Crucially it is on the banks of the Mississippi river (the route by which peopleand goods moves northwards from New Orleans) that America's music and geography combined quite so
effectively as in the case of Memphis, Tennessee.
Confluences of culture
All the black jazz and blues musicians coming up from the South came to Memphis. They worked easier in the bars of Beale Street (the mayor of Memphis closed them down to stop street's prostitution and drug trade; so the musicians further north).
Sam phillips was a local music producer with
a tiny record label called Sun Record. He
enjoyed some succes recording such as BB King.
But his ambition was to introduce the black rythm and
blues (R&B).
One day, the young Elvis Presley came to Sun Record, Sam saw immediatly his potencial. He could sing all the kind of music with egal ease. All days long, he recorded Elvis but he was not happy with the result.
Elvis, in the night, began joking with the musicians and sang with them a black R&B song called "That's alright mama" in a high-speed manner that mixed country influences.
He found the sound he was looking for: Rockabilly !!!
Elvis rocks a nation
The combination of his vocal talent, good looks and
outrageous dance moves did more than introduce a new music in the world. He was the first pop phenomenon, the first whose music divided the country into groups, the old generation who were shocked by him and the young.
The age of rock, of youth rebellion expressed throught music, had begun ... and the world would never be the same again.
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