706 Union Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee. A storefront, rented space, not much bigger than a living room with a plate glass window facing the street and a sign that said, “We record anything, anywhere, anytime.” For a few dollars, anyone could walk through the door and press their voice onto an acetate disc.

Weddings, funerals, messages for family overseas, whatever you brought, they would put on record. On July 18th, 1953, an 18-year-old truck driver walked through that door on his lunch hour, paid $3.98, and asked to make a record. Marion Keisker was sitting at the front desk. Sam Phillips, who owned the studio, was not in.

She asked the boy what kind of singer he was. He said he sang all kinds. She asked who he sounded like. He said he didn’t sound like nobody. She ran the session herself, recorded two songs, and after the boy left, she wrote his name and phone number in the studio’s log. Next to his name, she added four words of her own: “Good ballad singer. Hold.

” Those four words are the beginning of everything. To understand what Sam Phillips was looking for when Marion Keisker pressed record on that July afternoon in 1953, you have to understand what he had already built at 706 Union Avenue and what he believed was missing. Phillips had opened the Memphis Recording Service in January of 1950, and from the beginning, he had used it as a studio for the black musicians whose work he believed was being ignored by the wider American music industry.

He recorded Howlin’ Wolf, whom he later called his greatest discovery. He recorded B.B. King, Rufus Thomas, James Cotton, Rosco Gordon, Little Milton. He produced what some music historians consider the first rock and roll record, Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats’ Rocket 88, recorded at his studio in 1951 with a young Ike Turner on keyboards.

He had been building towards something for 3 years before Elvis Presley walked through his door. And the thing he was building toward was described later by his long-time collaborator Marion Keisker, who had heard Sam say it over and over, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.

” Phillips was not thinking about money in the small sense. He believed, as Peter Guralnick later documented in the definitive biography of both Elvis and Phillips, that the music he was recording for black artists was never going to reach its full audience as long as it remained segregated from the mainstream of American popular music.

He wanted a bridge. He had spent 3 years recording the source material. He needed someone who could carry it across. The boy who paid $3.98 on July 18th, 1953, was not that person yet. He was 18 years old and recently graduated from L.C. Humes High School in Memphis. His family had moved from Tupelo, Mississippi to Memphis when he was 13, and the city had given him something Tupelo had not: proximity to a musical culture that crossed every line the era was supposed to keep fixed.

He had grown up attending all-night gospel sings at Ellis Auditorium. He had absorbed the sound of black radio stations that broadcast rhythm and blues into the Memphis night. He had walked into Sun Studio with all of that inside him and no clear idea of how to get it out. The two songs he recorded on July 18th were slow ballads, “My Happiness” on one side, “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” on the flip.

Both were standards that any young singer trying to impress a studio owner might have chosen. The acetate he left with that day was pressed on site. That was how it worked. The disc was made while you waited. He reportedly took it to a friend’s house to listen to it because the Presley family did not own a record player.

Then he left it behind when he went home. That acetate sat in his safe in his friend’s house for 60 years. When the friend’s family finally opened the safe after both he and his wife had died, they found the disc and contacted Graceland. On January 8th, 2015, what would have been Elvis’s 80th birthday, it sold at auction for $300,000 to an anonymous buyer later revealed to be Jack White of the White Stripes, who had it digitally preserved.

Record Collector magazine had valued it at $500,000 before the sale. Marion Keisker had kept her note. She showed it to Sam Phillips. Nothing happened immediately. Elvis returned to Sun Studio on January 4th, 1954 and recorded a second acetate, “I’ll Never Stand in Your Way” and “It Wouldn’t Be the Same Without You.

” Again, nothing came of it. Phillips filed the name. In June of 1954, Phillips acquired a demo of a ballad called “Without You” that he wanted to record properly. He remembered Keisker’s note. He called the number. Elvis came by the studio and tried the song, but couldn’t make it work. Phillips kept him in the room anyway and asked him to sing as many numbers as he knew.

He sang everything he had: pop, country, rhythm and blues, gospel, the full range of what Memphis had put inside him over 5 years. Phillips was not certain what he was hearing, but he was certain enough of something to take the next step. He contacted Scotty Moore, a 22-year-old guitarist who had been recording with his country band, the Starlight Wranglers, at Sun, and asked him to spend an afternoon with the boy and see if there was anything there.

Moore introduced himself to Elvis, and Elvis introduced him to his bandmate Bill Black, who played upright bass. On Sunday, July 4th, 1954, the three of them rehearsed together at Scotty Moore’s house. Moore’s assessment afterward, delivered honestly, was that Elvis sang good, but didn’t particularly knock him out.

But he agreed there was enough to warrant a session. The following evening, July 5th, 1954, Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore, and Bill Black walked into Sun Studio. The session that followed lasted into the early hours of the morning and produced almost nothing. The three of them worked through ballads, standards, whatever material they had brought.

The air in the studio was stifling. It was July in Memphis, temperatures in the 90s, and recording studios of that era couldn’t run air conditioning during sessions because the units generated too much noise. They took breaks. They tried different songs. Sam Phillips sat in the control booth and listened and found nothing that answered the question he had been asking for 3 years.

