Dewey and Elvis: The Life and Times of a Rock 'n' Roll Deejay.

Dewey and Elvis: The Life and Times of a Rock 'n' Roll Deejay. By Louis Cantor. Music in American Life. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, c. 2005. Pp. x, 287. $34.95, ISBN 0-252-02981-X.)

Dewey Phillips might best be described as the Reginald Fessenden of rock-and-roll promotion. Fessenden, for the non-media historian, was the Canadian engineer credited with first broadcasting the human voice over radio, the inventor who until recently was often overlooked in favor of the Italian inventor of the wireless telegraph, Guglielmo Marconi, or American technological innovator and radio popularizer Lee DeForest. A Memphis deejay pivotal in the history of rock-and-roll promotion, Phillips sits in a similar position, often overlooked in favor of popularizers such as Sam Phillips, Alan Freed, and Dick Clark. By focusing on Dewey Phillips, the white deejay who hosted the immeasurably important Red, Hot and Blue program over Memphis radio, Louis Cantor's latest book offers an informative and poignant corrective.

Cantor is perhaps best known as the author who informed readers about how the Memphis station WDIA helped to establish a white audience for R & B and set the stage for white consumption of rock and roll. He begins his study of Phillips by tackling the standard components of biography. We learn of Phillips's poor white background; his growing appreciation of black music and sojourns along all-black sections of Beale Street; the erratic but infectious sense of humor that made him class clown; his showmanship as a disc jockey and promoter at the record department at W. T. Grant discount store; and his clashes with the managers at the straight-laced, white-oriented WHBQ--WDIA's competitor station. Important to Cantor's story is the ground that Phillips broke in selling R & B and rock and roll to white audiences long before Freed or Clark and his almost evangelical commitment to the music. We also learn how much of a force Dewey Phillips was in introducing listeners to Elvis Presley and keeping up the demand for Elvis's recordings among WHBQ audiences. Cantor rightly suggests that without Phillips's intervention and his collaboration with Presley and Sun Records' Sam Phillips, the introduction of rock and roll to young white audiences might have been stifled or shunted down an entirely different path.

But Cantor's biography offers more than the story of an under-appreciated disc jockey and his relationship to Elvis. Woven throughout the book is thoughtful, original, and illuminating research on the social history of race and how notions about racial identity and geographical space informed the ways in which the segregated white and black residents of Memphis interacted and were involved in one another' s musical cultures and social spheres. Here readers are introduced to the history of machine politics in Memphis and its relationship to social and political apartheid as well as the history of the Memphis police department and its heavy-handed policing of Beale Street, which Cantor insightfully identifies as an "unofficial capital of black America" (p. 45).

Well written and compelling, Dewey and Elvis: The Life and Times of a Rock 'n' Roll Deejay not only is highly recommended to urban historians and music researchers but also would make an excellent required text in undergraduate courses on the history of rock and roll, the history of popular music, southern urban history, and the history of race in America.

PETER LA CHAPELLE

Wilson College