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Size | 1.5 feet of linear shelf space (approximately 800 items) |
Abstract | Contains the personal collection of Barbara Barnes Sims, a white woman, from the years she worked in public relations at Sun Records (1957-1960), including correspondence, promotional photographs, and other publicity materials. These materials offer the perspective of a young woman working in the recording industry for a rising independent record label that would transform popular music and introduce artists including Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Elvis Presley, among others. Sims later became a professor at Louisiana State University (LSU), where she taught English for 36 years and authored the book The Next Elvis: Searching for Stardom at Sun Records (LSU Press, 2014). |
Creator | Sims, Barbara Barnes, 1933- |
Curatorial Unit | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library. Southern Folklife Collection. |
Language | English |
This summary description was created in May 2022 to provide information about materials in Wilson Special Collections Library.
Encoded by: Dawne Howard Lucas, May 2022
Since August 2017, we have added ethnic and racial identities for individuals and families represented in collections. To determine identity, we rely on self-identification; other information supplied to the repository by collection creators or sources; public records, press accounts, and secondary sources; and contextual information in the collection materials. Omissions of ethnic and racial identities in finding aids created or updated after August 2017 are an indication of insufficient information to make an educated guess or an individual's preference for identity information to be excluded from description. When we have misidentified, please let us know at wilsonlibrary@unc.edu.
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Barbara Barnes Sims (b. 1933), a white woman, worked in promotion and publicity for Sam Phillips's Memphis-based record label Sun Records from 1957 to 1960. Sims then became a professor at Louisiana State University (LSU), where she taught English for 36 years and authored the book The Next Elvis: Searching for Stardom at Sun Records (LSU Press, 2014).
Back to TopContains the personal collection of Barbara Barnes Sims from the years she worked at Sun Records, including correspondence, promotional photographs, and other publicity materials. These materials offer the perspective of a young woman working in the recording industry for a rising independent record label that would transform popular music and introduce artists including Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Elvis Presley, among others. Sims worked in public relations for Sun Records when the scandal of Jerry Lee Lewis's marriage to his 13-year-old cousin Myra Gale Brown broke during Brown's 1958 tour in the United Kingdom.
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