Rose Clayton Phillips is an author and a retired print and broadcast journalist, who started her career freelancing as a booker for ABC News 20/20 with Ted Koppel after Elvis Presley’s death. That assignment led to her working as an audio engineer on location for ABC and took her to Nashville when 20/20 began taping profiles on a host of country music legends, Willie Nelson, Mickey Gilley, Merle Haggard, Hank Williams, Jr, and many more during the Urban Cowboy craze.

In the meantime, she had begun freelancing for Billboard and Rolling Stone magazines while working between Memphis and Nashville until she finally moved to Music City. It was there she found a mentor in songwriter Dick Heard, co-writer with Eddie Rabbitt on “Kentucky Rain.” Knowing she had freelanced for ABC, Heard recruited her to work on the pilot for the first celebrity news magazine TV show “Entertainment Tonight.” Eventually she freelanced as a field producer for ET for a decade.

As a print journalist, she continued to write stories investigating the death of Elvis Presley and the legal battles between the Presley Estate and Lisa Marie Presley’s lawsuit by her Guardian Ad Litem against Colonel Tom Parker. Clayton Phillips also covered the trial of Dr. George Nichopoulos, Elvis’ primary physician, in which Dr. Nick was forced to surrender his medical license.

Phillips wrote and produced the Grammy-Award-Winning Best Spoken Word/Documentary Album Interviews from the Recording Sessions of the Class of ’55. That project for America Records allowed her to win Grammy’s for her long-time friends: Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Rick Nelson, and Sam Phillips.