With the push of a button, Elvis Presley' 'That's All Right' went spinning around the world Monday on the 50th anniversary of one of rock 'n' roll's defining moments.

'That's All Right' was Presley's first professional recording, taped at Sam Phillips' Sun Studio on July 5, 1954, to begin a career that changed pop music everywhere.

For the anniversary, Scotty Moore, Presley's first guitarist, hit a button on a control board at Sun to begin a satellite broadcast of 'That's All Right' at 11 a.m. CDT to 1,200 to 1,500 radio stations around the world.

Outside the small studio, a street party was under way with a series of area bands lined up to perform on a sound stage at Sun's front door.

Despite temperatures in the low 90s and practically no shade, more than 2,000 participants had turned out by early afternoon.

Presley was accompanied on 'That's All Right' by Moore on guitar and Bill Black on bass. They had no drummer, and Black slapped his standup base hard to create a one-man rhythm section.

While 'That's All Right' now enjoys a prominent place in the history of American music, it did not produce immediate fame for Presley and his colleagues.

'A lot of people think it was an overnight success, but we paid our dues for two years on the road in Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas before RCA picked us up', Moore said.

Music historians regard the recording of 'That's All Right' as a milestone in American pop culture, but Presley fans who like to think of it as the beginning of rock 'n' roll may be getting a bit carried away.

'Elvis would be the first to say he didn't create rock 'n' roll. Rock 'n' roll came from an evolutionary process going back probably to the 1940s', said Kevin Kane, director of the Memphis tourism bureau.

'But there was a defining moment that took place on July 5th and we just figured this is as good a time as any to celebrate it', said Kane, a leading organizer of the celebration.

Sun Studio, which was called the Memphis Recording Service in the 1950s, played a larger role in the history of pop music than simply the place where Presley got his start.

Before Presley's arrival, Sam Phillips recorded blues and R&B artists including B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Little Milton and Rufus Thomas. He recorded Jackie Brenston's 'Rocket 88' in 1951.

After 'That's All Right', Phillips recorded other rock 'n' roll pioneers including Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison.

It's an old story now how Presley, Moore and Black weren't making much progress at their first recording session together.

Then Presley broke spontaneously into an upbeat version of 'That's All Right', which was first recorded in 1946 by bluesman Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup.

Moore and Black joined in, and Phillips told them to keep on jamming.

'One thing I always enjoyed about Sam is he would let the artists and the musicians do their thing', Moore said. 'He didn't guide you in any direction'.

Isaac Hayes, who recorded for Memphis' Stax Records in the 1960s and 1970s, and Justin Timberlake, a Memphis native, joined Moore for the ceremony.

Hayes said Presley mixed gospel, country and blues into a blend that opened the way for other artists with nontraditional styles.

It has often been said, that because Presley was a white man who sounded black, he opened the way for black artists to get radio air time.

'He brought a lot of cultures together', Hayes said. 'He brought a lot of music together'.

At the street party, Phillip Lofton, 54, said he was convinced, despite what some others may say, that Memphis is the home of rock 'n' roll.

'This is history', he said, leaning back in a folding chair a few yards from Sun's front door. 'This is where it started, absolutely'.

Eyewitness To History - Scotty Moore Recalls
Bill Ellis - Memphis Commercial Appeal

The last man standing, Scotty Moore recalls the day he recorded 'That's All Right'

He could have been a Starlite Wrangler.

If history had played out differently, Elvis Presley might have been just a singer in a local country & western group.

That's how Wrangler guitarist Scotty Moore pictured him when he first heard the unproven vocalist.

'At that point, we were really thinking about another one we could add to the group', says Moore, now 72, when he was interviewed at his home and studio outside Nashville on Blueberry Hill Road.

The fates of the 19-year-old Memphis truck driver at Crown Electric and Wrangler cohorts Moore and bassist Bill Black were famously altered 50 years ago this Monday, when they recorded a raucous cover of the Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup blues number 'That's All Right' at Sun Studio, forever changing popular music.

Moore -- a 2000 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and the last living member of the group -- will be at Sun on Monday to press 'play' for a global-moment-in-time recognition of 'That's All Right'. The event is part of Memphis's celebration of the 50th anniversary of rock and roll.

Chance, circumstance and, most of all, persistence figured into the course of events.

