Perkins, who by this time had already met success with "Blue Suede Shoes", had come into the studios that day[1] accompanied by his brothers Clayton and Jay and by drummer W.S.

Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records, who wanted to try to fatten this sparse rockabilly instrumentation, had brought in his latest acquisition, Jerry Lee Lewis, still unknown outside Memphis, to play piano (at the time, a Wurlitzer Spinet) on the Perkins session.

Sometime in the early afternoon, 21-year-old Elvis Presley, a former Sun artist now with RCA Victor, arrived to pay a casual visit accompanied by a girlfriend, Marilyn Evans.

[2] After chatting with Phillips in the control room, Presley listened to the playback of Perkins's session, which he pronounced to be good.

At some point during the session, Sun artist Johnny Cash, who had recently enjoyed a few hit records on the country charts, arrived as well.

Whatever Elvis's feelings may or may not have been in regard to "following" Lewis, Presley was clearly the "star" of the impromptu jam session, which consisted largely of snippets of gospel songs that the four artists had all grown up singing.

The recordings show Elvis, the most nationally and internationally famous of the four at the time, to be the focal point of what was a casual, spur-of-the-moment gathering of four artists who would each go on to contribute greatly to the seismic shift in popular music in the late 1950s.

Bob Johnson, the newspaper's entertainment editor, came over to the studios with UPI representative Leo Sora with photographer George Pierce.

Johnson wrote an article about the session, which appeared the following day in the Press-Scimitar under the headline "Million Dollar Quartet".

This was issued in Europe in 1981 as "Charly/Sun" LP #1006 The Million Dollar Quartet, and it contained 17 tracks, focusing on gospel/spiritual music from the session.

This resulted in the release of the 1987 "Charly/Sun" two-LP set #CDX 20 The Complete Million Dollar Session, together with their simultaneous issue in CD format in Europe.

According to Ernst Jorgensen, an authority on Elvis who consults for RCA, the published material contains about 95 percent of the master recordings.

They are not pristine, well rehearsed studio recordings, which were meant for commercial release, but rather the sound of a group of friends gathered to play old favorites and share the pleasure of making music.

The songs of such country and Western legends as Bill Monroe, Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow and Gene Autry are among those featured.

Jerry Lee Lewis can be heard more frequently, often singing in duet with Presley and at the end of the session, when Presley got up to leave, he swiftly took over the piano and whipped off five piano ravers in rapid succession, including a rousing "Crazy Arms" (his debut Sun single) and a soulful make-over of Gene Autry's "You're the Only Star in My Blue Heaven".

Colin Escott reports that according to attendee Bob Johnson (whose article was published in the Memphis Press-Scimitar the day after the session), Cash joined Presley, Perkins and Lewis on "Blueberry Hill" and "Isle Of Golden Dreams".

"[13] Other reports, including one in a very detailed account in Peter Guralnick's book, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, suggest that Cash stayed for only a short time and then left, possibly to do some Christmas shopping.

Colin Escott also reports that Cash might have been brought in for the last part of the session, after Sam Phillips had decided to call the Memphis Press Scimitar.

Presley describes Jackie Wilson tearing up Las Vegas audiences with a house-on-fire rendition of "Don't Be Cruel".

Obviously on a roll, Presley, then ripped into a slower, sassier version of "Paralyzed", a song recorded for his second album and also released on an extended play 45.

According to the Rolling Stone review of the album, "'The Complete Million Dollar Session' provides a rare post-Sun glimpse of Elvis Presley momentarily free of the golden shackles of stardom and the manipulative grasp of his manager, Colonel Tom Parker.

"[citation needed] The surviving members of the Quartet session would reunite several times in years to come, with Cash, Lewis and Perkins uniting in 1982 for the concert album The Survivors Live and again, in 1985, Perkins, Lewis, Cash and Roy Orbison, also a Sun recording artist in 1956, went back into the Sun Studios to record the album Class of '55.