On this day · 72 years ago · 1954
72 Years Ago Today: A Memphis DJ Put Scotty Moore's Guitar on the Radio for the First Time
Three days after Elvis, Scotty Moore, and Bill Black cut That's All Right at Sun Studio, a Memphis radio DJ played it on air and refused to stop. It was the first time anyone outside the room had heard Moore's guitar on the record.
By Axel, Classic Rock desk · Edited by Cadence ·
On July 8, 1954, Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips played Elvis Presley's That's All Right on WHBQ's Red, Hot & Blue show, the first public airing of the Sun Studio session guitarist Scotty Moore, bassist Bill Black, and Presley had recorded three days earlier. Listener calls flooded the station, and Phillips tracked down and interviewed the nervous 19-year-old Presley live on air that same night.
Three days after Sun Studio, a DJ put the record on air
Three days earlier, Elvis Presley, guitarist Scotty Moore, and bassist Bill Black had recorded an uptempo version of Arthur Crudup's That's All Right during a break in a stalled Sun Studio session. On July 8, 1954, that recording reached the public for the first time. Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips played it on his nightly WHBQ show, Red, Hot & Blue, per American Songwriter's account of the broadcast, corroborated by MPR News below. (A minority of accounts, including Wikipedia's page on the song itself, date the broadcast a day earlier, to July 7; this piece follows American Songwriter and MPR News, both of which place it on July 8.) It was the first time anyone outside the Sun Studio control room had heard Moore's guitar work on the record, the same gold-finish 1953 Gibson ES-295 he'd used across Presley's early Sun sessions.
The calls didn't stop
Sam Phillips, who ran Sun Records, had handed out acetate copies of the A-side to a handful of local DJs ahead of the single's planned release, and Dewey Phillips (no relation) was one of them. Per MPR News's account of the broadcast, the response was immediate: listeners flooded the station with calls asking him to play it again, and he obliged, reportedly more than a dozen times over the course of the evening. The record was a regional hit almost overnight, moving around 20,000 copies in the Memphis area even though it never reached the national charts.
Tracking down a nervous 19-year-old
Presley, meanwhile, had gone to the movies, too anxious about the planned airplay to sit and listen. Phillips called his parents, who picked him up from the theater and brought him to the station, where Phillips conducted his first-ever on-air interview. One of Phillips's first questions, according to both American Songwriter and Wikipedia's entry on Phillips, was which high school Presley attended, a coded way of telling his segregated Memphis audience that the singer behind this rhythm and blues-inflected record was white. Phillips had built his career playing Black artists to a mixed-race audience in a segregated city, and that July night, Moore's guitar work rode in on the same wave.
The guitar tone that started it
Moore's ES-295 on That's All Right is one of the most influential guitar sounds in rock history, the template for the clean, echo-laced, country-meets-blues tone that rockabilly guitarists spent the rest of the decade chasing. A light-to-medium nickel-wound set in the same territory keeps that vocal, articulate clarity.
Boomers GBL Nickel-Plated Steel (.010–.046)
Why this one: A light-to-medium nickel-wound set that keeps the clean, articulate top end Moore's ES-295 needed for that clipped, echo-laced rockabilly attack.
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