Sun Studio

Sam Phillips opened the Memphis Recording Service at 706 Union Avenue in January 1950, in a thirty-by-eighteen-foot room that had been a radiator shop. He taped weddings and amateurs for a living, but his real business was Black musicians from the Delta and Memphis, whom he recorded and leased to other labels: B.B. King and Howlin' Wolf among them. In 1951 Jackie Brenston, backed by Ike Turner's band, cut "Rocket 88," which many historians call the first rock and roll record. It came out on Chess, not on a label of Phillips's own.

He started Sun in 1952. Rufus Thomas recorded here, and in July 1954 a young Elvis Presley made his first Sun single. Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison followed, and rockabilly, a mix of white country and Black rhythm and blues, took shape in this room. On December 4, 1956, Presley, Perkins, Lewis and Cash found themselves in the studio together for a jam session that became known as the Million Dollar Quartet.

Sun outgrew the building and moved to Madison Avenue in 1959, and Phillips sold the label in 1969. The old room reopened in 1987 and was named a National Historic Landmark in 2003. The tour is short, and that is part of its force: you stand in a space smaller than most living rooms and hear how much came out of it.