One of the stranger five minutes you’ll spend on YouTube comes in a May 1986 clip from Late Night with David Letterman. The YouTube caption says that Sam Phillips, the planned guest of honour that night, was “drunk”. The Phillips family deny this. And yet, Sam wanders on a little late and stands with his back to the studio audience, loudly admiring the set, before sitting down, inspecting Letterman’s teeth and avoiding each and every question about the birth of rock and roll put to him. His rationale is that one day he might want to tell this story, and why should he give away his secrets. Letterman, whose easy manner always disguised a high level of control-freakery, looks awkward and irritable, the thunder and lightning rolling outside the studio window a perfect echo of the presumable storm in his head. Who booked this guy? Who gave him bourbon?

Peter Guralnick has many chapters to fill, sixty three years’ worth, before he gets to that enigmatic television moment. For some, the Sam Phillips story began with his 1954 recording of Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore and Bill Black recording “That’s Alright Mama” (b/w “Blue Moon of Kentucky”) and ended when Phillips sold Sun Records to Shelby Singleton in 1968, another cusp year in rock history. How Sam occupied himself for the rest of that time remains obscure even to most rock fans, and to some degree he did spend it avoiding unavoidable questions about the artists he had discovered, who included Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison, as well as the statuesque Howlin’ Wolf. Guralnick’s subtitle looks to have genuine substance.

The actual birthdate is set a little earlier than Elvis’s debut. Guralnick insists that the very first rock’n’roll record was “Rocket 88”, released in 1951 by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats, but really an Ike Turner creation and the 19 year old pianist’s commercial debut. Though he was destined to make his reputation and the beginnings of a fortune by recording a young white man (albeit of Native American descent) singing in a black style – “That’s Alright Mama” was associated with Arthur Crudup – Phillips’s dream was to record African-American vernacular music in its purest forms. His most value-laden description of any artist or any music was that it was “different”, by which he meant not merely original, but coming from a place that most young white men even of his own poorish, churchy experience could not comprehend. He valued “difference”, freedom and individuality above all things. Visiting Memphis’s Beale Street en route to a missionary event was revelation. Phillips determined to build a studio and “experiment with overlooked humanity”.

He was blessed – and would have considered it as such – with great “ears”. This was a young man who as a DJ and tyro producer could tell you the required EQ on every record he placed, who invented his own form of reverb, the famous Sun “slapback” and who regarded the ringing of a phone during a musical take as part of the moment of recording and by no means an intrusion. He maybe felt the same about the thunder and lightning outside Letterman’s window, just another effect in his self-produced performance.

That this mighty book is also a Phillips production and not merely a researched biography is made clear from the outset. It’s hardly surprising to find Guralnick tackling the subject, given that his big books to date have been Last Train To Memphis and Careless Love, respectively tracing the “rise” and “unmaking” of Elvis Presley. Guralnick must have spent many hours talking to Sam Phillips about his most famous star before it became clear that Phillips himself was the more interesting subject. What emerges is a book that has many of the characteristics of a Sun recording session: epic, but as intimate as sex; repetitive, insistent almost to the point of madness, but delivering a figure so quintessentially American he might almost be a character in Mark Twain or Melville.

Pious, driven, assailed by doubts that led him into voluntary courses of electro-shock therapy, Phillips emerges as a classic Trickster figure, whose self-perpetuating myth isn’t so much warts-and-all as sometimes warts-only. Phillips sometimes didn’t see the people standing right in front of him, whether it was his wife Becky, his sons, or his Memphis Recording Service partner and sometime mistress Marion Kreisker (who is the Rosalind Franklin figure in this story), but he heard people and fulfilled something of poet Walt Whitman’s claim “I Hear America Singing”. At moments Guralnick seems almost ventriloquized by his subject, which is the cleverest biographical tactic of all, allowing the voice to come through even as other observers comment and contradict, extrapolate and explain. It’s one of the most profound biographies of recent years. Sam died in 2003, half a century into the history of a music he would not have claimed to have invented, but which he certainly heard in the American wind and took down faithfully.