Sun Records

…Presley, he landed at the Sun Records label in Memphis, Tennessee.

…who launched careers from Memphis’s Sun Studio. After Presley’s death in 1977, his city mansion and burial site, Graceland, became a shrine (opened to the public for tours in 1982). Memphis made a huge contribution to the development of soul music as well, with Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam and…

…when producer Sam Phillips at Sun Records, a local blues label, responded to his audition tape with a phone call. Several weeks worth of recording sessions ensued with a band consisting of Presley, guitarist Scotty Moore, and bassist Bill Black. Their repertoire consisted of the kind of material for which…

…rhythm and blues, as did Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee—before Sam Phillips turned his attention to Elvis Presley and rockabilly music—and J&M Studio in New Orleans, Louisiana, where a number of the most important records released on the Los Angeles-based labels were recorded.

…for a small label called Sun Records. An easy, swinging mixture of country music, rhythm and blues, and pop ballad singing, these were, if not the first, then the seminal recordings of a new music that, it is hardly an exaggeration to say, would make all other kinds of music…

…first session for Sam Phillips’s Sun label of Memphis, Tennessee, Presley recorded two songs that would lay the foundation for rockabilly: “That’s All Right,” written by Mississippi bluesman Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, and a hopped-up version of “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” a mid-tempo waltz by Bill Monroe, the creator of…