Tag: lewis

Date Published: April 29th, 2025 | Last Updated: April 29th, 2025
Author: Abby | Category: Travel, USA
Date of travel: April 13th, 2025

Started by Sam Phillips, Sun Studio is a historic recording studio where it all began for many great musicians including Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and B.B. King. It is also credited for recording the very first rock and roll single, Rocket ’88 and the site of recording the Million Dollar Quartet. No musical tour of Memphis is complete without checking out Sun Studios!

How to get here:

Travelling here by car is the easiest way. There’s a small parking lot behind the building. You can also get here by public transport or bundled as part as a few Memphis local music tours.

How much time do I need?

Although mammoth in reputation, Sun Studio is actually quite small. You can only visit with a guided tour that lasts about 45 minutes to 1 hour with a gift shop in the lobby. They give you a bit of extra time at the end of the tour to take in the studio surroundings and to ask any questions you may have.

Tickets & Cost?

Annoyingly, you cannot reserve tickets ahead of time. Ticket purchases are only made in-person on a first come first serve basis. From their website they mention that it’s not uncommon for people to stop by earlier in the day to purchase a ticket for later in the day. Tickets for the day open up at 10am and you can buy a ticket for any time that day.

You can only see the studio as part of a guided tour and the tours are run every hour. From their website, these are the current tour times: Monday – Sunday 10:30, 11:30, 12:30, 1:30, 2:30, 3:30 and 4:30. Double check their website for the most up to date times before you travel.

We came in the middle of April which wasn’t quite peak tourist season yet and we were also arriving in Memphis in the evening so we were able to walk in a purchase a ticket for the 4:30pm tour without having to wait. I can see this being a problem in peak tourist season – the space isn’t very big so there’ll be a limit on the number of people they can fit in a tour group, and considering this is the #2 tourist attraction (second to Graceland) in Memphis, I can imagine it would get quite busy and sell out early!

One way to avoid the hassle of coming in early in hopes to get a ticket is to book a Memphis Tour that has the Sun Studio tour included in the ticket. We went on Backbeat Tours and there was an option for the tour to drop you off at Sun Studio and get picked up later.

The Guided Tour

Upon arrival of this small brown brick building, snap a few photos outside then head inside to the retro vintage style lobby. Here is where you’ll buy tickets and there’s also a small counter where you can purchase a cup of pour-over coffee while waiting for the tour to start.

Take a gander around the various items displayed and check out the small record shop in the back. There’s also many photos and memorabilia on the walls as well – even in the bathroom!

The tour will start at the back where you’re led up a narrow set of stairs to a room full of memorabilia. Our guide was a musician and knew plenty about the history of Sun Studio and also played some original tunes recorded right there! He started off with how Sun Studio started and went along the wall and pointed out important items throughout history.

Sam Phillips disliked pop music and wanted to start a recording company that recorded the less popular non-pop music, mainly the blues. He started off as the Memphis Recording Service. To generate revenue, he’d record anything for anyone with a portable device in a suitcase and would travel to church events, weddings…etc. His slogan was “We Record Anything, Anywhere, Anytime”. He had an open door policy where anyone could come in and record what they wanted for a small fee.

Memphis Recording Service is credited for recording “Rocket ’88”, what music historians would deem as the very first rock and roll song due to the distortion in the guitar. The distortion is due to an amplifier that broke while the band was on their way to the recording studio and an attempted repair was made by stuffing wadded newspapers to make it work. The result produced a distorted sound that Sam Phillips loved and kept the recording as-is. The band then brought this record to Chess Records for release. It became the third-biggest R&B single in jukebox plays of 1951.

Memphis Recording Service was only a recording service where people would come to lay down their track then leave with a record where they would bring to record labels. Sam Phillips wanted a bigger piece of the picture and thus started Sun Studio, his own record label.

He signed many artists that would go on to have successful careers including B.B. King, Rufus Thomas, and Howlin’ Wolf. Despite his success, he was struggling to keep the business afloat and the copyright infringement lawsuit for the release of Rufus Thomas’ “Bear Cat”, a response song to Big Mama Thornton “Hound Dog” (later re-recorded by Elvis) nearly bankrupted the business. Phillips continued on and had more hits from artists such as The Prisonaires, a group of 4 incarcerated men that were so popular that they were given special permission to temporarily leave prison to record a single.

Sun Studio gained a reputation and would draw in artists from all over. One of those artists was Elvis Presley. Elvis came to impress Sam Phillips, but on the day he arrived to record “My Happiness”, Sam Phillips was out of town and he met Sam’s assistant Marion Keisker instead who recorded his songs for him. After his performance, Marion was so impressed that she made an extra copy of the recording to give to Sam upon his return. Sam did not like the recording at all – he wasn’t into pop music, but he brought in Elvis along with two local musicians to record a ballad demo he had acquired to test it out. The session was unfruitful and Sam was unimpressed with Elvis as a ballad singer. As the musicians were packing up, Elvis was losing his big chance with Sam and just started playing and singing. As guitarist Winfield “Scotty” Moore recalled: “All of a sudden, Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them. Sam, I think, had the door to the control booth open … he stuck his head out and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And we said, ‘We don’t know.’ ‘Well, back up,’ he said, ‘try to find a place to start, and do it again.'” Although Sam wasn’t impressed with Elvis as a ballad singer, he loved Elvis as a blues/rockabilly singer.

3 days later the record was played on Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips’ radio show, Red, Hot, and Blue where he famously smashes records of songs he did not like. Listeners kept phoning in to find out about Elvis and his record was played again and again on the radio. The success of Elvis tied into the ongoing success of Sun Studio. Phillips realized that his label wasn’t big enough for the rapid popularity of Elvis and wouldn’t be able to break him out across USA, so for the betterment of Elvis, Phillips sold his contract for an unprecedented amount to RCA. The money he got for selling Elvis’ contract helped settle his debts and provided the financial roads to launch other famous artists including Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis.

After some time in the memorabilia room, we were then led downstairs to THE famous studio room where so many stars have stood and played before. This was the exact room where Elvis took a chance a sang out the blues to impress Sam Phillips.

Sam donated most of the original recording equipment so you can see what it was like back in the days. The ‘X’ marker tape is still on the ground where the artists would have stood during their recording session. They even left the original microphone in the room so you can touch a piece of history and take a few photos. 🙂

The Million Dollar Quartet happened right here in this studio as an impromptu jam session between Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, and Johnny Cash. It started off with Jerry Lee Lewis playing piano for a recording session with Carl Perkins, then Elvis walks in for an unexpected visit (he was already signed to RCA at this point and no longer with Sun Studios). Sam Phillips called in Johnny Cash to join the session (although Cash’s version of the story said he was already there to listen in on the Perkins session) and all 4 of them were jamming together. The engineer behind the booth that day decided to record the session without any of them knowing. Phillips saw this as a chance for good publicity and called in a journalist that snapped the infamous photo and the next day coined the term “Million Dollar Quartet” in the papers.

The piano in the studio is not the original piano they played on that day, however it is a piano where Jerry Lee Lewis played and you can see a cigar burn on the keys. The original piano is on display at Graceland.

The tour ends after the studio. They gave us a bit of extra time at the end to look through everything and take some extra photos or ask questions. Overall it was a great tour and super cool to be in the presence of rock history and be able to see and touch where so many famous artists have been before!