Early Life
Phillips was the youngest of eight children, born on a farm near Florence, Alabama to poor tenant farmers. As a child he picked cotton in the fields with his parents alongside black laborers. The experience of the workers singing in the fields left a big impression on the young Phillips. Travelling through Memphis with his family in 1939 on the way to see a preacher in Dallas, he slipped off to look at Beale Street, at the time the heart of the city's music scene. "I just fell totally in love," he later recalled.
Phillips attended the former Coffee High School in Florence. He conducted the school band and had ambitions to be a criminal defense attorney. However his father was bankrupted by the Great Depression and died in 1941, forcing Phillips to leave high school to look after his mother and aunt. To support the family Phillips worked in a grocery store and then a funeral parlor.
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