Robert Phillips
by Bernard Mitchell Plumlee
Wednesday, March 5, 2008 3:07 PM CST
Robert Phillips of Franklin, Ky., has had opportunities that would be a dream come true for anyone. He has also had opposition that would stop most from going on, but Phillips grabbed the bat and came out swinging, literally and figuratively. He was a pitcher for the New York Giants and a saxophone player for many of the greatest musicians the world has known. He came into his first career, baseball, at a time of great opportunity and great opposition. At a time when whites and blacks could not drink from the same water fountain, Phillips was paving the way for his race to be accepted as just normal human beings. When the door to his first career closed, he found another door to go through. He is not a crusader, he is just so talented that he could not, and cannot, be overlooked. Whether he set out to be a pioneer or not doesn’t matter, he paid the price just the same. Through it all he has always put the most important thing first: family.
Phillips and his wife, Rosie, have lived in the same quaint Victorian house for over 33 years, and on the same street for over 50. The porch is wide and inviting, with plenty of comfortable chairs suitable for shooting the breeze. Inside, the house is filled with family portraits that paint a peaceful picture. The place has an unmistakable feeling of home. Through the spacious Victorian doors that separate the family room from the living room sits the man who has sacrificed much of his own personal ambition to help make it a home. Phillips turns to say, “How you doing?” with a big Southern grin that seems to slap both his ears at once. His huge hands rest on a walking cane as he watches ‘Bet on Jazz’ on the big-screen TV. “That’s one of the fellows that I learned my chops from,” Phillips says as he points to Big Head Newman, well known for being Ray Charles’ sax player. Seeing Newman on TV immediately brings forth a backlog of memories. On this day as all others, Phillips sees the past, but he also sees the present and future.
But Phillips’ story doesn’t start with Newman. The two-part novel of his life begins to unfold in the summer of ’42 in Franklin, Ky. At the excitable age of 14, he was pitching for the Franklin Giants when a traveling baseball team from Louisville, The Zulu Cannibal Giants, stormed into town. They were one of the old slapstick teams, wearing grass skirts and clowning around until the game got tight, then they would hit the opposition with all they had and walk away a winner. When the two teams hit the field the Cannibals got hit by something they were not expecting. Phillips struck out 22 of their players with his 94 mph fast ball.
“So in two or three days they came around wanting me to go with ‘em on the road, but my father said I was too young.” Phillips said. “They came back through three weeks later and told my father they’d send him a $150 every two weeks and pay me too. My father let me go. I guess he thought I’d aged some.”
Phillips toured with the Cannibals for three seasons. Lincoln High School was already in session by the time baseball season was over, but Phillips was always back by September. “They used to give me a test to see if I knew what I had missed,” Phillips said. He always passed. Obviously he passed Rosie Ray’s test also, they married when they were both 19.
He decided it was time to move on when he got a call to try out for the Birmingham Black Barons. “Back then, they would call the black team the Black Barons and the white team the White Barons,” Phillips said. It was while he was with the Barons that Phillips first influenced history by showing fellow team mate Willie Mays some tricks of the trade.
“Willie and I used to get out there in the outfield and catch some balls, and I always caught all my balls over my shoulder,” Phillips said. When Phillips was fielding a fly ball, he didn’t like to run backwards (facing the batter). He would always run toward the wall and just reach his hand over his head to catch the ball.
Intrigued by this odd back-to-the batter catch, Mays asked him, “You don’t ever turn around?”
Phillips explained to Mays how a fielder stands a better chance of catching the ball this way if it bounces off the wall.
Obviously Mays took the advice to heart. When Phillips was watching the ’54 World Series he saw Mays put his advice into action. The score was tied, bases loaded. Mays made baseball history by catching a fly ball with the back-to-the-batter catch, winning the game for the New York Giants.
Mays did not forget the favor. Phillips recalled, “He recommended me to the Giants.” So it was time for Phillips to move again. Only this time it was to the New York Giants.
He started out in class C, they quickly moved him to A and then to double A. “Class C league was these guys they’d sign out of high school,” said Phillips. “But I’d been playing with grown men, so I hit the ball pretty hard. Kindly shook up one or two of them, so they moved me on up.”
It would seem that someone who had achieved such outstanding recognition would have enjoyed a lot of popularity at home, but Phillips said people resented him. “They’d see me everyday and I’d have to mind my place at home. That’s just the way they looked at it.”
Phillips proved to be extremely popular with the New York crowd. “I’d get a home run,” said Phillips. “The home crowd would throw bottles and hit me in the head and stuff. It was just a matter of a black guy being in the wrong place.”
