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16 The Legacy: The Next Generation and Beyond Despite the enormous amount of media attention devoted to Elvis Presley , Sam Phillips, and the origins of rock ’n’ roll, the significant contribution Dewey Phillips made in helping launch Presley’s career and turning on the southern white audience to previously forbidden race music is hardly mentioned. Fortunately, however, that is beginning to change. Gradually, if belatedly, Dewey’s role is being acknowledged, best evidenced by his inclusion in a permanent exhibit of 1950s’ deejays in Cleveland’s Rock ’n’ roll Hall of Fame, in a display at the Rock ’n’ Soul Museum in Memphis, and in a televised biography of Sam Phillips. Although we are some distance from the beginnings of rock ’n’ roll, Dewey’s legacy is still felt because his show made such a huge impact on young listeners who became the next generation of Memphis musicians. Steve Cropper says he and Duck Dunn (along with the Stax generation of performers) “kinda grew up on Dewey Phillips.” Singer and songwriter Sid Selvidge would drive to Clarksdale, Mississippi—the closest spot he could pick up Dewey on the dial—to hear him. Memphis’s most articulate musician, the legendary Jim Dickinson, who grew up listening to Red, Hot and Blue, is convinced that Dewey’s is the untold story of the history of rock ’n’ roll. Dickinson arrived in Memphis from Chicago in 1949, the famous “it” year. He was only eight, but because he would spend his entire life in music, he is firmly convinced that it was more than serendipity that caused him to arrive in Memphis the year WDIA went all-black and Dewey Phillips began Red, Hot and Blue. Jim became the leader of Atlantic Records’ house band in the 1970s and played piano for such luminaries as the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin , and Ry Cooder. He is still going strong. In case evidence is needed 16.222-230_Cant.indd฀฀฀222 2/8/05฀฀฀1:59:05฀PM The Next Generation and Beyond 223 of Dewey’s link (through Jim) to cutting-edge music, Dickinson plays keyboard on Bob Dylan’s Grammy award–winning release “Time Out of Mind” (Dylan personally thanked Jim when he received the award). When discussing his propitious arrival in Memphis in 1949, Jim borrows a page from Sam Phillips and speaks with the fervor of a Baptist preacher: “God sent me here. I firmly believe it!” He speaks of Dewey’s impact on his life in tones that sound religious in nature. “He radically changed my life. Musically I had no idea what was goin’ on at the time. Here is this crazy guy teaching me how to think.” As for Dewey’s impact, Jim says, “Here is a man who is barely literate and just competent enough to run a console and he is changing the cultural history of this city.” Dewey created a mind-set that not only shaped his own destiny but also changed a generation’s way of thinking . Dickinson believes that Dewey musically “opened doors” for him, something that would not have happened had he not had the good fortune to hear Red, Hot and Blue in the early 1950s. He credits his early musical success to the head start he got by hearing the kind of music Dewey played. “When I went to college in Texas and started talking to musicians there, most of them had never heard of the stuff I was playing ,” he says. Just listening to Dewey’s show gave Dickinson a repertoire that other people didn’t know about. “In Waco, Texas, in 1961 I had a hell of an act, courtesy of Dewey Phillips. All I had to do was to remember a few songs. They thought I was a genius!”1 That heartfelt observation leaves little doubt about Dewey’s importance to future musicians from a city that calls itself “the Home of the Blues” and “the Birthplace of Rock and Roll.” But this Memphis disc jockey carved out a niche for himself in the pantheon of popular musical history in a much more significant way. He may have made at least a partial contribution to racial cross-culturalization at a critical moment, one that would ultimately have an impact on the entire nation rather than just on the Mid-South. When Dewey Phillips first hit the Memphis airwaves with Red, Hot and Blue in 1949, the blacks and whites in his audience still inhabited two entirely...

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