Musical supergroups are nothing new. Sometimes the temptation to throw a few big names together is motivated by dollar signs, and sometimes it just works out. Some of you have rightfully given me grief for my late discovery of the Traveling Wilburys, but the stars might never have aligned to produce a more high-watt assemblage of musical talent than they did 58 years ago when the “Million Dollar Quartet” made their first and only recording session on December 4, 1956.

It wasn’t really planned. Record producer Sam Phillips was trying to build on the success Carl Perkins had recently achieved with “Blue Suede Shoes” by bringing Perkins into the Sun Records studio in Memphis to record some new material. Phillips paid a still relatively unknown artist named Jerry Lee Lewis $15 to play piano. (Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On” would make him a star the following year.) When they arrived at the studio, they found Johnny Cash, who had broken out onto the country charts in 1955 and 1956 with hits like “Folsom Prison Blues” and “I Walk the Line,” hanging out hoping to watch the session. (Another version says Cash was brought in later, but he claims to have gotten there first in his autobiography.) At some point during the day, Elvis Presley dropped by with his girlfriend. (Elvis was ending his breakout year to national stardom, and was red-hot at the time. His appearance on Ed Sullivan’s show in September had pulled in over 80% of the viewing audience.)

At some point, Phillips realized the impromptu jam session between four current or rising stars would make good newspaper material, and called a local reporter. The photo of the four men around the piano singing gospel music ran in the next day’s edition with the caption “Million Dollar Quartet.” The recording engineer also had the presence of mind to record what was happening. The recordings would sit lost for a quarter-century before they were rediscovered and released in Europe in 1981. More material from the session, which was heavy on gospel and country music (rock was still emerging at the time), has been found over time and released. RCA obtained the rights to release the recordings in the US, and marked the 50th anniversary of the jam session with a re-release that included an extra 12 minutes of new material, including the four men hanging out and chatting between songs. One Elvis authority believes the Quartet’s only session has been pretty well released in its entirety at this point, saying "You could always argue that there were more [reels]. But in the first you can hear Elvis arriving and in the last you can hear him leaving. I doubt that there are more."

The Quartet would never record again. By the time the recordings were released in Europe in 1981, prompting a reunion tour by Cash, Lewis, and Perkins, Presley had been dead for four years. The three survivors got together again in 1986 around the session’s 30th anniversary to record an album called “Class of ’55,” while bringing in Roy Orbison to create a new quartet. Orbison died two years later, followed by Perkins in 1998 and Cash in 2003. At 79, Jerry Lee Lewis is the only member of the quartet still shakin’.

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