“Well one time when one (a fan) threw a bottle at me, when I came across home plate I picked up that bat. He came out of the stands, I ran him a pretty good piece till the police caught me. They took me by each arm and carried me over to the dugout and sat me down.”
“It didn’t really bother me,” Phillips recalled. “It just bothered me that I was the only one picked on.”
Things were not always so grim. He remembers plenty of horseplay while they were on the road. “They (the team) was always on me ‘cause I was pretty quiet,” Phillips said. “When we would go into a town I would have to stay in the black section. One time this cab driver, he took me down to this whore house. It was nice you know, a real nice place. All of them knew it was a whore house but I didn’t. I didn’t even know it was a whore house till the last day I stayed there. The woman that was running the place asked me how I slept last night and I told her, ‘Well, you people don’t ever go to bed: walking, doors slamming, people talking.’ She just died laughing.”
Another time, the guys in the New York Giants had a naked woman wait for Phillips in his motel room. “I backed out of the door and looked at the room number, and then I went back in and said, ‘Lady, you must be in the wrong room.’ I could hear the guys snickering. These guys were hid under the bed and in the closets. She said look what you can get for fifty dollars, and I said, ‘Fifty dollars?!’”
The place burst out in laughter. “They called me “First National Bank” ‘cause I was so tight with my money,” Phillips said. “They said I still had the first dollar I ever made.”
In 1956 Phillips’ career came to a screeching halt while he was going after a fly ball in St. Jean, Canada. “They hollered at me and told me to let it go,” said Phillips. “But I went after it and caught it, and stepped in a hole and broke my ankle.”
After a year recovering Phillips said the Giants wanted him to come back. “They tried to get me to come back and play but it kept swelling, you know — my ankle. Every time I would run on it real hard. I figured I would get cut and I didn’t want to go through all that other stuff I had went through. You know people throwing bottles and stuff at you” Phillips said. “Looking back on it now, I should have gone.”
Forced to leave the field he soon found a safe haven in the saxophone.
“I liked the way it sounded,” he said. “I started playing while I had the cast on. My brother-in-law (Joe Lee Ray) tried to learn how to play. He had one out of a pawnshop. So he was making all kinds of noise and they’d tell him to shut up and put that thing down. So one day he just told me, ‘Here you can have the damn thing.’”
Phillips beat the blues by blowing the horn. He taught himself how to play. “I learned from the book which note was which,” he said. “And then I went from there.”
One place he went was to watch the pros do their stuff.
Phillips used to go and listen to Ray Charles and his sax player, Fathead Newman, at the old Quonset Club in Bowling Green, now the site of the Bale Tire Center on College Street. Phillips would talk to Newman and get tips from him during intermission. “That Quonset was a big time night-club,” Phillips said. “That’s where all the recording stars used to come.”
Soon Phillips found himself on stage with many of the pioneers in the music business. He played sax for James Brown, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Ike and Tina Turner, Lloyd Price, Fats Domino, B.B. King, T Bone Walker, Joe Hunter and Big Maybelle.
“Sometimes they’d just bring their rhythm section, so they’d get me and a couple more guys,” Phillips recalled. “That’s how I got to play with a bunch of ‘em. They’d make this little tour: Nashville, Clarksville, Madisonville, Earlington and Hopkinsville.”
Phillips eyes lit up with laughter when he recalled a rehearsal when Ray Charles turned and said, “Who’s that playing that horn just like Fathead? Why, we gonna be all right.”
Phillips soon found out that baseball was not the only activity that offered some tense moments. “One time when I was playing with Ike and Tina Turner, Tina was dancing...she went up to the edge of the stage dancing and this guy grabbed her by the leg and wouldn’t turn it loose. Ike took that guitar and hit him upside the head and broke it. Ike just grabbed another guitar and kept on playing.”
Phillips excelled in baseball and music because he always gave it his all. He obviously admires that quality in others. The respect in his voice was unmistakable as he recalled one of James Brown’s lectures before they went on stage. “You can hate each other, but when you get on stage you better act like brothers,” Brown would say.
“I don’t guess James Brown ever knew my name,” Phillips said. “All he ever called me was Sax. Hey Sax, he’d say. The first time I ever played with him he didn’t have a band. Just him and the Blue Flames, you know they were singing and a-dancing. Driving around in an old station wagon.”
In 1957, Phillips was hired at the Kendall Company in Franklin. He was promoted rather quickly to the position of warehouse manager. He stayed there for almost 27 years overseeing 27 workers in the plant and two office workers. His day job, Rosie and their four sons- Robert, Danny, John and Leon — are the main forces that kept him from venturing out on the road again.
