Quotes by Sam Phillips

About Sam Phillips:

Samuel Cornelius Phillips was an American musician, businessman, record executive, music producer, and disc-jockey, who played an important role in the emergence and development of rock and roll and rockabilly as the major form of popular music in the 1950s. He was a producer, label owner, and talent scout throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.

Sam Phillips

I'll never retire. I'm just using up somebody else's oxygen if I retire.

Sam Phillips

I am a sound freak. I could play around with sound forever.

Sam Phillips

There was a certain feeling I developed as a young person for black people. Somehow they were able to get pleasure out of things that I couldn't see them enjoying. I heard them sing a lot, and I didn't hear white folks going down the cotton rows sing...

Sam Phillips

If you're not doing something different, you're not doing anything.

Sam Phillips

Feeling has as much to say as the words do. You can have the greatest words in the world and if they're not believable, they don't strike a chord and they're not said convincingly, it's not a great song.

Sam Phillips

I was looking for what was coming from a man's soul and a man's conviction. I didn't care about his past. If it was innate and natural and felt good to him and it communicated.

Sam Phillips

Teenagers did not have, before rock 'n' roll and rhythm-and-blues - they did not have any type of music they could call their own once they got over 4 or 5 years old until they were well into their 20's and considered adults.

Sam Phillips

I was trying to establish an identity in music, and black and white had nothing to do with it.

Sam Phillips

I grew up on what everybody called a plantation - but believe me, it wasn't a plantation. It was just an old farm. I grew up with a lot of black people working in the fields, and it was during the Depression between 1930 and the war, so we were all p...

Sam Phillips

Author Bio

  • NameSam Phillips
  • DescriptionAmerican businessman, record executive, record producer and DJ
  • AliasesSamuel Cornelius Phillips
  • BornJanuary 5, 1923
  • DiedJuly 30, 2003
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionEntrepreneur; Record Producer
  • AwardsGrammy Trustees Award