In the spring of 1962, Memphis producer Sam Phillips, ever the iconoclast, did something he hadn't attempted in nearly a decade: He recorded a set of raw blues, the kind of stuff that boomed from the juke joints and roadhouses that dotted the flat, desolate landscape of north Mississippi. Phillips, founder of the Sun label and the man responsible for unleashing on the world the likes of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins, had pretty much abandoned the blues following the mid-Fifties rise of Elvis, et al., even though it was the music of blues pioneers Howlin' Wolf, Junior Parker, and Rosco Gordon that helped established the label earlier that decade. But after hearing a trio based in Lula, Mississippi (harmonica whiz Frank Frost, drummer Sam Carr, and guitarist Big Jack Johnson), Phillips threw commercial considerations aside, and over the course of three long sessions in April 1962, produced Sun Studio's last... More >>>