TouchéGet the appThe Million Dollar Quartet may have been a trio on tape
In December 1956 Elvis Presley dropped in at Sun Studio in Memphis while Carl Perkins was recording, with a little-known pianist named Jerry Lee Lewis.
On December 4, 1956, Carl Perkins came into Sun Studio in Memphis to record new songs with his band. Sam Phillips, who owned Sun Records, wanted a fuller sound. He brought in his newest find to play piano: Jerry Lee Lewis, who was still unknown outside Memphis.
Early that afternoon Elvis Presley walked in on a social visit, with a girlfriend, Marilyn Evans. He had left Sun for RCA Victor a year earlier. In the control room he listened to a playback of Perkins's session and said it was good. Then he went into the studio, and a jam session started.
Much of what they sang was gospel, songs they had all grown up with. Presley sang nearly all the leads, and Lewis played most of the piano. At one point Presley did an impression of Jackie Wilson singing Presley's own "Don't Be Cruel." He had watched Wilson do it in Las Vegas four nights straight. The tape was running.
Phillips called a local paper, the Memphis Press-Scimitar. Its entertainment editor, Bob Johnson, came over with a photographer. The next day the paper ran his story under the headline "Million Dollar Quartet," with a photo of Presley at the piano and Lewis, Perkins and Johnny Cash around him.
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Cash was a Sun artist, and the photo shows he was there. But his voice does not seem to appear on any of the released recordings, and accounts of his visit differ. Perkins said Cash was already at the studio when Presley arrived. Peter Guralnick's biography of Presley suggests that Cash stayed only a short time, possibly to go Christmas shopping.
In his 1997 autobiography Cash wrote that he was the first to arrive and the last to leave. He said his voice is on the tape but hard to pick out. He had stood farthest from the microphone and sung much higher than usual to stay in Presley's key.
In 1969 Shelby Singleton bought Sun Records and began going through more than 10,000 hours of its tapes. Part of the session came out in Europe in 1981, and the fuller recordings were released in the United States in 1990.
A 50th-anniversary release in 2006 put the songs in the order they were recorded. On its last track, Presley can be heard saying goodbye to someone named Johnny.