Rock-’n’-roll music.

How did such a simple thing get so complicated?

A chance meeting on a cold Tuesday on December 4, 1956, brought together musicians Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. The place was Sun Studio, Memphis, Tennessee. The man who made it happen was Sam Phillips. This was the first and the last time the four would unite in an impromptu gospel sing-along recording session that embodied the birth of rock-’n’-roll and has come to be known as one of the greatest jam sessions of all time. While the four musicians there that day didn’t think it such a big deal, what they played was to have a huge impact on popular music – even now.

For the uninitiated a jam session begins with one musician making a riff and others join in, improvising, showing off, having fun. It’s often built around a kind of music that everyone knows, like the blues.

Taking opportunity of the situation, Sam Phillips set a tape recorder rolling in the studio and most of the day was recorded. Twenty years later that the tape was found in the studio files by Shelby Singleton, the new owner of Sun Records. Shelby decided it should be public property. It was released as The Million Dollar Quartet.

Currently touring nationally is The Ultimate Jam Session, a musical which celebrates that serendipitous night at Sun Studio, bringing to life a score of raw twelve bar blues which sound as good today as they did in 1955. Songs include the chart-toppers Blue Suede Shoes, Fever, That’s All Right, Sixteen Tons, Great Balls of Fire, Walk the Line, Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On, Who Do You Love? Matchbox, Folsom Prison Blues, Hound Dog and more.

There have been many tribute shows lately. The Ultimate Jam Session has a Chicago and Broadway version – The Million Dollar Quartet – and there’s also The Man In Black, a Johnny Cash tribute, which has been touring Australia for the past twelve months. These shows sell out every night and receive standing ovations. Which poses a number of questions about the music industry today.

Is there something special about this music or are we just manipulated by record companies and promoters as they dig up the past? And if this is the case why are we so nostalgic? Are shows like this commemorative in the same way Anzac Day is commemorative – Lest We Forget, and is this a way of keeping the legacy alive? If so, what will we commemorate in Fifty years from today?

The Million Dollar Quartet is a reminder of why bringing it back to the basics will always resonate with music fans and stand the test of time. Once upon a time, we paid to see people sing and not mime. You had to be good at your craft. There were no A&R department, marketing experts, or record company spin pushing your barrow. You were either good or you weren’t.

Johnny Cash was a towering figure in twentieth-century American music and he was big because he was good. He wasn’t propped up with the gimmicks of Lady Gaga or Marilyn Manson, in which the entertainment is more about the circus that surrounds them, than the music. Watching Rage or Australian Idol is a reminder of what little the medium has left to offer. In this age of the live voice tuner, good-looking kids sing ugly songs about themselves, badly. That’s not to say fashion and good looks don’t play an important part in rock – Elvis and Cash are a testament to this. It was just commensurate with their talent as artists. Today it seems you can sell a record on how you look rather than what how you sound.

Cash was a poet, a minimalist with a booming Old Testament baritone who could wrench an abundance of power from stark settings. At first he was backed by guitar and bass; in the end, it was simply guitar. When a voice can tell a story with as much resonance as Cash’s could, not much else is needed. His songs, from early gospel recordings and the resonant outlaw-country of Fifties classics like Folsom Prison Blues, to later efforts like the million-selling I Walk the Line to his unlikely, gut-wrenching cover of the Nine Inch Nails’ song Hurt – influenced not only his fellow country musicians, but also rockers from Bono to Bob Dylan. These songs are laden with pathos, whimsy, regret, hope, lust, and fury; they cut to the heart of the subject matter, whether it’s God, love or the plight of prisoners and Native Americans. Cash led a tumultuous life, battling drug addiction, chaffing against orthodoxy, but by the end, The Man in Black became an icon, a man who earns almost universal respect among music fans.

And then there’s Elvis. In 1954 he brought with him a musical vocabulary rich in country, blues, gospel, inspirational music, bluegrass, traditional country, and popular music; as well as a host of emotional needs that found their most eloquent expression in song. His timing was impeccable, not only as a vocalist but with regard to the cultural zeitgeist: emerging in the first blush of America’s postwar ebullience, Presley captured the spirit of a country flexing its industrial muscle, of a generation unburdened by the concerns of war, younger, more mobile, more affluent, and better educated than any before.

There was no marketing model for Elvis Presley’s success. Sam Phillips sensed something in the wind, an inevitable outgrowth of all the country and blues he was recording at his Union Avenue studio. It was an undeclared war on segregated radio stations nationwide. Presley’s initial single, That’s All Right, written in 1946 by delta blues singer and guitarist Arthur Crudup, was released in 1954, the same year the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools, and Martin Luther King took the pulpit at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Overnight, it seemed, “race music,” as the music industry had labelled the work of black artists, became a thing of the past, as did the pejorative “hillbilly” music. Suddenly Elvis Presley could be heard fusing musical styles on stations that would also play Ray Charles or jazz baritone Al Hibbler, and in turn, Tony Bennett.

Like Cash and Perkins, Sam Phillips was born on a dirt-poor cotton farm, and his introduction to music was the same as theirs – gospel music. Gospel grew from the spirituals sung by the African American labourers working the cotton fields; long hard days lived in abject poverty. These people had nothing but music for comfort – in the cotton fields and in the churches of the Deep South, music had a profound meaning.

Like all great art, it’s the struggle that makes it special. Carl Perkins said: “Elvis, Cash, none of us had anything. We came from poor people, and it was Sam – I know he did for me – bought me the first clothes I ever had to wear on stage.“ Musicians were poor back then not middle class. These were artists who hadn’t made a conscious decision to get into music just to get rich.

Phillips discovered the talent, gave them a home, and nurtured their careers as well as produced the music. In addition to Presley, Cash and Lewis, he was also responsible for kick-starting the careers of Roy Orbison and B. B. King. If you talk to musicians today they’ll tell you no record label nurtures talent like this anymore – they just exploit it. Noiseworks frontman Jon Stevens recently slammed the Australian recording industry likening the major record labels to criminal organisations. “Sony is a pathetic excuse for a label now… They’ve got nothing to do with music. In the old days they would sign you up and you work out a deal based on selling records and they take a whack of that. Nowadays they offer artists what’s called a ‘360 deal’ where they just rape and pillage. They take a cut of your sales, performance fees, recording royalties, everything. You talk to Damien Leith, (Australian Idol Champion 2006). He sold 300,000 albums and didn’t make a cent. ”

Rock-’n’-roll in the 1950s and 60s was a time when simple songs, played on crappy guitars, recorded on crappy equipment, topped the charts. People didn’t care about production – they just heard the energy, the performance and the song. So then why did we feel the need to improve it? And did we really improve anything?

Music production got so high fidelity in the 1970s that the old music was left behind. Yet ironically some of the most coveted music equipment today is from the 50s and 60s, such as vintage four-track mixing consoles and basic hand wired valve equipment. U2 came to Sun Studio to record the Rattle and Hum album for this reason. Bono said they came to experience “the chill” you get from the room’s history.

And that’s why this music is special. It’s the talent, the poetry, the struggle, the emotion, times and timelessness contained within a simple three-chord song.