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What does it mean to be a Nashvillian? A Black Nashvillian? A white Nashvillian? What does it mean to be an organizer, an ally, an elected official, an agent for change? Deep Dish Conversations began as a running online interview series in which host Jerome Moore sits down over pizza with Nashville leaders and community members to talk about the past, present, and future of the city and what it means to live here. The result is honest conversation about racism, housing, policing, poverty, and more in a safe, brave, person-to-person environment that allows for disagreement.

This book is a curated collection of the most striking interviews from the first few seasons of the series, with a foreword by Dr. Sekou Franklin, an introduction by Moore, and contextual introductions to each interviewee. Figures like Judge Sheila Calloway, comedian Josh Black, anti-racism speaker Tim Wise, organizer Jorge Salles Diaz, and many more explore their wide-ranging perspectives on social change in a city in the midst of massive demographic and ideological shifts.

For anyone in any twenty-first-century city, Deep Dish Conversations offers a lot to think about—and a lot of ways to think about it.

Beginning in 1949, while Elvis Presley and Sun Records were still virtually unknown--and two full years before Alan Freed famously "discovered" rock 'n' roll--Dewey Phillips brought the budding new music to the Memphis airwaves by playing Howlin' Wolf, B. B. King, and Muddy Waters on his nightly radio show Red, Hot and Blue. The mid-South's most popular white deejay, "Daddy-O-Dewey" soon became part of rock 'n' roll history for being the first major disc jockey to play Elvis Presley and, subsequently, to conduct the first live, on-air interview with the singer.

Louis Cantor illuminates Phillips's role in turning a huge white audience on to previously forbidden race music. Phillips's zeal for rhythm and blues legitimized the sound and set the stage for both Elvis's subsequent success and the rock 'n' roll revolution of the 1950s. Using personal interviews, documentary sources, and oral history collections, Cantor presents a personal view of the disc jockey while restoring Phillips's place as an essential figure in rock 'n' roll history.