Notice this modest storefront: it's the actual birthplace of rock and roll. This modest storefront at 706 Union Avenue was rented in 1950 by a young radio engineer from Alabama named Sam Phillips, who had a wild theory: that there was a fortune to be made recording the raw, unpolished music of Black Southern artists that the major labels were ignoring. He was right.
In these few hundred square feet, Phillips recorded Howlin' Wolf, Ike Turner's 'Rocket 88' — often called the first rock and roll record — and B.B. King. Then in 1954 a nineteen-year-old truck driver named Elvis Presley walked in and started something that would permanently alter the history of popular music. Within months, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison followed.
They called them the Million Dollar Quartet. The studio is essentially unchanged. The same microphone Elvis used still hangs from the same ceiling.
When you walk in and hear 'That's All Right' echoing off these walls, you'll feel it: the precise moment when American music cracked open and became something entirely new.