Sam Phillips

==Early life==
Phillips was the youngest of eight children, born on a 200-acre farm near [[Florence, Alabama]] to Madge Ella ({{nee}} Lovelace) and Charles Tucker Phillips.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.anb.org/articles/18/18-03875.html|title=Phillips, Sam|last=Bertrand|first=Michael T.|work=[[American National Biography]]|date=April 2014|access-date=October 22, 2016}}</ref> Sam's parents owned their farm, though it was mortgaged.<ref>{{cite census | url = https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MX8J-6N9| title = Charles Phillips | year = 1920 | location = Oakland, Lauderdale, Alabama, United States | roll = 27 | page = 68 | line = 28 | enumdist = 22 | filmnum = 1820027 | nafilm = T625 | access-date = March 10, 2019}}</ref> As a child, he picked [[cotton]] in the fields with his parents alongside black laborers.{{sfn|Palmer|1982|p=218}} The experience of hearing black laborers singing in the fields left a big impression on the young Phillips.<ref name="obit-August 1, 2003">{{cite news|title=Sam Phillips Obituary|url=http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article854378.ece|access-date=October 6, 2011|newspaper=[[The Times]]|date=August 1, 2003}}</ref> Traveling through Memphis with his family in 1939 on the way to see a preacher in Dallas, he slipped off to look at [[Beale Street]], at the time the heart of the city's music scene. "I just fell totally in love," he later recalled.<ref name=telegraph-1-8-2003>{{cite news|title=Sam Phillips|url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1437680/Sam-Phillips.html|access-date=October 6, 2011|newspaper=[[Daily Telegraph]]|date=August 1, 2003|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161022090958/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1437680/Sam-Phillips.html|archive-date=October 22, 2016|url-status=live}}</ref>

Phillips attended the now defunct Coffee High School in Florence. He conducted the school band and had ambitions to be a criminal [[Defense (legal)|defense]] [[attorney at law|attorney]]. However, his father was bankrupt by the [[Great Depression]] and died in 1941, forcing Phillips to leave high school to look after his mother and aunt. To support the family he worked in a [[grocery store]] and then a [[funeral parlor]].{{citation needed|date=August 2022}}

In 1942, Sam, 19, met Rebecca "Becky" Burns, 17, his future wife, while they were both working at WLAY radio station in [[Sheffield, Alabama]]. He was an announcer and she was still in high school and had a radio segment with her sister as 'The Kitchen Sisters' where they played music and sang. A January 18, 2013, article in the Alabama Chanin Journal honoring Becky quoted Sam as saying, "I fell in love with Becky's voice even before I met her."  Becky described her first encounter with Sam to journalist Peter Guralnick: "He had just come in out of the rain. His hair was windblown and full of raindrops. He wore sandals and a smile unlike any I had ever seen. He sat down on the piano bench and began to talk to me. I told my family that night that I had met the man I wanted to marry." They wed in 1943 and went on to have two children in a marriage that ended in 1960. Becky Phillips died in 2012, aged 87.<ref name=telegraph-1-8-2003 /><ref name=Laing-8-1-2003>{{cite news|last=Laing|first=David|title=Obituary: Sam Phillips|url=https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/aug/01/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries|access-date=October 6, 2011|newspaper=[[The Guardian]]|date=August 1, 2003}}</ref><ref name=Dewitt-1994>{{cite book|last=DeWitt|first=Howard A.|title=Elvis: The Sun Years|year=1994|publisher=Popular Culture Ink|isbn=1-56075-020-0}}</ref>