“Million Dollar Quartet” is a recording of an impromptu jam session involving Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash made on December 4, 1956, at the Sun Record Studios in Memphis, Tennessee
A copy of the tape was made for Elvis, and it was located in the 1980s in his Graceland bedroom closet, along with a recording of the 1956 Tupelo Homecoming show and an interview with Elvis and both of his parents.
Sam Phillips (second from the left), with Elvis, Leo Soroka and Robert Johnson at Sun Recording Studios in Memphis.
In 2006, RCA used a copy of the session recordings owned by Presley to create a 50th-anniversary issue of the session. The new release placed the titles in the original recorded sequence and contained about twelve minutes of previously unavailable material.
According to Ernst Jorgensen, an authority on Elvis who consults for RCA, the published material contains about 95 percent of the master recordings. “We found three reels”, he says, “You could always argue that there were more. But in the first you can hear Elvis arriving and in the last you can hear him leaving. I doubt that there are more.”