4th December 1956, Tuesday

[Graeme]

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[Private Presley]

December 4, 1956

Elvis was already under contract with RCA but he continued to stay in touch with Sam Phillips and would often drop by Sun Studios unannounced. It was just such a day on December 4,1956, when Elvis with his friend, Marilyn Evans, dropped by Sun Studios.

Carl Perkins, who by this time had already met success with 'Blue Suede Shoes', had come into the studios that day, to work on a revamped version of an old blues song, 'Matchbox'. Sam Phillips, who wanted to try to fatten this sparse rockabilly instrumentation, had brought in his latest acquisition, Jerry Lee Lewis, still unknown outside Memphis, to play piano on the Perkins session. Lewis's first Sun single would be released a few days later. The Sun artist Johnny Cash, who had recently enjoyed a few hit records on the country charts, had arrived earlier wanting to listen in on Carl Perkins’ session.

Sometime in the early afternoon, Elvis, with Marilyn Evans, arrived to pay a casual visit. After chatting with Phillips in the control room, Elvis listened to the playback of Perkins' session, which he pronounced to be good. Then he went into the studio and soon a jam session began. Elvis had sat down at the piano and they started off just fooling around, singing snatches of various remembered songs in between excited conversation as they gathered around the piano. Presley was clearly the 'star' of the impromptu jam session, which consisted largely of snippets of gospel songs that the four artists had all grown up singing. The recordings show Elvis, the most nationally and internationally famous of the four at the time, to be the focal point of what was a casual, spur-of-the-moment gathering of four artists who would each go on to contribute greatly to the seismic shift in popular music in the late 1950s. Fortunately, Jack Clement was engineering that day and remembers saying to himself 'I think I'd be remiss not to record this' and turned on the switch to record the impromptu session. It was 24 years later before some of the tracks from the session were released

During the session, Phillips called a local newspaper, the Memphis Press-Scimitar. Bob Johnson, the newspaper's entertainment editor, who came over to the studios with UPI representative Leo Soroca and a photographer. Johnson wrote an article about the session, which appeared the following day in the Press-Scimitar under the headline 'Million Dollar Quartet'. The article contained the now-famous photograph of Presley seated at the piano surrounded by Lewis, Perkins and Cash (the uncropped version of the photo also includes Evans, shown seated atop the piano).

Sam Phillips would later say that “… for the first time, it seemed like Elvis himself was really in charge. It was the total spontaneity. And the rhythm was moving along just right - it [was] pushing him, [but] he still had command'. But that was what differentiated Elvis from so many of these other boys. Elvis could learn from his mistakes, where they were just destined to repeat them.”

It is a moment of perfect innocence. It is also, in many ways, a moment of pure vindication, the proof for Sam that somehow this music - the music of poor blacks and poor whites that had been overlooked for so long - was not going to be forgotten. … What happened that day is akin to a spiritual awakening through music.

[Private Presley]

Memphis Press Scimitar reporter Robert Johnson and Leo Soroca UPI representative

[ColinB]

Million Dollar Quartet [5].jpg (10.78 KiB) Viewed 1732 times

[Private Presley]

And here is the photographer George Pierce who took the iconic photo that day.