Dewey and Elvis: The Life and Times of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Deejay (Music in American Life)

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Description

Beginning in 1949, even as Elvis Presley and Sun Records were still virtually unknown–and two full years before Alan Freed famously “came upon” rock ‘n’ roll–Dewey Phillips brought rock ‘n’ roll to the Memphis airwaves by playing Howlin’ Wolf, B. B. King, and Muddy Waters on his nightly radio show Red, Hot and Blue. The mid-South’s hottest white deejay, “Daddy-O-Dewey” is a part of rock ‘n’ roll history for being the first major disc jockey to play Elvis Presley (and due to this fact to conduct the first live, on-air interview with Elvis). This book illustrates Phillips’s role in turning an enormous white audience on to prior to now forbidden race music. His zeal for rhythm and blues legitimized the sound and set the stage for both Elvis’s subsequent success and the rock ‘n’ roll revolution of the 1950s. The use of personal interviews, documentary sources, and the oral history collections on the Center for Southern Folklore and the University of Memphis, Louis Cantor presents a very personal view of the disc jockey even as arguing for his place as an essential a part of rock ‘n’ roll history.


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