Sam Phillips

Sam was born Leslie Ann Phillips in 1962 but, after years of disillusionment working in the Christian music industry, she adopted her childhood nickname for her new mainstream career. It was a bold choice considering the "other" Sam Phillips was a legendary figure who started Sun Records and discovered Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash. In deference to her accidental namesake, she would not take a producer credit on any of her albums until after the producer's death in 2003.

Sam left the Christian music industry - namely Myrrh Records - when she realized the atmosphere didn't line up with her own views of Christianity. She didn't want to be creatively stifled by the label's narrow views or pigeonholed into being "the Christian Cyndi Lauper." She explained to Magnet Magazine: "I thought it had become a pretty terrible landscape of phoniness and bad politics and just pinheaded thinking. I felt it didn’t have much to do with God or real spirituality or love or the things I was interested in." She continued talking about her experience in an interview with Songfacts: "When I got a contract with the Christian recording company, you had to do many variations on one theme, so it was very limiting as a writer. As I grew up, and as my spirituality grew up, a lot of that was just no longer relevant, and I found people got very unhappy in that world when you didn't tell them what they wanted to hear." The Turning (1987) was her last album as Leslie Phillips.

Sam met music producer T Bone Burnett while she was still working as Leslie Phillips. The pair began a long-running business partnership that started with T Bone producing The Turning album, and a marriage that lasted from 1989-2004. The same year of their divorce, T Bone produced one more album for Sam, a painful eulogy of the death of their marriage called A Boot and a Shoe.