Between 1954 and 1958, Phillips was credited with the spiraling popularity of rockabilly music and was a principal creator of rock and roll.
The hybrid rockabilly songs that came out of the Sun Studios he founded in 1952 marked a revolutionary influence on the heavily conservative country music market.
The early Sun sound involved a small band with electric lead guitar, heavy string bass and loud vocals.
Located in the center of the Delta region, Memphis attracted both black and white musicians from Mississippi and Arkansas as well as Tennessee.
Phillips made tapes for rhythm and blues singers which he sold to small independent companies pushing black music in cities outside the South.
Sam Phillips, the man whose creative genius kicked off rockabilly and the careers of Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash in his little Sun Studios building in Memphis in the fifties, died on Wednesday evening aged 80.
