MEMPHIS, Tenn. — While thousands were touring Graceland during Elvis Week last month, a retired English professor from Baton Rouge sat at legendary Sun Studio and signed copies of her quiet but fascinating book.
“I signed a book for a woman from Greece,” Barbara Barnes Sims said. “Leave Greece for Memphis in August?”
It’s that kind of practical personality that characterizes the woman and her new book. If you read Sims’ firsthand account of working at Sun — “The Next Elvis; Searching for Stardom at Sun Records” — you won’t get an overdose of gossipy details about stars she met, or vivid recounting of sexual escapades of rock ‘n’ roll pioneers. You’ll get insight into something far more important: the business.
Maybe there was a whole lot of shakin’ going on from 1957 to 1960 while a young Barbara Barnes learned the recording business in a professional trial by fire. But this compelling, authoritative version reveals more about how talent worked than how they played — except for obvious overlap.
When the Mississippi “girl” arrived in Memphis looking for work, the United Press bureau chief wanted to hire her to cover night court. His bosses recoiled at the idea of sending a young woman out on the Memphis streets after dark. The UP man told Sun Studio founder Sam Phillips about Barbara and her journalism background. One night Phillips phoned, gave her a 15-minute heads-up and visited.
“He was overflowing with enthusiasm, but the ideas were tumbling out so fast that I couldn’t quite follow all the information — hit records, TV shows, artists, LPs, singles, pressing plants, names I’d never heard, too much at once.”
She had to interrupt his pitch to reveal that her water heater had sprung a leak and needed attention. After that, legendary Phillips took his turn emptying the water as it accumulated in a pan. “I decided,” Sims wrote, “he was tactful, efficient and in a way humble.”
Over the next days and weeks, Sam Phillips confided his life story to Barbara Barnes, eventually convincing her to go to work for his merrily unconventional but successful studio. She would work in promotion and publicity, editing newsletters, dealing with distributors and writing the liner notes for the first albums of Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Charlie Rich and Jerry Lee Lewis.
She got to know Lewis, once watched him sitting at the piano bare-chested during a session recording “Breathless.” “I had heard he gave it his all, whether for 10 people or 10,000, and the evidence was right before my eyes.”
But Jerry Lee’s bigamous marriage to 13-year-old cousin Myra was one of the worst moments in her time at Sun. “The damage didn’t appear irreparable at first, and things went on as usual for some time, but Sun never had a major star after this fiasco.”
Good memories are the flip side. Live music daily, playbacks from landmark sessions, “having Jack Clement or Charlie Rich play a song for me.” Elvis came home from service, the raw rock rebel parboiled out of him by Colonel Parker and the William Morris Agency. He visited his old studio and politely shook her hand.
Sims’ story is as much about working women as anything. “I wish I could reach an audience of women who could learn what it was like to struggle for a decent salary and fend off the various types of harassment and condescension women encountered in the workplace in those days.”
I wish so, too. That might be about as easy as convincing today’s young female professionals that the author thought it necessary to wear a black hat with a veil and three-quarter-length gloves for her first trip to New York. She was a real lady amongst rock ‘n’ roll lions.
Rheta Grimsley Johnson lives near Iuka. Her email address is [email protected].
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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