The employment boom of World War II, the increased quality of Delta highways, and the city’s location on major northbound railways made Memphis a common, and often final, stop for people leaving the Delta countryside. Beale Street remained a tremendous draw, if not quite as wide-open as it had been earlier in the century, owing to several municipal crack-downs on vice. While older blues performers continued to play an acoustic country style in the streets, younger ones were beginning to play in an electrified style with a smoother, more urbane approach.

Taking their cues from the sustained electric tone and prominent soloing of T-Bone Walker on hits like "Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just as Bad)", and the fuller instrumentation of small R&B and jump blues combos like Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five, younger musicians often incorporated broader instrumentation, such as horns, and sang in a noticeably smoother style that frequently incorporated gospel touches such as melisma (sustained singing of one syllable over several notes). A loose affiliation of these younger Memphis musicians, including B.B. King, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Johnny Ace, “Little” Junior Parker, and Roscoe Gordon, became known informally as the “Beale Streeters,” and would be largely responsible for taking this style nationwide during the following decade.

Much of this music could be heard on Memphis’s WDIA, which in 1949 became the nation’s first radio station to feature an all-black format and on-air staff (though the ownership was still white), and West Memphis’s KWEM. Broadcast segments on both stations were available to those enterprising performers who could arrange a sponsor, and combined live performance and records, providing a valuable opportunity for building regional renown and promoting upcoming shows, despite little to no DJ pay.

WDIA provided career boosts to such Memphis musicians as Joe Hill Louis “The Be-Bop Boy,” a one-man band who played an infectiously ramshackle blues on harmonica, guitar and drums, frequently all at once; B.B. King, a full-time DJ for the station from approximately 1949 until 1955, when his growing national popularity and touring commitments made keeping the show impractical; and Rufus Thomas, an all-around entertainer whose career would span the forthcoming decades.

KWEM, for its part, featured Sonny Boy Williamson (on a break from arguably the region’s most popular blues radio program, “King Biscuit Time,” in Helena, Arkansas), and Chester Burnett, aka Howlin’ Wolf.

With the exception of Williamson, the career of each one of these radio personalities was significantly enhanced by Sam Phillips, a local sound engineer who, in January 1950, opened the Memphis Recording Service “with the intention of recording singers and musicians from Memphis and the locality who I felt had something that people should be able to hear.” The arrival of this independent studio filled a void left by the major labels, who since before the war had been concentrating on pop music because it was considered far more consistently marketable than the emerging electric blues and R&B.

Independent record labels contracted the Memphis Recording Service to record their Memphis-based artists such as B.B. King. At times Phillips worked independently, recording artists and attempting to place their songs with other labels, as he did when he sold Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cat’s “Rocket 88” to Chess Records. By early 1952, however, Phillips’ increasingly frayed relations with several independent labels, as well as an increase in local competition attracted to the Memphis scene, led him to launch his own label—Sun Records.

For most people, Sun Records is inexorably associated with Elvis Presley and other white stars of early rock ‘n’ roll, and rightfully so. But the revolution these artists helped ignite was made possible thanks to the contributions of the blues artists who recorded for Sun throughout the early 1950s; Sun’s blues artists not only kept the label in business, but provided the inspiration and, in some instances, the songs with which Elvis and others would bring the blues “feel” to a white audience that was generally unwilling to accept it from a black musician. Sun’s amazing roster included, among others, Rufus Thomas, Joe Hill Louis, James Cotton, Little Milton, Roscoe Gordon and Howlin’ Wolf, whom Phillips has frequently named an even greatest discovery than Elvis.

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