Presley had been trying to get into the good graces of late producer Sam Phillips and his Sun Records label for at least a year prior to the recording. In the summer of 1953, the fledgling singer paid $3.98 to record an acetate at Sun under the guise of its being a gift for his mother. He bought a second acetate in January of 1954. Phillips just wasn't biting. Sun assistant Marion Keisker noticed Presley; her interest led to an audition on June 26 that also went nowhere.

Moore and his bassist pal Bill Black were playing in the sextet Doug Poindexter & the Starlite Wranglers, which performed mostly country material at places such as the Bon Air Club.

The group had made a single for Sun, the 1954 two-sider 'My Kind of Carryin' On' and 'Now She Cares No More for Me'.

'Maybe it sold eight (copies)', Moore laughs -- but still the musician stopped by Sun frequently to inquire into other recording opportunities.

One afternoon at the studio, he and Phillips were talking over coffee when Keisker said, 'Well, what do you think about that boy that was in here a couple of hours ago?' recalls Moore. 'Sam kind of looked at her and said 'Oh yeah', and nothing was said. But it stuck in my mind, and over a two-week period, every time I was in there, I'd ask him, 'Have you called that guy you was talking about?' 'No, not yet'.

On July 3, Phillips gave in. Keisker handed Moore a piece of paper with the singer's name and phone number and Moore read it.

'Elvis Presley? What kind of name is that?' he remembers saying.

Identifying himself as a Sun Records representative, Moore called Presley after dinner that night and got his mother, Gladys, on the phone -- Elvis had gone to a movie theater. He soon called back, and a rehearsal was set for the next day.

Presley showed up around noon on July Fourth at the house Moore and then-wife Bobbie rented on 983 Belz in north Memphis, down the street from Black and his wife, Evelyn.

According to Moore's 1997 autobiography, 'That's Alright, Elvis' (as told to James Dickerson), Presley was wearing 'a white lacy shirt, pink pants with a black stripe down the legs, and white buck shoes'.

Moore spent the afternoon hours listening to Presley sing, impressed by his vast repertoire: 'It seemed like he knew every song in the world, pop, country', says Moore. Black dropped by to hear how things were going.

'I asked Bill Black what he thought. He said, 'Well, he sounded pretty good, he didn't knock me out'. I said, 'My thoughts, too'. Moore still thought Presley might make a good second singer for the Wranglers. After the guitarist gave his assessment to Sam Phillips, they agreed on a studio audition the following night.

'Just you and Bill come in', Moore recalls Phillips saying. 'I don't need the whole band, I just want to hear what he sounds like on tape'.

The players convened sometime in the early evening after work (Moore at University Park Cleaners and Black at Firestone).

That's All Right CD Single

The Phillips-supervised session started out frustratingly slow, one ballad after another yielding no results. While everyone was taking a break -- around 9 o'clock, Moore recalls -- Presley broke loose on a blues number recorded in 1946 for RCA Victor by Forest, Miss.-born bluesman Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup.

'Elvis just stood up and started singing 'That's All Right' out of nervous (energy)', says Moore. 'Bill started slapping the bass and playing with him. By that time, Sam had come through the door. I was trying to find the chords. He said, 'What are you doing?' We said, 'We're just jamming, having a good time'. He said, 'Well, do it a little bit more, it sounds pretty good'. He went back in, closed the door and listened to it on mike. You could see him in there, he was grinning and nodding his head'.

Presley's version didn't bear much of a resemblance to the gritty original. The young singer had put a hillbilly-styled vocal on top of the tune and strummed on his acoustic guitar with an abandon that moved to its own jolting rhythm.

Another producer might have let that flight of fancy trail off in thin air while the boys got back to the 'real' rehearsal. But this one had an expression of musical freedom that Phillips had heard in his head but not his studio.

Where Presley had sounded generic on the ballads, his voice came to life on this gutbucket blues, a genre Phillips could appreciate since Sun had been recording such artists -- from Howlin' Wolf to Rufus Thomas -- for the past four years.

But it wasn't just blues. It was a crossroads where blues met country. Moore and Black had never heard the song before, so they did the most logical thing: they adapted it to their own way of playing.

For Moore, that meant using an economical finger-picking style on his full-toned Gibson ES-295 electric, partly inspired by such country pioneers as Chet Atkins and Merle Travis.

