Элвис Пресли на Sun Records: Ранние записи и "Миллионный квартет"

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Elvis Presley recorded at least 24 songs at Sun Studio in Memphis, Tennessee, between 1953 and 1955. The recordings reflect the wide variety of music that could be heard in Memphis at the time: blues, rhythm & blues, gospel, country & western, hillbilly, rockabilly and bluegrass. Because of the recordings' historical significance in the foundation of rock and roll music, they were inducted into the U. S. Congress's National Recording Registry in 2002. Of the 24 known taped songs, 22 survive. Ten were released by Sun as Elvis's first five singles between 1954 and 1955. With the exception of the first four songs, which were demos recorded at Presley's expense, all of the songs were produced by Sam Phillips and featured Scotty Moore on guitar and Bill Black on bass. A year after Presley joined RCA Victor, he had a spontaneous informal session with Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis when visiting the Sun studio. This meeting was recorded on December 4, 1956, and dubbed the Million Dollar Quartet by the local newspaper the next day. These sessions are not generally included when reference is made to "Elvis's Sun Sessions", however.

On July 18, 1953, Presley first went to the Memphis Recording Service at the Sun Record Company, now commonly known as Sun Studio. He paid $3.98 to record the first of two double sided demo acetates, "My Happiness" and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin". Presley reportedly gave the acetate to his mother as a much belated extra birthday present, although many biographers suggest that Presley simply wanted to get noticed by Sun owner Sam Phillips. These suggestions are strengthened by the fact that the Presleys did not own a record player at the time. Elvis could have wanted both : another gift for his mother and an opportunity to be discovered. That one off acetate has since been valued at $500,000 by Record Collector magazine. Returning to Sun Studios on January 4, 1954, he recorded a second acetate, "I'll Never Stand in Your Way" / "It Wouldn't Be the Same Without You". Phillips had already cut the first records by blues artists such as Howlin' Wolf and Junior Parker. He thought a combination of black blues and boogie woogie music would be very popular among white people, if presented in the right way. In the spring, Presley auditioned for an amateur gospel quartet called The Songfellows, as one of the group was leaving and they were seeking a replacement. In May, Presley auditioned at the Hi Hat in Memphis as a vocalist for a band. Eddie Bond, the owner of the Hi Hat, turned him down. When Phillips acquired a demo recording of "Without You" and was unable to identify the vocalist, his assistant, Marion Keisker, reminded him about the young truck driver. She called him on May 26, 1954. Presley was not able to do justice to the song (the original acetate of the song that Phillips presented to Elvis resides in the Memphis State University collection), but Phillips asked him to perform some of the many other songs he knew. After running through a few songs, Presley expressed an interest in finding a band to play with, and Phillips invited local Western swing musicians Winfield "Scotty" Moore (electric guitar) and Bill Black (slap bass) to audition Presley. They did so on Sunday, July 4, 1954, at Moore's house. Neither musician was overly impressed, but they agreed a studio session would be useful to explore his potential. On July 5, 1954, the trio met at Sun studios to rehearse and record a handful of songs. According to Moore, the first song they recorded was "I Love You Because", but, after a few other country oriented songs that weren't all that impressive, they decided to take a break. During the break, Presley began "acting the fool" with Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right (Mama)", a blues song. When the other two musicians joined in, Phillips got them to restart and began taping. This was the bright, upbeat sound he had been looking for. Black remarked, "Damn. Get that on the radio and they'll run us out of town." The group recorded four songs during that session, including bluegrass musician Bill Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky", which he had written and recorded as a slow waltz. Sources credit Bill Black with initiating the song, with Presley and Moore joining in. They ended up with a fast version of the song in 4/4 time. After an early take, Phillips can be heard on tape saying: "Fine, man. Hell, that's different—that's a pop song now, nearly 'bout." To gauge professional and public reaction, Phillips took several acetates of the session to DJ Dewey Phillips (no relation) of Memphis radio station WHBQ's Red, Hot and Blue show. "That's All Right" subsequently received its first play on July 8, 1954. A week later, Sun had received some 6,000 advanced orders for "That's All Right" / "Blue Moon of Kentucky," which was released on July 19, 1954. From August 18 through December 8, "Blue Moon of Kentucky" was consistently higher on the charts, and then both sides began to chart across the South. After several performances with other bands, Presley arranged for Moore and Black to be his regular back up group, giving them each 25% of the takings. Moore and Black were originally members of their own band, The Starlight Wranglers, but after the success of "That's All Right", jealousy within the group forced them to split. Over the next 15 months, the trio would release five singles, tour extensively across the South, and appear regularly on the Louisiana Hayride; it was the biggest rival to the Grand Ole Opry at the time. They had originally auditioned for the Opry in October 1954, but they failed to impress the people in charge, or the audience, and were not invited back. Several biographers cite Jim Denny, talent agent at the Opry, as the man who told Presley that he should "go back to driving a truck". The trio would record at Sun together until November 1955, when Phillips sold Presley's contract to RCA Victor for $40,000; it was, at the time, the highest sum ever paid for a recording contract. Sun had permission to keep pressing the singles until January 1, 1956, and RCA Victor released Presley's first five Sun singles nationally. In January 1956, Presley recorded "Heartbreak Hotel", his first RCA Victor single. He would return to Sun studios regularly over the next few months, visiting with Phillips and meeting many of the label's new artists. Although Presley never officially recorded for Sun again, he was caught on tape during an impromptu jamming session on December 4, 1956. Presley had arrived during a Carl Perkins recording session, which also featured a young Jerry Lee Lewis on piano, and a new artist named Johnny Cash watching on. During a break in recording, Presley sat at the piano and began to sing along with Perkins, Lewis and Cash. Phillips kept his tape recorder running, and, seeing an opportunity to promote another of his new acts, he arranged for a reporter to cover the event. The recordings would eventually be known as "The Million Dollar Quartet". During Presley's tenure at Sun Records, he recorded two demo recordings in Lubbock, Texas: "Fool, Fool, Fool" and "Shake, Rattle and Roll", which were released for the first time by RCA in the 1990s. These are not considered Sun recordings.

