Sun Studio

Sam Phillips opened his Memphis Recording Service in the early 1950s with a simple, radical idea, that the raw music being made by Black and white working people of the region deserved to be recorded and heard. He recorded blues and rhythm and blues artists like Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King, and Ike Turner, whose band cut Rocket 88, a song many historians point to as the first rock and roll record, in 1951.

Phillips had an ear for a new sound and a knack for capturing raw energy on tape in his small studio. He famously said he was looking for a way to bring together the feel of Black music and country music into something new, and he found it. His willingness to record across the color line in a segregated South, and his taste for the untamed and the original, made his little studio a laboratory for a musical revolution.

In 1953 a shy teenager named Elvis Presley walked in to record a song, and within a couple of years Phillips had him cutting the sides that would launch him toward superstardom. Elvis's early Sun recordings, blending country, blues, and gospel into something electric and new, are the cornerstone of rock and roll, and Phillips eventually sold Elvis's contract in a deal that would help fund the label's next wave.

That next wave was staggering. Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison all recorded for Sun, each becoming a legend in his own right. In December 1956 an impromptu jam session brought Elvis, Cash, Lewis, and Perkins together in the studio at once, a moment captured on tape and remembered ever since as the Million Dollar Quartet. Few rooms anywhere have produced so much influential music.

Sun Studio is both a museum and a working recording studio, and the original recording room has been preserved much as it was, a plain, acoustically simple space where guides tell the stories and play the records that were made there. Visitors can stand where Elvis stood and see original equipment, photographs, and memorabilia from the studio's golden years, including a microphone tied to the earliest sessions.

By night the room still records music, and artists from around the world come to cut tracks in the very studio where rock and roll was born, hoping a little of that magic still lingers in the walls. That mix of living studio and shrine gives Sun a rare authenticity, and its modest size only underscores the wonder that so much came out of so small a place.

Because the visit is a short guided tour of an indoor space, Sun Studio works in any weather and any season, an easy stop on a Memphis music itinerary year round.

Spring and fall bring Memphis its mildest weather, the best time to combine Sun with the city's other music landmarks on foot and by car.

Summer is hot and humid, and tours can be busy with vacationing music fans, so arriving for an earlier tour time can help beat the heat and the crowds.

Winter is the quietest season in the city, a relaxed time to visit and hear the stories without the peak-season rush.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.