On an August morning in 1953, a truck driver walked into a small recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee.

He was looking to make a record.

In those days, little independent recording studios were quite familiar with these types of walk-ins.

These studios were not solely the domain of professional musicians.

People often wanted to record songs or even spoken word messages as gifts for friends and family.

Anyone could come in off the street, sing a little something, and have a cheap record pressed on the spot.

This helped these nascent studios drum up a little extra cash.

And who knows? Someone talented just might end up walking through your front door.

Just to hammer home their open door policy, this particular recording studio's motto was,

we'll record anything, anywhere, anytime.

This truck driver would later claim that he came in that day to make a record as a birthday gift for his mother.

But it turns out that was a little bit of a white lie.

His mother's birthday had been a couple months previous. He just wanted to see how he sounded.

Now over the course of a few short takes, the young man recorded a couple of unremarkable country-inflected ballads.

There was nothing particularly special about the songs themselves, but there was something about this young man that caught the attention of Mary and Kysker, the woman who was running the shop that day.

The kid was striking to look at, and he had this distinctive baritone voice.

She made a note of his name and added her own little touch of commentary in her notes.

She wrote,

Elvis Presley, good ballad singer, hold.

Over the course of the next year, Mary and Kysker couldn't seem to get this young man out of her head.

Her boss was a man by the name of Sam Phillips, who was the owner of this little studio and also the head producer.

He adubbed his little storefront, Sun Studios, and by 1953, he had recorded dozens of artists, many of whom would go on to be hugely important to American music.

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