Baton Rouge woman details years working at Sun Records in new book



Baton Rouge resident Barbara Barnes Sims worked at the famed Sun Records between 1957 and 1960 as a promoter and publicist. (Photo courtesy of Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc.)


By Chelsea Brasted, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
on September 02, 2014


By the time Baton Rouge resident Barbara Sims signed on as a publicist and promoter at Sun Records, the famed Memphis recording studio had already given life to the music careers of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison. The headlines that accompanied the so-called Million Dollar Quartet had barely faded from view, and Jerry Lee Lewis was headed back into the studio to sing "Great Balls of Fire."

The year was 1957, and Barbara Sims, née Barnes, was looking for a job to get her into the media industry. When an editor at United Press gave her name to Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, she got her first chance.

"He came to my apartment and interviewed me and told me he needed someone to write album liner notes," Sims remembered. "Ultimately, it became a full-time job just to work in publicity, promotions and generally do the things that had to be done to help sell the records."

Sims landed the job, and she joined Phillips' staff for about three years, during which time she both saw and heard a number of the hit records that helped solidify Sun Records' place in music's hall of fame before leaving to take a teaching job at LSU.

Sims released a book just two weeks ago detailing her career at Sun Records, including what it was like to be a professional woman in a world and an industry dominated by men. She sat down recently to speak with NOLA.com about those years of her life. (Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

"The Next Elvis: Searching for Stardom at Sun Records" is available from LSU Press and it's currently on sale through Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

NOLA: How did you get started working at Sun Records?

Barbara Barnes Sims: People ask that question very often: How did I start working at Sun Records? It was not intentional on my part. ... Sam Phillips had heard of me through a man at United Press. I had applied for United Press, and he wanted to hire me, but the only job he had open was a night beat, and that was OK with me but his bosses wouldn't let me be a night reporter because they didn't think I should be out on the streets of Memphis at night. ... Then Sam Phillips heard of me through the UP man.

NOLA: Tell me about some of your first experiences working at Sun Records. What are some of the memories you have that stand out?

BBS: One of them is just getting to know the musicians. We had an interesting variety of people who were in there all the time.

NOLA: I can imagine.

BBS: There were the ones you might call the house band who hung around all the time, and some of them were rather well-known in their own right. Billy Lee Riley was one of them that I made friends with right away. It was fun.

I never had actually seen records being pressed, so I went out to the pressing plant and saw the mechanism by which records are literally pressed. Also, it was fun learning who the people were in the national media that covered music. I made a trip to New York ... and met people at Billboard magazine. Another big trade paper was Music Reporter out of Nashville. One was Cashbox, which was catered to jukeboxes. That was fun, to learn how to do publicity on a national scale. I spent a lot of my time talking to disc jockeys on a telephone.

At that time, long distance -- you didn't have a long distance plan like you do today where you pay a certain amount and make a call. Every call was sort of a precious expenditure, something you think about before you call someone in another city, so that was fun, talking to people all over the country. Those beautiful voices of the disc jockeys, talked to all these eloquent, beautiful voices on the telephone. Kind of flirting with them a little bit sometimes, trying to get them to play our records.

It was exciting the first time I saw Johnny Cash, the first time I saw Jerry Lee Lewis, the first time I saw Carl Perkins. ... The first time I saw Elvis was kind of exciting, too. Elvis was just getting ready to go in the service at the time.

NOLA: What was it like seeing those performers up close?

BBS: It was interesting to me how they selected their material. They would come in and they might record -- in a few hours, they might record half a dozen songs and sometimes they would record them over and over again. It was interesting to hear the producers talk about what they were trying to get in the way of a sound. They had to place the microphones certain ways, they wanted somebody to sound softer.

All the recordings were not mixed. Everybody played all at once, so I got to hear virtually what the finished products would be when I was literally in the control room listening while I was in my office, which was behind the control room.