'I got into using fingers because it was just the three of us', says Moore. 'I was just trying to make more noise . . . I'm glad I didn't hear ('That's All Right') because we might have tried to play it like it had been recorded'.

Black further filled out the sound of the minimalist trio with his thumping upright bass, a rhythmic pulse that made no excuses for the absence of a drummer.

The trio went over the brief tune several times that night before arriving at a version that pleased Phillips.

A few days later, Sam played it for Dewey Phillips, who flipped. Sometime later in the week, Dewey spun the song repeatedly on his evening show, inspiring curiosity about the new singer.

That date is uncertain, though Frank Price -- a 90-year-old Collierville resident who was in the Navy in Millington when he heard the song's debut -- says he's sure it was a Thursday.

A B-side was needed and 'Blue Moon of Kentucky' was cut, a choice Moore recalls was instigated by Black, whose straight-time rendition of the Bill Monroe bluegrass waltz turned it inside out just as Presley had done a few days prior with the blues song.

On July 19, 'That's All Right' was released as Sun single 209. It's still worth marveling that it came out at all.

'You can't rule out the fact that by happenstance, Elvis was thrown into juxtaposition with somebody who had a vision of the eloquence and impact of African-American music', says Peter Guralnick, author of the definitive Presley biographies 'Last Train to Memphis' and 'Careless Love'.

Colin Escott, co-author of the Sun history, 'Good Rockin' Tonight', agrees: 'Sam realized that this was the way forward even though nothing like 'That's All Right' was selling or had ever sold. He didn't care. It felt good to him, he was going to put it out'.

His instincts right on target, Phillips released four more singles of Presley's over the course of the next year and a half.

By April 1956, the singer, now signed to RCA, had his first national No. 1 hit, 'Heartbreak Hotel'. By the late 1950s, Presley was a crossover phenomenon, with an average of nine records per year on the mainstream pop charts and five per year on both the country and R&B charts, according to Richard Layman in 'American Decades 1950-1959'.

All that from a song which, Moore only half-joked at the time, was so different that people would run the group clean out of town.

'And they did!'

'Elvis was instantaneous'
By Michael Lollar, July 4, 2004

Knox Phillips was 9 years old when his father brought home the 45 rpm record that was destined to spin the world off its music axis.

'What I remember is that little yellow Sun label going round and round on the record player and the sheer excitement I saw on my dad's face. Sam didn't bring many records home for us to hear. He told my mother, 'We might even make a little money. You might be able to get a new coat'. '

Elvis Presley recorded 'That's All Right' for Sam Phillips at Sun Studio on July 5, 1954. It was a speeded-up version of an Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup blues tune.

Disc jockey Dewey Phillips played the song on WHBQ Radio at least seven times the first night he got it. Elvis was too nervous to listen to the radio debut, so Phillips had to dispatch friends to the old Suzore Theater on North Main to bring him to the studio for his first on-air interview.

'Elvis was instantaneous. The first time they heard him on the radio, they went nuts', says Jack Clement, then a singer and guitarist in a country band and later a music engineer for Sam Phillips, helping to produce records by Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins.

Knox Phillips says his father couldn't afford promoters, so he had to pack up 45 rpm pressings of Elvis' record and hit the road, stopping at every radio tower in a circuit that included Houston, Shreveport, Oklahoma City and Dallas. 'At first, he was caught in a no-man's land', Phillips says. 'Some stations would say this sounds like too much of a race-sounding record. Black stations would hear it and think it sounded too white'.

In Gladewater, Texas, disc jockey and promoter Tom Perryman describes himself as the 'first deejay to play that song in East Texas'. Perryman became Elvis' regional promoter: His product was not a tough sell. 'You just played his record on the radio and said where he was going to be. Kids were looking for something to call their own. He came along with the right thing at the right time'.

Elvis was born in an era when children moved directly from youth to adulthood, says music historian David Evans. 'I don't think an adolescent group was all that clearly defined before the 1950s or late 1940s'. But postwar prosperity and a growing middle class made possible an extended adolescence, with a demand for its own music, he says.

Elvis -- his sideburns, his stage style, his sound -- broke the rules that made adolescents chafe. Former University of Memphis communications professor John Bakke, who staged the first scholarly conference on Elvis in 1979, says the tempest surrounding Elvis led to the first real generation gap in America.

Was 'That's All Right' the big bang of rock and roll?

