Dewey Phillips

He got it right away.

You know, like along with like Dewey Phillips and these fucking dudes all across the country, you know,

I mean, shit, man, we can just get right into it.

He was like, you know, he was a dude.

And they also,

Dewey Phillips was on that radio station.

Right.

And

And while he sometimes gets credit for being the first white radio DJ to play R&B or music by black artists, he was not the first.

Earlier white disc jockeys like Gene Nobles and John R. on WLAC in Nashville, Tennessee, and also Dewey Phillips on WHBQ in Memphis, Tennessee, had been heavily programming black R&B records for mainstream Southern audiences since the late 1940s.

Alan Freed's huge contribution was greatly helping to popularize the music and the phrase rock and roll, which was originally black slang for sex, and bringing it to the dominant New York City media market and helping to make it go worldwide.

In 1955, Chuck Berry performed his very first duck walk by accident.

And he was a DJ for Channel 13.

And my dad at the time, well, my dad previously that had been a DJ with Week Martindale and George Klein and Dewey Phillips.

And so he moved over to TV and dad became program director at that station and And he recommended to Dave, he said, hey, if you want to further your career, you really ought to think about going into TV.

And Dave took him up on it.

It opened in January of 1950 with the slogan, We Record Anything, Anywhere, Anytime.

It was right around this time that Sam Phillips and his friend, local Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips, no relation, decided to start their own record label called It's the Phillips.

Their new label only had one release, though, called Boogie in the Park by Joe Hill Lewis.

Only a couple hundred copies were pressed up.

That song was first recorded by Blind Lemon Jefferson in 1926.

Upon finishing the recording session, Bill Black, who played string bass, remarked, "Damn, get that on the radio and they'll run us out of town." Now Sam Phillips gave copies of the acetate to local disc jockey Dewey Phillips, and on July 7th, 1954, he played That's All Right on his popular radio show, Red, Hot, and Blue.

On hearing the news that Dewey was gonna play his song, Presley went to the local movie theater to calm his nerves.

Interest in the song was so intense that Dewey reportedly played the acetate 14 times and received over 40 telephone calls.