Robert Phillips photo by Kim Mason

A chapter of Kentucky history came sadly to a close when Robert Phillips, of Franklin, who played baseball with Willie Mays and music with the likes of Ray Charles and James Brown, died Aug. 26, 2005.

I first met Mr. Phillips in 1994 at a Port Oliver Yacht Club luau party. I was filling in for the Fender Benders’ drummer and Mr. Phillips was playing saxophone. Not to diminish the Yacht Club in any way, but it wasn’t the sort of place I expected to meet a man who had walked with some of the most historical figures of our time. And I sheepishly admit that I played the gig and left not knowing anything about Mr. Phillips other than the fact that he was a fantastic sax player. He was completely at ease, cool, calm, and readily offering a half-moon smile that stretched from ear to ear anytime I was unsure of the band’s arrangements.

I did a few more gigs with Mr. Phillips over the next couple of years. Most of the musicians referred to him as the “Big Man” with the horn, but if I heard anyone speak of his illustrious past, I don’t remember it.

So my curiosity was sparked when he told me he’d been asked to appear on “In Performance at the Governor’s Mansion,” a Kentucky Educational Television special that was being filmed Aug. 8, 1997, in front of a live audience which included former Gov. Paul Patton. I came in as the drummer for the show. At a last minute rehearsal I asked Mr. Phillips why he was invited to perform for the governor. He casually responded that he’d been asked to do so before because he used to play professional baseball and he’d played some shows with James Brown in his younger days. That got my attention. Mr. Phillips headlined the show and was introduced by the Louisville Courier-Journal’s noted columnist, Byron Crawford. He gave a long history of Mr. Phillips career, including a few more musicians that he’d played with which Mr. Phillips had not mentioned to me, i.e., T. Bone Walker, Ruth Brown and Memphis Slim. My interest was piqued! So in the green room after the show, I asked Mr. Phillips how he got to play with some of the most recognizable names in American music.

“Played with a lot of �em at The Quonset,” he answered. “That Quonset was a big time night-club in Bowling Green.” The Quonset was located at State Street and U.S. 31-W By-Pass in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and operated from 1946 to 1959. It then came to be known as the Bale Tire Center until it was demolished by the city in 2003.

When I interviewed Mr. Phillips later for a story that appeared in the Park City Daily News, Dec. 23, 2000, he said Upton Roundtree, a local promoter of black musicians, often brought big name acts to The Quonset and used Mr. Phillips as a member of the backup band. “To save money between their main gigs in Louisville and Nashville, most artists didn’t bring their full bands to Bowling Green,” Mr. Phillips said in the 2000 article. “They would send records ahead to Upton and we’d learn them by the time they got there�Everybody that was anybody in the music business was there n James Brown, Ray Charles, B.B. King, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Memphis Slim, Big Maybell, Fats Domino, Ruth Brown, Little Richard, Ike and Tina Turner, Ivory Joe Hunter, Chuck Berry, Joe Tex, Lloyd Price, Cab Calloway and the Midnighters n they were all there.”

I was spellbound and shocked to find out that Mr. Phillips had played with some of the biggest names in show business. He was very nonchalant about it, as if it was old news.

At the 2000 News Years Eve dance for the Glasgow Country Club, Mr. Phillips got my attention once more when he told me the singer, Mary Ann Fisher, of Louisville, used to do gigs with Ray Charles. It was the first time I’d met her, but she had been doing jazz gigs with Mr. Phillips for years. I assumed she was part of The Quonset’s house band and wanted to talk to her. But it turned out to be a nightmare gig. The people that contracted Mr. Phillips were expecting rock and roll, but Ms. Fisher sang mostly smooth jazz and Billy Holiday torch songs that night. She and Mr. Phillips were busy doing damage control during our breaks, so I didn’t get to talk to her. They finally appeased the crowd with some knock dead versions of Mustang Sally and What’d I Say. I split as soon as the gig was over, hoping to talk to her next time. But �next time’ never came. She passed way in 2004. Not long afterwards, I saw a portrayal of Ms. Fisher in the recent hit movie, “Ray.” I’m sure my mouth dropped when I realized that she not only played The Quonset with Mr. Charles, but she was also his lover and backup singer on the road from 1955 to 1958, sang on his recording, “What Kind of Man Are You,” and was the inspiration for his song, “Mary Ann.”

Mr. Phillips could’ve been a road musician. “They every one tried to hire me,” he told me in an interview that appeared in the June, 1998 edition of The Amplifier. But he chose to help his wife, Rosie, raise their sons: Willie, John, Daniel, and Robert. “I was married and my mother wanted me to stay here with these kids you know,” Mr. Phillips said for the ’98 story. “I never said it out loud, but it was really rough to do that.” Phillips also said he’d had enough road life with his first career, which ironically wasn’t music. It was baseball.

At age 14, he pitched a game for the Franklin Giants against The Zulu Cannibal Giants, a traveling baseball team from Louisville, and struck out 22 of their players with his 94 mile per hour fastball. They wanted him to join the team, but his father said he was too young. Three weeks later they offered his father $150 every two weeks and a matching salary for Mr. Phillips. “My father let me go,” Mr. Phillips said with a chuckle during the ’98 Amplifier interview. “I guess he thought I’d aged some.”

He toured with the Cannibals for three seasons and left when he got a call from the Birmingham Black Barons, where he first met Willie Mays. In the ’98 interview, Mr. Phillips said he didn’t like running backwards (facing the batter) when he fielded a fly ball. So he’d run facing the wall and reach his hand over his head to catch the ball. Mr. Mays was intrigued by this style of fielding flies, according to Mr. Phillips.

