Sun Studio and the Million Dollar Quartet

Sam Phillips opened the Memphis Recording Service at Seven-Oh-Six Union Avenue in nineteen fifty, charging local musicians four dollars an hour to cut their own records. He was looking for something he could not yet name. He found it in nineteen fifty-three when Elvis Presley walked in and paid for a vanity recording of two songs as a birthday present for his mother. Presley was eighteen years old. Phillips noticed the voice.

By the following year, Sun Studio, as the operation became known, had launched Presley's recording career and was working with Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash. All four had found the thing Phillips was chasing: a place where the blues the Black musicians of the Delta had been playing for decades touched the country music tradition coming out of the Appalachian South, and became something that had not existed before.

On December fourth, nineteen fifty-six, Presley stopped by the studio while Perkins was recording. Lewis was playing piano on the session. Cash happened to be in the building. The four gathered around a piano and began playing together informally, running through gospel songs, old country standards, and rhythm and blues numbers. Phillips's engineer, Jack Clement, started the tape. The recording ran for over an hour.

Phillips later said he recognized what was in the room: four artists at the exact pivot point of American popular music, in the one studio where all four had begun. The session was not released as an album during any of the artists' commercial peaks. The British label Charly Records issued a portion in nineteen eighty-one, when Cash and Perkins were still alive. The fuller recording followed over subsequent decades as more tape was recovered and restored.

Sam Phillips sold Presley's recording contract to RCA Victor in November nineteen fifty-five for thirty-five thousand dollars and a five thousand dollar bonus to Presley. He used the money to sign Lewis, Perkins, and others. He called the Presley sale the greatest mistake of his life, then amended that: it was not a mistake, he said, because it gave him the cash to keep going. The music he kept going with also changed the world, in ways that took somewhat longer to recognize.