For Clement, arguments about who invented rock are 'kind of futile'. Before Elvis hit the radio, Clement says, he heard 'Rock the Joint' by Bill Haley and the Comets. 'To me, that's where I first got acquainted with rock and roll'.

But Haley's music had a country sound. 'It was rocking, but it wasn't hip like Elvis. I guess Haley was more swing, sort of a funky hillbilly swing'.

Plus Haley was 10 years older than Elvis and overweight. Blind in one eye, he looked 'cross-eyed', says Clement, while Elvis looked like the movie star he was destined to become.

Presley didn't single-handedly invent a music form. What he did do was distill the streams of music available to him -- rhythm and blues, country, bluegrass, gospel, pop -- into the package that 50 years later makes him the undisputed 'King' of rock and roll and arguably the biggest, most enduring celebrity the world has known.

In July 1954, Elvis was a skinny 19-year-old delivery truck driver studying at night to be an electrician. He had been singing since he was a child. When he was 10, he stood on a chair to reach the microphone and won a $5 second-place prize singing 'Old Shep' in the youth talent contest at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show in Tupelo.

A year later, when his mother, Gladys, couldn't afford the bicycle he wanted, she bought him a guitar instead. He played it while he sang 'Leaf on a Tree' for his Milam Junior High Class in 1948. It was his farewell just before the family strapped their belongings to the roof of their 1939 Plymouth and moved to Memphis.

From 1949 to 1953, they lived in public housing at Lauderdale Courts, just north of downtown. The Presleys didn't have a television set, so, instead of watching 'Lassie', 'I Love Lucy' and 'Make Room for Daddy', Elvis listened to the radio, then sat on his doorstep practicing the songs he heard.

'He could hear a song on the radio one time, and he'd know it', says one of Elvis' neighbors and best friends, Paul Dougher, who now owns a North Memphis liquor store.

'He'd sing gospel or whatever was current on the radio, like Hank Snow songs'.

Another friend, Evan 'Buzzy' Forbess, a retired gas operations supervisor for Memphis, Light, Gas and Water Division, says the Lauderdale Courts manager would let them use the basement laundry room at night as a party room so they wouldn't disturb neighbors.

Legend has it that Elvis 'absorbed' the blues and rhythm and blues music of Beale Street by hanging out at clubs there. Those closest to Elvis as a teenager say it isn't so. 'Back then those clubs on Beale were strictly black clubs. At nighttime, none of us went down', says Dougher.

Close friend and disc jockey George Klein says stories of the young Elvis hanging out in Beale clubs are 'embellished', and Forbess agrees. 'We were kids in high school. You couldn't get into no joint, and we had to scrap for every nickel. Besides, Elvis didn't go places where people were drinking beer'.

Elvis' original guitarist, Scotty Moore, and longtime friends, including Memphis Mafia member Red West, would later wonder why Elvis, who seemed shy, had no inhibitions when he hit the stage after his first record release. Forbess recalls going with him to the Home for Incurables to hear a band performing for patients. 'During a break we talked the band into letting Elvis entertain, and, of course, the place started jumping. He didn't bop, but he had his own rhythm and beat. And, of course, he did the thing with his legs', says Forbess.

Those moves, which would later earn him his 'Elvis the Pelvis' nickname, were a rhythm-keeping device from the very beginning, say several friends. Blues great B.B. King once said Elvis' moves came from 'being sanctified'. It's a spirit that was present well before he became famous, says Anna Lois Brooks, longtime secretary and music director of East Trigg Avenue Missionary Baptist Church, whose minister, Rev. Herbert Brewster, was a well-known gospel composer.

Brooks, 78, was organist and accompanied the church choir and guest musicians who performed from 11 p.m. to midnight on Sundays for the live radio broadcast of a rousing gospel hour. Klein says Presley listened to the Blackwood Brothers quartet at his own church, First Assembly of God, then attended the late broadcasts at East Trigg. It was one of the most potent ingredients in the musical stew of his life.

Brooks says Brewster 'would let him sing. Sometimes the choir would back him up. The choir, some of them would be wiggling and going on, and he started the wiggling'.

Dixie Locke Emmons, Elvis' girlfriend just before and after his first record, says, 'He was never still. As soon as he started singing, he started moving. If they put him in a straitjacket, I don't think he'd be able to sing at all'.