In the summer of 1953, an eighteen year old delivery driver walked into a little storefront studio in Memphis. He paid around four dollars, some say exactly $3.98, to cut a single acetate of a song called My Happiness. One copy. That was the whole thing.
He wasn’t famous. He wasn’t signed to anybody. The woman running the office asked him who he sounded like, and he gave the answer that turned out to be truer than he knew. I don’t sound like nobody.
Then the record basically disappeared. By most tellings Elvis left it with his friend Ed Leek, and the Leek family held onto it for more than sixty years. The very first thing Elvis Presley ever recorded, sitting in a house, going quietly unheard.
What happened to Elvis’s first record
When it finally came up for sale at a Graceland auction in 2015, it sold for three hundred thousand dollars to a buyer who stayed anonymous. For a while, nobody knew who had it.
Then the buyer stepped forward. It was Jack White, the musician, who took Elvis’s first recording home to his label Third Man Records and put it back out into the world so people could actually hear it again.
Hear Elvis’s 1953 recording of My Happiness
Four dollars and one copy, cut by a kid nobody had heard of. Seventy years later it’s a three hundred thousand dollar piece of music history, and it’s the sound of Elvis before he was Elvis.