Where: Memphis, Tennessee
When: year-round
If you like: music, history
Why you should go: The former auto garage on the edge of downtown Memphis might not look impressive at first. But when tour groups step into a room lined with scruffy acoustic tiles, grip a vintage microphone, and strike a pose on the X taped to the linoleum floor, they’re connecting with rock-and-roll history. It’s the exact spot where Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, B.B. King, and countless other acts recorded their vocals.
This year marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Sun Studio, which opened in 1950 when a local DJ, Sam Phillips, set out to capture Memphis’s rapidly evolving music scene. A year later he produced what historians consider the first rock-and-roll song, “Rocket 88,” with vocals by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats; soon after, he signed a teenager named Elvis, who had dropped in to record a song for his mother. Sun now annually welcomes 200,000 visitors to the still-active studio and National Historic Landmark, where guides reverently recount the building’s milestones. “The space really does speak for itself,” says Nina Kathleen Jones, the studio’s operations manager. “The simplicity is kind of the magic of it.”
G&G tip: Hit the gift shop for an only-in-Memphis souvenir. Where else could you find a work shirt from Crown Electric? That’s where Elvis was employed as a delivery driver for $1 an hour in 1954, when he first recorded at Sun.
Larry Bleiberg is a Virginia native and past president of the Society of American Travel Writers. He served on a Pulitzer Prize–winning team and has won ten Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards. He has contributed to the BBC, National Geographic, The Washington Post, CNN, Fodors, Afar, AARP, and Atlas Obscura, among others. A former travel editor of the Dallas Morning News and Coastal Living, he’s also the founder of CivilRightsTravel.com, a guide to visiting historic sites from the civil rights movement.