All I heard was the bass going thump, thump, thump. To this day, I always listen to the bass when I hear a band. ... My favorite bass player is James Jamerson of Motown. I can tell a James Jamerson track in my sleep because I'm so accustomed to listening to the bass.

NOLA: What recordings stand out that you were around for?

BBS: I was there when "Great Balls of Fire" was made. I was there when Johnny Cash did all of his Hank Williams recordings, and some of the recordings that were not as well known. He did one called "Guess Things Happen That Way," which was a big hit.

NOLA: What was it like being in the room when those things happened? Was it like, OK, we just made something here?

BBS: Yeah. I usually heard the playbacks rather than being in the room. A lot of times I was going through on the way to my office from the front, so I wasn't sitting there, but when I heard the playbacks I usually knew, that's a hit. Or as they said in the business, that's a stone, man.

NOLA: What are some other memories that stand out for you?

BBS: One of the things that, in looking back at it from the historical standpoint, I don't think it was Sun Records that made up the phrase, "the birth of rock and roll." It was critics later, but in trying to imagine why it was the birth of rock and roll, I've come to the conclusion that it's because the people there were from either the Tennessee valley or Mississippi Delta, and when those people got together, and the two influences came together, Memphis was the obvious place for them to come to together.

All of us, including me, came from about 90 miles from Memphis. All of us migrated there from small towns, and all of us had listened to small town radio. In those days, small town radio played everything. They played country in the morning, and they played pop hits, popular people like Frank Sinatra in the evening, they played live bands sometimes during the day and they played gospel music. All of us who came to Sun ... were saturated in the music of those regions.

The Tennessee valley is Appalachia-influenced and the Mississippi Delta is black gospel-influenced, so ... right at the center of everything good, and it got combined. Not everyone believes that's the true beginning of rock and roll. ...
Part of it was that Sam Phillips was willing to gamble on music that was not widely popular and try to introduce it to wider audiences, and Elvis was kind of a symbol of that. One thing, of course, that people probably know is that there was a great outcry against Elvis. Not just because of his body language or his movement onstage, but because he typified lower class, and southern whites were considered low-class. There was a great deal of stigma about being southern, and particularly poor southern. Almost as much as there was a stigma about being black in those days.

That sort of sums up why I think that studio produced such unusual people.

NOLA: There was kind of a perfect storm brewing for it. ... Considering you were a woman in the industry, I imagine you met some walls with people.

BBS: The general expectation in that time was that women -- only some women, actually, could go to college. Now we think everyone can go to college, but in those days, it was not nearly the great percentage. ... If you did go to college ... the business world was just a stopgap until you got married. It was sort of a peculiar idea to think, now I've gone to college, I've got educated, now I'm going to have a career. I met quite a bit of resistance to finding a job that I considered responsible, that I would have responsibilities and a pay that would provide me an adequate income.

I could either have an apartment or I could have a car. If I had an apartment, I couldn't afford a car. If I had a car, I had to live in a rented room because that's the way women's salaries were in those days. ... Most women's salaries were just really low. The average was about $45 a week, and Sam Phillips paid me $75. He paid me as much as his producers, which was wonderful, but it was just because he was ahead of his time, in a way, about his faith in women.

He also had an all-girl radio station called WHER. Imaginative about what women could do, he was imaginative about what his singers could do. To discover Elvis and Johnny Cash when at first glance, they probably didn't appear as if they would have a lot of talent. It really took a lot of imagination on his part.

One of the things I liked about my job was it was so much fun. The people that worked there were creative, and Sam encouraged people to be creative.

From the 1960s on, the image of the rock musician has become one of outlandish -- in fact, some of the Sun artists became kind of bizarre in some of the things they did -- but at the time I was there, we were all so young. I was 24 when I started, and only ... Sam was 35, but even that's pretty young. We were very young, and we were able to do the things we did because nobody told us we couldn't.



Baton Rouge resident Barbara Barnes Sims worked at the famed Sun Records between 1957 and 1960 as a promoter and publicist. (Photo courtesy of LSU Press)


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