The room where rock & roll, the sound and the phenomenon, was born does not look very different today from the way it did on the night of creation: July 5th, 1954. The Memphis Recording Service -- the original name of Sam Phillips' Sun Records studio at 706 Union Ave. in Memphis -- is about the size of a generous living room, with space for a small, rocking combo and not much else. At the rear, behind a glass window, is a tiny control room where Phillips manned the primitive console, coached his acts and listened intently for the take that mattered.

On that Monday night in July, work began at about 7 p.m. For the first few hours, nothing special happened. Nineteen-year-old Elvis Presley -- a truck driver for the local Crown Electric firm -- ran through take after take of sentimental cheese: the recent Bing Crosby hit "Harbor Lights"; "I Love You Because," a 1949 smash for country star Ernest Tubb.

Then, during a break, Presley started messing around with an up-tempo blues, "That's All Right," written and first cut in 1947 by the black singer-guitarist Arthur Crudup. Guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, recruited by Phillips to back Presley, jumped in. Phillips knew his blues -- he had already produced historic sides and regional hits by Jackie Brenston, Rufus Thomas, Howlin' Wolf and the Prisonaires -- and he was impressed that Presley, a white teenage hillbilly born in Tupelo, Mississippi, knew the Crudup song. Phillips could also hear Presley's natural sound and vocal authority coming out, an intuitive combustion of field, church and juke joint.

Released on July 19th as the A side of Sun 209, with a high-speed reinvention of Bill Monroe's waltz "Blue Moon of Kentucky" on the flip, "That's All Right" was more than an expression of a young man's disparate influences. It was a revolutionary act of musical, cultural and racial integration. As Moore put it in a 1991 interview, "We just sort of shook our heads and said, 'Well, that's fine, but good God, they'll run us out of town.' "

Presley, Moore and Black had played together for the first time at Moore's house the day before the "That's All Right" session. But the hallmarks of Presley's greatest work during the next two decades -- his obsessions with perfection and connection, with finding his way inside a song to the ultimate take -- were already obvious on July 5th. In the only complete, surviving alternate take of "That's All Right," Presley sounds short of transcendence: He glides through lines, hamming them up, while Moore overplays behind him. Phillips, in turn, rolled tape until he caught magic. In an era when most big-city recording dates were run military-style -- four cuts in three hours -- Phillips was not bound by the clock. He owned the studio and the label.

Presley would make four more historic singles for Sun. In late 1955, Phillips, facing cash-flow problems, sold Presley's contract and masters to RCA for $35,000, then went on to discover and record Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins before selling Sun itself in the 1960s. Presley became the King. But he never claimed to have invented anything. "Rock & roll has been around for many years," he said in a 1958 interview. "It used to be called rhythm & blues."

But Presley clearly understood the magnitude of what he started that night in 1954. "I don't think it'll ever die out completely," he said, defending the music he made and loved, "because they're gonna have to get something mighty good to take its place."