Song of the Day 12/4: The Million Dollar Quartet, “This Train”

On this date in rock and roll history, Dec. 4, 1956, the Million Dollar Quartet — Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins — sang together for the only time, an impromptu jam session at Sun Studios in Memphis.

It began as a Carl Perkins recording session, for which a still-unknown Jerry Lee Lewis was brought in to play piano. Presley, whose contract Sam Phillips had sold to RCA a year earlier, stopped by to visit. Johnny Cash was hanging around, too, and drifted in and out.

While they chatted, Presley sat at the piano and started picking out gospel tunes, and Perkins and his drummer joined in. An alert engineer push the “record” button (the tapes weren’t released until the first of them was rediscovered in 1981). The savvy Phillips called the entertainment editor of the local paper while the musicians were playing and the Press-Scimitar sent over a photographer. The Million Dollar Quartet headline appeared the next day.

The quartet never sang together again. A few months after Presley’s death in 1977, Johnny Cash recorded a tribute to for his Christmas TV special: He gathered Perkins, Lewis and Roy Orbison, a Sun artist who wasn’t at the studio that fateful day, for a rendition of the traditional gospel tune “This Train.” Some remember Presley singing that song during the two-hour-plus Sun session, but no tape of it has been found.