On the evening of 5 July 1954, in a small storefront studio at 706 Union Avenue, Memphis, a session was going nowhere. Sam Phillips, proprietor of Sun Records, had invited a nineteen-year-old truck driver named Elvis Presley to try out with two local musicians — guitarist Scotty Moore and upright bass player Bill Black — after the boy had spent a year hanging around the studio. They worked through ballads and country numbers, politely and forgettably. During a break, with nothing to lose, Elvis picked up his guitar and started clowning: a sped-up, jumping version of "That's All Right", a blues number by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup. Black began slapping his bass along; Moore joined in. Phillips stuck his head out of the control booth and asked what they were doing. They admitted they didn't know. "Back up," he said, in the account all three would tell for decades, "try to find a place to start, and do it again."
Phillips pressed record, and the take that survived is now commonly treated as a founding document of rock and roll — a white country boy singing black rhythm and blues with a hillbilly string band, no drums, and an energy that belonged to neither genre. It was precisely the sound Phillips had been hunting. The producer, who had recorded B.B. King and Howlin' Wolf and had cut what many historians rank as the first rock and roll record — "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats in 1951 — understood exactly what the market's segregation was costing the music.
The acetate and the birthday myth
Elvis had first walked into Sun the previous summer, in 1953, paying a few dollars to record a two-sided personal acetate: "My Happiness" and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin". The cherished legend says it was a birthday present for his mother, Gladys; the awkward fact, cheerfully noted by biographers, is that her birthday was months away — in April — and the Presleys did not even own a record player. He almost certainly wanted to be heard, and he was: Phillips's assistant, Marion Keisker, noted his name, by her account with the memo "Good ballad singer. Hold." Nearly a year of nothing followed until the July 1954 call. The session's other alchemy came days later, when the trio flipped the formula for a B-side: they took "Blue Moon of Kentucky", a stately bluegrass waltz by Bill Monroe, and set it on fire. A record with a blues number on one side and a bluegrass tune on the other, both sung wrong on purpose, was its own manifesto.
Two nights later, Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips (no relation to Sam) played "That's All Right" on his WHBQ show Red, Hot & Blue — and, as the story goes, played it repeatedly through the evening as calls flooded in. He hauled Elvis into the studio for an on-air interview and asked which high school he had attended: Humes High, the answer that told his radio audience, in the code of segregated Memphis, that the singer was white. Many listeners had assumed otherwise, which was rather the point.
Selling the future for $35,000
Elvis cut five singles for Sun between 1954 and 1955 — collectors' grails now — while touring the South relentlessly, acquiring a manager who called himself Colonel Tom Parker, and detonating audiences that came for country music and left with something else. By late 1955, Sun's tiny finances could not fund the demand. In November 1955, Phillips sold Elvis's contract to RCA Victor for $35,000, plus $5,000 owed to Elvis in back royalties — a sum widely mocked since as the worst deal in music history. It wasn't, quite: Phillips used the capital to keep Sun alive and promptly minted Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison, while an early investment in the Holiday Inn motel chain made him wealthier still. Within five months of the sale, "Heartbreak Hotel" made Elvis the biggest act in America.
The little studio at 706 Union Avenue still stands, open to tourists, with the very microphones and the X of tape on the floor. One December night in 1956, Elvis dropped in while Perkins was recording and Lewis was playing piano; Cash was present at least for the photograph, and the impromptu session was taped and mythologised as the Million Dollar Quartet. It is a fitting emblem of the place: a room barely bigger than a garage where, during a coffee break, American popular music changed key.
Quiz nuggets
- Elvis recorded "That's All Right" at Sun Studio, 706 Union Avenue, Memphis, on 5 July 1954, with Scotty Moore and Bill Black.
- The song was a cover of a blues number by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup; the B-side reworked Bill Monroe's bluegrass waltz "Blue Moon of Kentucky".
- DJ Dewey Phillips premiered the record on his WHBQ show Red, Hot & Blue and interviewed Elvis on air.
- Sam Phillips sold Elvis's contract to RCA in November 1955 for $35,000 plus $5,000 in back royalties.
- The 1956 Sun Studio jam with Elvis, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash is known as the Million Dollar Quartet.