Elvis Presley

There is a before and an after, and this record is where the line gets drawn.

Elvis Presley was twenty-one years old when this album came out. He had never made an album before. Almost no one outside of Memphis had heard of him. By the end of 1956 his face was on the cover of every magazine in America and parents across the country were demanding that television networks never show him from the waist down again. That is the kind of impact this music had.

What Sam Phillips first captured at Sun Studio was not a polished product. It was a collision. Elvis came from gospel and country, but he had grown up absorbing the blues and R&B of Beale Street, and when he sang he sounded like all of those things at once. The sound did not have a name yet. Rock and roll was the closest anyone could get. RCA bought his contract for an unprecedented $35,000, rushed him into studios in Nashville and New York in January 1956, and filled out the album with five of the Sun recordings, including "That's All Right," the song that started everything, cut during a break in a 1954 session when Elvis began goofing around with an old Arthur Crudup blues number and Phillips hit record.

The music is simple by any technical measure. A handful of chords, a slapping upright bass, a guitar that sounds like it was recorded in a hallway. None of that matters. What matters is the feeling, and the feeling on this record is pure liberation, the sense of something locked up finally getting free. "Blue Suede Shoes" opens the album and became an anthem for a generation that had been told to sit still and be quiet.

Every rock and roll record made in the seventy years since owes this one a debt. Most of them know it.