Sun Studio is a small recording studio at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis, opened in 1950 by Sam Phillips as the Memphis Recording Service. Between 1951 and 1956 it recorded early sessions by B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. It is a National Historic Landmark and still operates as a working studio.
What is Sun Studio, exactly?
It is a one-room recording studio, roughly the size of a small storefront, that Sam Phillips built out to record local musicians — first blues and gospel acts, then country and rockabilly performers — who had no other studio in the region willing to record them. Phillips ran it first as Memphis Recording Service, with the slogan “We Record Anything — Anywhere — Anytime,” and formed Sun Records as its label in 1952. The building has never been demolished or substantially altered; the control room and studio floor visitors see today are the ones used in the 1950s sessions.
Where is it, and is it still an active studio?
Sun Studio sits on Union Avenue, east of downtown Memphis, in a building that predates its use as a studio. It functions on two tracks at once: by day it operates as a museum with guided tours, run by the private company Sun Studio; after hours, it continues to book recording sessions, a point the studio’s own site makes to distinguish it from a preserved-in-amber exhibit. Musicians including U2 and Ringo Starr have recorded there in later decades, according to Sun Studio’s own account of the building’s history — a detail worth attributing to the operator rather than treating as settled trivia, since studio booking records are not public documents.
What was actually recorded there in the 1950s?
The studio’s catalogue from its first decade is unusually dense with recordings later treated as foundational to American popular music. Key sessions, as documented by the studio and repeated in standard music-history accounts, include:
- “Rocket 88,” recorded in 1951 by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats (the backing band was Ike Turner’s), often cited by music historians as an early candidate for the first rock and roll record.
- Elvis Presley’s first commercial sessions, beginning in 1954, including “That’s All Right,” cut with Scotty Moore and Bill Black.
- Early recordings by B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf, made when Phillips was leasing masters to labels such as Chess and RPM before Sun Records existed as its own imprint.
- Johnny Cash’s early Sun sides, including his first singles with the Tennessee Two.
- Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes,” recorded at Sun in 1955.
- Jerry Lee Lewis’s breakthrough recordings, including “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” made in 1957.
Phillips’s own account, as preserved in interviews and cited in Sun Studio’s institutional history, was that he was listening for a particular rawness in vocal performance — a quality he wanted whether the singer was Black or white, at a time when Memphis radio and recording were largely segregated. That framing belongs to Phillips and to the historians who have written about him; it is not a claim this site can independently verify beyond noting how consistently it appears in the documented record.
Who was Sam Phillips, and why is his role central to the story?
Sam Phillips owned and ran the studio and Sun Records; he is the person historians credit with recording several artists before any major label would. He also sold Elvis Presley’s recording contract to RCA Victor in 1955, a transaction that funded Sun’s continued operation and is treated by music historians as one of the pivotal deals in the commercial history of rock and roll. The building and label’s significance rests on this combination — a small, independent studio that intersected with several artists whose later careers were shaped elsewhere, but whose earliest recorded work exists only because Phillips made the tape.
What is the Million Dollar Quartet session?
On December 4, 1956, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis were all at Sun Studio at once — Perkins was recording, Lewis was playing piano on the session, and Presley and Cash stopped by. An impromptu jam was recorded on the studio’s own tape, later released commercially and referred to as the Million Dollar Quartet session. Sun Studio’s own materials describe this as one occasion when all four performers were captured on the same reel, a detail that has since become one of the studio’s most frequently repeated stories; the recording itself is the primary evidence for it, rather than any single participant’s later retelling.
Can the studio be toured, and what does a visit involve seeing?
Sun Studio operates guided tours through its own booking system, and its site is the authoritative source for current hours, ticket prices and tour length — figures that change and should be confirmed there directly rather than assumed from older listings. The tour covers the control room, the studio floor, and a small collection of artifacts and photographs tied to the 1950s sessions; Sun Studio’s own materials describe the recording room as substantially the same physical space used during the Presley, Cash, Perkins and Lewis sessions. As with any working studio, active recording bookings can affect which parts of the building are accessible on a given day.
How does Sun Studio relate to Stax and the rest of Memphis’s music history?
Sun Studio and the Stax Museum of American Soul Music are separate institutions built around separate histories, and conflating them is a common outsider’s error. Stax Records operated a different studio on McLemore Avenue in South Memphis starting in the late 1950s, recording soul artists including Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes; the Soulsville Foundation now runs a museum on that site. Sun’s history is earlier and centers on the transition from blues and country into rock and roll and rockabilly. Readers building out a fuller picture of the city’s music institutions can find both covered, alongside Graceland and the Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum, in the site’s broader Museums & Galleries coverage.
Where does Sun Studio sit within Memphis as a whole?
Sun Studio is one stop within a wider set of civil-rights and music sites that define how the city presents its own history to visitors and residents alike. The National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel sits a short distance away and documents a very different, and far heavier, chapter of the city’s record — the two should not be treated as interchangeable stops on the same casual circuit. A fuller sense of how Memphis’s landmarks, museums and neighborhoods fit together is laid out in the site’s Memphis guide.
What should a visitor plan around, practically?
Sun Studio is a working business with its own hours, admission structure and tour scheduling, all of which are subject to change; the studio’s own site should be treated as the current source rather than any third-party summary, including this one. For getting to Union Avenue, working out transport options, and building a realistic day around downtown’s museum and music sites, the site’s practical planning hub covers routes, timing and how the riverfront and Midtown connect. Residents thinking about how music history sits alongside daily life in Memphis — including how the city funds and maintains sites like this one — will find that context in Living in Memphis.
The core fact is straightforward and does not need embellishment: a small studio on Union Avenue recorded a run of sessions in the early-to-mid 1950s that later historians treat as pivotal to American popular music, and the building — still recording, still open for tours — is the primary physical evidence of that record.
Access Memphis is an independent guide written from published, checkable sources. We have not visited the places described here and we do not publish personal recommendations or invented ‘local favourites’ — where something is singled out as notable, we say who says so. Opening times, fares, closures and prices change at short notice, so treat everything here as a starting point and confirm with the museum, operator or venue directly before building a day around it. We give no advice on visas, insurance, health or safety; use your own government’s official guidance for those.