One night in 1955, a ten-year-old named Knox Phillips was hanging out at Sun Records, a small, narrow building next to a parking lot at 706 Union Avenue in downtown Memphis. He hadn't come to audition for Sam Phillips, Sun's proprietor, as hundreds of young hopefuls from all over the South had. Sam Phillips was his father and he had come to see four of his discoveries — Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash — make a recording together. The four men had longish, greased-back hair and were wearing loud clothes, but they were singing white country spirituals, looking reverently up in the direction of heaven while Lewis pounded out a sanctified accompaniment on the Sun studio's piano.

Knox had his ducktail Brylcreemed and was dressed to the nines in his cat clothes in emulation of Elvis, his idol. During a break between takes, Presley spotted him, broke into a broad grin, walked over and hugged him. "Stay with me, son, stay with me," the singer said, clasping young Knox close. "And," Phillips added twenty-two years later, the day after Presley's death, "he meant it. I think he saw me coming up as an embodiment of the Southern rebel thing and the other things he represented."

Presley was largely a Southern phenomenon that night in 1955, but already he was shaping the style and attitude of a younger generation, the first rock & roll generation. He would move on to the movies, to Las Vegas, to an increasingly elaborate musical presentation, but he always came back to Memphis, and onstage he always came back to gospel music and rock & roll. This rooted, self-consciously Southern Elvis Presley was the Elvis many of the music people who worked with him — instrumentalists, singers, producers — remembered in the days following the announcement of his passing. He came, as Knox Phillips said, "from poor, deprived people who were also fundamentally religious people," from a part of the country where poor whites knew intimately, and to a great extent shared, the lives of poor blacks. Like these people, he was impulsive and shy, self-willed and humble, wild and spiritual, courtly and crude. He was a Southern man.

He was also a Southern musician, not the first and not the last, but surely the most important. He learned to sing in the fundamentalist First Assembly of God Church in Tupelo, Mississippi. In Memphis, with the help and encouragement of Sam Phillips, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, he spent hours, days, weeks and months transforming the white and black gospel, blues, folk and country music of his childhood into something people would call rockabilly, which we recognize today as archetypal rock & roll. And it was largely in Nashville that the raw sound of rockabilly was refined — or emasculated, depending on one's point of view — into songs the whole world could sing.

There can be little doubt that Sam Phillips played the crucial role of midwife in the birth of the new music, that without him there might never have been an Elvis Presley. White boys who sang black were nothing new in the South. Carl Perkins, playing with his brothers in Jackson, Tennessee, and Jerry Lee Lewis down in Ferriday, Louisiana, were making music much like Presley's when Elvis was screwing up his courage to go in and make that first record for his mother. Country boogie groups had been covering black hits in a more or less black style for years; that went back to prewar recordings of people like Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills. But white singers who sang very black and also jumped and boogied to the beat were considered low class and disreputable even by hillbilly musicians.

Presley came to Sun with all his musical influences digested, but he was star-struck and tried at first to imitate the popular crooners of the day. Sam Phillips, who is fond of saying, "If you aren't doing something different, you aren't doing anything," tried cutting the country ballad "I Love You Because" with him, then, during a break, Elvis grabbed his guitar and launched into "That's All Right, Mama," a blues by Arthur Crudup. Scotty Moore and Bill Black fell in behind him and Phillips knew immediately that what another producer might have taken for a bit of lighthearted country clowning, a break from the serious work, was in fact one of the most serious cultural events of the 20th century. Presley never forgot this moment. He had tried, and failed, to make the kind of music mainstream Americans accepted. From now on he would make music that came, naturally and instinctively, from his roots.

When RCA's Steve Sholes bought Presley's contract from Sam Phillips his young assistant, guitarist Chet Atkins, was given the responsibility of helping to arrange the singer's first Nashville sessions. "I thought he was a black guy when I heard his Sun records," Atkins recalls. "When I found out he was coming I hired the Jordanaires, Floyd Cramer and some of the other musicians to work with his group. Everybody knew he was going to be the hottest thing in show business, he was already so hot in Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana."

Elvis came to Nashville with Moore, Black and D.J. Fontana, who'd been staff drummer for the Louisiana Hayride. Fontana was used to playing conventional country music, and he freely admits that "I didn't understand what they were doing. I had listened to a lot of music but I wasn't that familiar with what was happening in rhythm & blues. When they first played on the Louisiana Hayride — this was when he was on Sun — Elvis was playing rhythm and Bill Black played a drum kind of thing, slapping that bass. Scotty had his thing. They had a feel and a sound all their own and didn't really need me. But somehow it all fell into place."