Sun Studio

A cramped storefront studio where a handful of sessions recorded by Sam Phillips helped invent rock and roll, launching Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis within a few short years of each other.

Sam Phillips opened the Memphis Recording Service in 1950 with the slogan 'We Record Anything - Anywhere - Anytime,' recording everything from weddings to local blues and R&B musicians that larger labels ignored. In 1951, Phillips recorded Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats performing 'Rocket 88,' a raucous, distorted single that music historians frequently cite as one of the first rock and roll records.

In 1954, a young truck driver named Elvis Presley walked into the studio and eventually recorded 'That's All Right' with Phillips, a session now regarded as Presley's breakthrough and one of the founding moments of rock and roll as a genre. Phillips's small label, Sun Records, went on to record Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and blues artists including B.B. King and Howlin' Wolf, assembling an extraordinary run of talent from a single storefront studio.

On December 4, 1956, an unplanned jam session brought Presley, Cash, Lewis, and Perkins together in the studio at once, later released as recordings of the 'Million Dollar Quartet.' The studio's run as a full-time label wound down by the late 1960s, but it reopened in 1985 as both a museum with daily tours and a working recording studio, still used today by contemporary artists including U2.