Seventy-five years ago, Sam Phillips signed a lease on a former auto garage, named it Memphis Recording Service, and filled it with sound. “He went out and found music that other people were not recording,” says Nina Kathleen Jones, the studio’s current operations manager. Phillips soon released what historians consider the first rock-and-roll song, “Rocket 88,” by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats. The spot, which became known as Sun Studio, also signed Elvis, who later had a chance meeting in the building with Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash. Their impromptu jam session was immortalized as the Million Dollar Quartet. Now Sun is a bona fide tourist attraction, bringing in 200,000 visitors a year—and most likely more for 2025’s anniversary. The highlight remains the humble studio, where visitors line up to pose for a picture with the Shure 55-series microphone once used by Elvis. But Sun still makes music, too. Josh Shaw, a tour guide and the lead singer of Blvck Hippie, recorded there in 2020. The experience, he said, gave him goose bumps: “It feels like hallowed ground.”
Southern Agenda