On December 4, 1956, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley gathered round the piano at Sun Studios in Memphis. This impromptu jam was recorded, and released some years later as the Million Dollar Quartet.
Studio owner Sam Phillips had bought the piano six years earlier, when he set up Sun Records, an enterprise central to the birth of rock music. It was a 1949 Wurlitzer spinet piano, and it’s been played by many great musicians on thousands of recording sessions.
Late in 2021, the piano was listed for sale by auction – with an expected price of about one million dollars. This instrument, and the store it was purchased from, are right at the heart of the rock and roll story.