“They every one tried to hire me. Bobby “Blue” Bland told me to go home and get my clothes...get on the bus,” Phillips said. “But I was married and my mother wanted me to stay here with these kids you know, and all this. So I ended up staying. It wasn’t the right decision to be in the music business, but it was the right decision to raise the kids. I would be pretty well into the music business by now if I had gone. I don’t really regret it, I tried to raise ‘em and do my best for ‘em.”
“I never said it out loud, but it was really tough to do that,” he said. “ ‘Cause I knew I’d get a chance sooner or later to do something (in the music business). Then to have to turn that down. It was pretty tough.”
Even though he played with some big names, Phillips says that the most satisfying part of his musical career was a band he put together called The House Rockers. “We held our own against all kind of bands,” he said. They would change the name to Push if it was going to be a quieter gig, such as a country club. Phillips said. “If we used the name House Rockers, then we would constantly be told to turn down the volume.” Sounds like he learned a thing or two about marketing along the way as well.
He sent a tape of the House Rockers to the famed Morris Booking Agency in Chicago. They told Phillips to come on up and they could give him all the work he could handle. “I didn’t try to talk the guys into it,” Phillips said. “I didn’t know whether or not to give up my job either. Several times we’ve gone to cities to play and...there would be an empty building, you know where we supposed to go get the money...The music business is pretty crooked.”
“I had to hit one guy, a lawyer,” Phillips said. “That’s the only guy I ever hit to get my money.” One night at a country club the guitar player didn’t make it. The lawyer that hired them told Phillips to just go ahead and play without him. “About 15 or 20 minutes before it was time to stop he walked up and whispered in my ear, ‘you know I don’t owe you nothing, don’t you?’” Phillips asked him what he meant, and the guy proceeded to tell him that they had breached the contract, and that he would lie and say he never told them to play.
“There was a little room off to the left,” Phillips said. “So I told that guy, ‘Hey, let’s go talk about that a minute.’ I was in front and when he stepped in there I fried him. POW! He flew over this table. I jumped on him with both feet and had him by the necktie and I said, ‘I want my money and I’m not going to tell you but once.’ The lawyer said to his buddies, ‘look what this nigger’s doing to me!’ “ His wife said she would write a check, just turn him loose. Phillips said, “I ain’t turning him loose, and I ain’t taking no check...get me the cash. And I’ll let him go.” They got the cash. As Phillips was walking out, one of the lawyer’s buddies said, “That was the prettiest one (left hook) I’ve ever seen.”
The House Rockers played big clubs from Mississippi to Terre Haute, Ind. They also played for universities such as University of Kentucky and Ole Miss. But Phillips was always back in town in time to be at work at Kendall by 7 am.
Many of his fellow musicians took full advantage of the “fringe benefits” of the road, but the vices of the music business held no more sway over Phillips than the ones in professional baseball. “I was trying to make it back home with what little money I made. It takes money you know, that’s what them women are looking for. On top of that man you was wore out. I was just beat whenever we got through playing. I didn’t feel like doing all that stuff. I was working in the daytime too,” he said. “Some of them guys in the band, they’d spend their money and then they’d come knocking on the door ‘Hey man, how about letting me have four or five bucks so I can get me some breakfast?’ I’d holler and say ‘You better go find that girl’”
Besides having to juggle music and his day job, he has also battled his baseball injury all his life. “I tried to quit (playing music) back in the 80’s when this started coming on,” Phillips said in reference to the increased swelling of his ankle. “But then I got back into it. I just love it.”
At 70, Phillips doesn’t show any signs of getting out. He has the Robert Phillips Jazz Trio, RWP, and the Bowling Green-based band, The Fender Benders.
Not long after the House Rockers started out, a man walked up to him one night and told him they sounded smooth as silk and to keep on trying. Phillips says that is some of the best advice he ever got. “Some guys I’ve talked to they’ve laid down in the bed and cried because they knew they were playing well, had a good band, but they couldn’t get anywhere.” Phillips said. “It’s all in who you know. One guy with pull, can pull you in anywhere.”
Phillips has never really tried to go anywhere besides Franklin. But he did stick with the sax and it has taken him a lot of places. He has been recognized for his talents by three governors, including Paul Patton. Three times he has been invited to perform for a yearly KET production, In Performance at the Governor’s Mansion.
The city of Franklin made March 26, 1998 ‘Robert Phillips, Sr. Day.’ They gave him the key to the city and Governor Patton bestowed upon him the title of Kentucky Colonel.
His wife Rosie said, “Can you believe it? After all these years and they finally say something about all he’s done.”
When Phillips was asked what he thought of all the recognition, he said, “I’m glad that somebody thinks I can play a little bit. And I hope that somebody will give me the chance to put out something before I get out of the music business.”
“The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Mitchell Plumlee is a writer and musician. His blog can be found at www.blindbutnowisee.blogspot.com
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