Sun Records founder Sam Phillips was born in Florence, Alabama on January 5, 1923. He was born to cotton pickers and learned how to work in the fields by the time he was five. This experience helped him form his taste for blues and gospel music from a young age."A day didn't go by when I didn't hear black folks singing in the cotton fields," he said in an interview posted on www.worldandI.com. "Did I feel sorry for them? In a way I did. But they could do things I couldn't do. They could outpick me. They could sing on pitch. That made a big impression on me."His work in the music business became as a radio DJ with a small station in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. He founded Sun Records in 1952 after securing a job on a local Memphis radio station called WREC.