Listed are the 24 titles from 1953 to 1955, ordered by their recording date. A take is any later version; the best take would be used to create a master to be issued.

On December 4, 1956, a year after Elvis had left Sun for RCA, he revisited Sun Studio. The afternoon became a jam session with Carl Perkins (then already famous for his "Blue Suede Shoes"), Jerry Lee Lewis (relatively unknown at the time), and Johnny Cash (not heard on the tapes, although he does appear on the cover photo). The taping was largely unintended by the quartet; they were just singing the songs they had in mind. About 40 titles are recorded, most of them incomplete. Elvis is caught telling about a singer he saw in Las Vegas, doing his version of "Don't Be Cruel", and they're enjoying "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" from Chuck Berry. Recorded: December 4, 1956.

Over the decades, several additional recordings have been claimed as having been recorded by Elvis at Sun Records. The reference work Elvis: The Illustrated Record by Roy Carr and Mick Farren lists the following songs that were, as of 1982, believed to have been recorded by Elvis at Sun Records but as of 2009 remain unreleased and unaccounted for in the official record:
"Tennessee Saturday Night" (2 takes recorded July 5–7, 1954). According to Carr and Farren, RCA planned to include this recording on the 1965 compilation album Elvis for Everyone!, but substituted the Sun side "Tomorrow Night" instead. "Uncle Penn" (1 take recorded September 9, 1954). Carr and Farren claim the existence of "Uncle Penn" is proven by it being listed on the session sheet for the recording session of December 8, 1954, that produced "Tomorrow Night" however this contradicts the authors' chart that gives the September 9 recording date. "Oakie Boogie" (1 take recorded December 8, 1954).

Most of the tapes, including the private single, the Million Dollar Quartet and alternate takes have been released.

A limited edition 3 CD box set released in June 2012 by RCA/Sony collectors' label Follow That Dream (FTD) Records, as a companion piece to a book by Ernst Mikael Jørgensen, also entitled A Boy from Tupelo. The book chronicles Presley's day to day life from July 4, 1954 (the day when he first rehearsed with guitarist Scotty Moore) to December 31, 1955, including many previously unpublished testimonies, accounts and details on every single show performed by Presley during the period (the book is, indeed, mainly intended as a complete concertography and tourography of Elvis Presley's early career). The first two of the three discs released in conjunction with the book feature, as the title specifies, all the material recorded by Presley from 1953 to 1955, including all of the alternate takes and all of the recordings which were missing from previous releases, with the exception of "Satisfied" and "I Got a Woman"; the latter two recordings are stated by Jørgensen himself, in the book, to be actually lost. However, a live rendition from March 19, 1955, of "I Got a Woman" is featured on the third disc of the package, along with 31 more live recordings from the era, 27 of which are previously unreleased. The A Boy from Tupelo book + CDs package, which was printed as a strictly limited run of 3,000 copies (each including a gift pack consisting in five 45 RPM reproductions of Presley's original Sun singles) sold out in 2012. In 2017 the set finally received wide release and added one track to Disc 3 which was previously unavailable: "I Forgot To Remember To Forget Recorded at the Louisiana Hayride, Shreveport, Louisiana, October 29, 1955".