[jazzy music intro] [Elvis Presley's "Jailhouse Rock"] ♪ The warden threw a party in the county jail ♪ - What is rock and roll?

I always have defined rock and roll as white guys trying to play the blues and they can't, and they fail.

And, their attempt created a new sound and that was called rock and roll.

[Johnny Rivers singing "Memphis, Tennessee"] ♪ Give me Memphis, Tennessee ♪ Elvis was the one who introduced that music to a lot of people.

He did it in Memphis at Sun Records, and Sun wound up finding a lot of other white people who were interested in singing black music.

In order for rock and roll to happen, black people had to experience white people's world, and white people had to experience black people's world.

So, you could say that the black church, which drew Elvis Presley for example, before he was a recording artist he would go to hear Reverend Brewster at East Street Baptist Church, and so he was drawing from the black church.

[Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog"] ♪ Cryin' all the time ♪ The way that Memphis became the birthplace of rock and roll had everything to do with the crossroads.

We are where a lot of highways intersect.

Before our time, Native Americans came right down Union Avenue, right in front of Sun Studios, and went to the river.

That was a very popular trail.

Memphis is a... it's the big city in a large rural region, so all these farmers who were growing cotton or produce or cattle or whatever they had, and because all that trade was brought here, a lot of people in Memphis got rich.

So, you had very, very rich people, and you had very, very poor people.

You had rich urban people, and you had poor rural people, and you had black and white, and you had poor urban people and you had some rich rural people.

And, I always think, you know, how two grasshoppers rub their legs together and make music, it's the confluence of all those different people on the streets of Memphis rubbing their shoulders against each other as they walk by, interacting.

That's why Memphis became the home of rock and roll.

It drew everybody, it became, the stew made here.

Memphis soul stew was made here.

It was funny because when rock and roll was popular, and I was a kid, I never thought it would die.

Rock and roll came, you know, sort of annouced itself in 1956.

In the '60s, it came into its own.

In the '70s, it was corporations.

And, by punk rock in the 1980s, you know, rock and roll was already kinda dying because it had gotten too bloated.

So, I would put it from the mid-'50s to the early 1980s was the great years of rock and roll.

It used to be king!

Rock and roll was king!

[Elvis Presley singing "Suspicious Minds"] ♪ Here we go again ♪ ♪ Asking where I've been ♪ ♪ You can't see the tears are real, I'm crying ♪