Dewey Phillips’s name is best associated with a single moment in the history of American popular culture. WOODLAND – Dewey LaVerne Phillips of Woodland passed away early Sunday morning, December 10, 2017. The man who would totally dominate Memphis radio entertainment in the early 1950s and whose commercial-laden show would almost single-handedly pull the station out of its ratings doldrums started work for the munificent sum of absolutely nothing.
On hearing the news that Dewey was going to play his song, Presley went to the local movie theater to calm his nerves. Clifford was born May 24, 1938, along Horseshoe Run, Tucker County, the son of the late Robert Dewey Phillips and Izetta Alberta Knotts Phillips. Gladys answered the phone and told Dewey that Elvis was working at the Theater that night. In essence, he did nothing less than deconstruct Memphis radio entertainment during the 1950s, and in the process he proclaimed a kind of Declaration of Radio Independence for all future programming. On July 8, 1954 Dewey Phillips played Elvis' recording of "That's All Right" and the Memphis Listeners responded with tremendous support (calls requesting the song were made such that the phone lines were literally overwhelmed). The Listeners actually demanded that the record be played, and replayed through the night, prompting Dewey to invite Elvis (note: Dewey Phillips got the phone number for Elvis from Sam Phillips and called the Presley home. He was preceded in death by his first wife, Anna Mae Phillips in 2017.
Like Elvis, his style not only violated a staid and conventional past...Dot had been struggling for a number of years with the knowledge of how bad Dewey’s problem was. Try logging in through your institution for access.Dewey Phillips’s name is best associated with a single moment in the history of American popular culture. Most fans agree that they had never heard anything quite like him and no doubt ever will again.
After her own...Beginning in 1949, while Elvis Presley and Sun Records were still virtually unknown--and two full years before Alan Freed famously "discovered" rock 'n' roll--Dewey Phillips brought rock 'n' roll to the Memphis airwaves by playing Howlin' Wolf, B. He made no effort to imitate anyone on the airwaves or in the entertainment business. Elvis left his job so fast that when he reached WHBQ he was (literally) out of breath. Dewey, however, was nothing if not a...Although the Phillips family still speaks of Dewey in positive, if not glowing, terms, none have any problem with openly discussing his terrible decline toward the end—when, as Dot Phillips sometimes puts it, “He was just a mess.” She, for example, is quick to emphasize that Dewey’s drug habit started as a desperate effort to relieve his suffering.
He is the disc jockey who introduced Elvis Presley to Memphis and the Mid-South by playing his first record and then conducting his first live on-the-air interview.¹ More important, however, if less well known is the contribution Dewey made to the rock ‘n’ roll revolution of the 1950s by both turning on a huge southern white audience to the previously forbidden “race” music and by providing indispensable assistance to Elvis’s early career at a time when Elvis and his local record label, Sun,...Elvis Presley would not be the only Sun Studio artist Dewey would help convert into a superstar, but he was one of the first, and Dewey took a fancy to him right away. In reality, Elvis was always shy and reserved.
In 1959 she accidentally discovered his abuse of pain pills.
That he certainly did. Presley may have been stereotyped as an explosive, swivel-hipped rocker, but close friends well knew that personally he was the quiet boy next door. Thus Elvis did his first "media interview" on July 8, 1954 as well.