Then, during one of the breaks, somewhere near midnight, Elvis picked up his acoustic guitar and started playing a 1946 blues song by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup called “That’s All Right.” He was not recording. He was not trying to impress anyone. He was fooling around, releasing energy between attempts, doing the thing musicians do in studio downtime when the formal session has stalled.

He started playing it fast and loose with a rhythm that had nothing to do with the deliberate pacing of the song as Crudup had originally recorded it. Bill Black heard it and jumped up and started slapping his bass in time. Scotty Moore joined in on electric guitar. Sam Phillips heard it through the glass from the control booth.

He opened the intercom and asked what they were doing. Nobody could answer him. How could they? They didn’t know what they were doing. That is the most documented and most important fact about the moment that produced “That’s All Right.” The three people who created it had no idea what they had created.

Phillips asked them to go back to the beginning and start again. He hit record. Scotty Moore later described the sound that came out of that session as something none of them had a name for. It was a blues song played at the speed of a country record by a white singer who bent the vowels the way he had learned from black gospel music and rhythm and blues that combination before.

The press that tried to describe it over the months that followed made a mess of it, calling Elvis a hillbilly singer, a young rural rhythm talent, a white man singing Negro rhythms with a rural flavor. None of those descriptions were wrong. None of them were right, either. Sam Phillips took the recording to Dewey Phillips, a disc jockey at WHBQ radio in Memphis, no relation, and Dewey played it on his Red, Hot, and Blue program on July 8th, 1954.

The station’s phone lines collapsed under the volume of calls. Dewey played “That’s All Right” 14 times in a single night. Elvis, who knew the song was going to air and was too nervous to listen alone at home, went to a movie theater on the other side of Memphis and sat in the dark.

He was summoned back to the station before the broadcast was over to be interviewed live on air. He came directly from the theater. He was 19 years old and had driven across Memphis to sit in the dark because he couldn’t stand to hear himself on the radio. The single, “That’s All Right” backed with “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” which had been improvised during a second session when they needed a B-side, was released by Sun Records on July 19th, 1954.

The label on that first single read, “Elvis Presley, Scotty, and Bill.” Three names, a band, not a a Elvis was signed to Sun Records and sent out on the road to build the name. He played the Louisiana Hayride radio program out of Shreveport, Louisiana, which gave him a regular platform in front of a regional audience.

He toured Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, a circuit of dance halls and auditoriums and high school gyms, where the reaction to what he was doing was immediate and physical and unlike anything anyone who watched it had seen before. Bob Neal, one of his early managers, later recalled that the reaction he drew from teenage boys in particular was frightening.

He said there were towns in Texas where they had to make sure there was a police guard because somebody would always try to take a swing at him. Elvis was doing something that made young men in the audience feel threatened by it. That quality, that the same performance that made girls scream made boys angry, was the clearest possible evidence that what was happening was genuinely new.

He auditioned for the Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts television show in New York in March of 1955 and was rejected. He performed at the Grand Ole Opry on October 2nd, 1954 and the Opry’s manager told Sam Phillips afterward that Presley just did not fit the Opry mold. Both rejections came from institutions that could not categorize what they were hearing and therefore could not accept it.

The Louisiana Hayride, which had been quicker to recognize something, got him. >> [snorts] >> He was on it regularly through 1955 while the records kept coming. Four more singles on Sun during 1954 and 1955, each one adding to the regional reputation that was building faster than any of them had expected. By late 1955, Colonel Tom Parker had been watching Elvis’s rise for months and had positioned himself to take over management of his career.

RCA Records, the largest label in the country, had been watching, too. In November of 1955, Sam Phillips sold Elvis Presley’s recording contract to RCA Victor. The sale price was $35,000, the highest amount ever paid for a contract in the record business at that time. Phillips later said he had priced it that high specifically because he believed it would put off any other label from trying to compete.

RCA called his bluff. He used some of the money to advance the careers of the artists who remained at Sun, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison. Every one of them became a legend in their own right. The small studio at 706 Union Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee, produced more of American music’s foundational figures than any other single address in the country’s history.

Marion Keisker’s four words, “Good ballad singer, hold”, are the annotation that started all of it, the note that told Sam Phillips to keep the name. The note that led to the phone call in June of 1954. The phone call that led to the Sunday afternoon at Scotty Moore’s house and the Monday night at Sun Studio and the break where Elvis picked up his guitar and started playing an Arthur crud up blues song too fast and too loose for anyone to have planned it and Scotty jumped in and Bill jumped in and Sam hit record. The building at 706 Union Avenue is still there. It is a museum now, operating a Sun Studio and you can walk into the same room where it happened. The original microphone is gone. The magnetic tape recorder that captured That’s All Right is gone. What remains is the room itself, 14 ft wide, the walls covered in the same

acoustic tile. Tourists from every country on Earth stand in that room and are told what happened there on the night of July 5th, 1954 and understand that they are standing in a place where something changed. The boy who paid $3.98 on his lunch hour said he didn’t sound like nobody. He was right about that.

The woman who wrote it down made sure someone else found out.