Mr. Mays won the 1954 World Series for the New York Giants with a back-to-the-batter catch and put in a good word for his former playing mate. Mr. Phillips was drafted to the New York Giants soon afterwards. Being one of the first black men to play on an integrated team had its trials. “The home crowd would throw bottles and hit me in the head and stuff,” he told me in �98. “It was just a matter of a black guy being in the wrong place.”

Mr. Phillips was forced to quit the New York Giants in 1956 after breaking his ankle chasing a fly ball in St. Jean, Canada. With his foot propped up on the couch, he heard his brother-in-law, Joe Lee Ray, slaughtering a perfectly good secondhand saxophone. “I liked the way it sounded,” Mr Phillips said in the ’98 Amplifier interview. “I started playing it while I had my cast on. My brother-in-law � was making all kinds of noise and they’d tell him to shut up and put that thing down. So one day he told me, �Here, you can have the damn thing.’”

The New York Giants wanted Mr. Phillips to return, but his ankle would swell whenever he ran, so he declined. “I didn’t want to go through all that other stuff I had went through. You know, people throwing bottles at you and stuff.” So to beat the blues, he hung out at The Quonset and started getting tips from Ray Charles’ sax player, Fathead Newman, and soon landed a spot in The Quonset’s backup band. One of my fondest memories as a reporter was when I saw the sparkle in Mr. Phillips’ eyes as he told me about the first time he played sax for Mr. Charles. “Ray Charles turned toward me and said, �Who’s that playing that horn just like Fathead? Why we gonna be all right.’”

By 1957, another reason came along for Mr. Phillips to stay off the road, he went to work for the Kendall Company in Franklin. But it didn’t deter him from playing gigs. Besides juggling music and a day job, he also battled his baseball injury the rest of his life. “I tried to quit playing music back in the 80s when this started coming on,” he said, referring to his swelling ankle, during the ’98 Amplifier interview. “But then I got back into it. I just love it.”

After The Quonset closed in 1959, he formed his own band. They called themselves “The House Rockers” for dance gigs and “PUSH” when the gig called for a mellower blend of music. The Fender Benders’ lead singer, Willie Smith, 62, Bowling Green, got his start in the House Rockers. “Robert started me out in a band when I was about 15 years old,” Mr. Smith said. “I was still in Lincoln High School in Franklin. He heard me singing in the school choir and wanted me in the band with him. I’ve been a lot of places with him. He played with James Brown and a lot of big bands.”

The “House Rockers” played gigs from Mississippi to Terre Haute, Ind. When Mr. Phillips wasn’t booking gigs with them, he did jazz gigs with Ms. Fisher and musicians from Louisville. On his way home from a Louisville gig in 1990, he heard the Fender Benders playing live on WLOC AM’s Chitlin’ Show, liked their sound and joined forces with the band for the next ten years, according to Fender Benders’ drummer, Chris Hardesty. Mr. Phillips was invited to play “In Performance at the Governor’s Mansion,” three times and was spotlighted in a Courier-Journal column by Mr. Crawford in 1998, along with a 1998 article in The Amplifier and a Park City Daily News story in 2000. The city of Franklin made March 26, 1998 �Robert Phillips, Sr. Day,’ They gave him the key to the city and Gov. Patton bestowed upon him the title of Kentucky Colonel.

Dobro picker, Curtis Burch, of Bowling Green – who performed on the Grammy winning CD, “The Great Dobro Sessions,” and on the five time Grammy winning soundtrack CD, “O Brother Where Art Thou,” n played several gigs with Mr. Phillips through the years and described him as a musician’s musician. “He was fun to play music with�We would play side by side and just got off on each other playing solos and stuff. He was such a warm, friendly person. He wasn’t into himself. He was into you, what the other guy was doing.”

Mr. Phillips’ son, Daniel Phillips, 44, Lexington, who also plays bass and drums, said his father lived for music. “He’d play all weekends, Friday night, Saturday night and sometimes Sunday. He pulled a U-haul trailer and hauled the guys in the band. Then he’d come home, drop people off in Russellville, Bowling Green, sometimes Owensboro and come back, then go to work at Kendall’s.”

Mr. Daniel Phillips reminisced how his family history was changed the day his uncle, Mr. Ray, gave the saxophone to his father. “It’s amazing how everybody in our family just picked up music. We used to sit around and jam in the house, I played drums, my brother John, who’s in a nursing home in Hopkinsville now, played bass, and people would gather around out in the yards. Robert Allen played keyboards and Willie Leon and Daddy played sax.”

He said his father’s love of music saw him through several heartaches. Two of Mr. Phillips’ sons, Willie and Robert, preceded him in passing along with his wife, Rosie. Mr. Phillips suffered multiple health problems with complications from diabetes and had to be cared for in a nursing home the last years of his life. “He was determined he was going to get back out and play,” Mr. Daniel Phillips said. “He never gave up on it. He never stopped wanting to play. His fingers used to swell up with fluid and he couldn’t hardly do the keys anymore. But he’d say, �I’m getting ready to call the guys. I’m getting out of here and do some gigs.’ He was determined he was going to play one more time. He never gave up. He never gave up. Music is what made him. He loved it. The saxophone did wonders for my dad.”

By Mitchell Plumlee

On a personal note, I was deeply touched by Mr. Phillip’s dedication to his family and his art and am thankful he shared his stories with me. I will carry them with me always.