No, the Million Dollar Quartet Wasn’t on Elvis’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky”!
Why a few people at American Songwriter need to be fired! And blackballed industry-wide! Or was it just AI...?
The first appearance of George Pierce’s famed “Million Dollar Quartet” photo, in the Dec. 5, 1956 edition of The Memphis Press-Scimitar, accompanying Bob Johnson’s account of what was assuredly NOT the “Blue Moon Of Kentucky” session! The original caption: “MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET - The only thing predictable about Elvis is that he's unpredictable. Yesterday Carl (Blue Suede Shoes) Perkins was cutting some new records at Sam Phillips' Sun Record studio on Union at Marshall. Elvis dropped in. So did Johnny Cash. Jerry Lee Lewis was already there. Elvis headed for the piano, and an old-fashioned barrelhouse session with barbershop harmony resulted. In the picture are Sun's new discovery, Jerry Lee Lewis, at the left, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cass and the virtuoso at the little 88 is Elvis. That lovely creature sitting on top of the piano? That's Marilyn Evans, 19, who dances at the New Frontier in Las Vegas. She is Elvis' house guest thru Friday. More about this get together in Robert Johnson's TV News and Views, Page 37.” (📷 Pic courtesy of scottymoore.net)
Some days, you just have to wake up, pour an entire pot of French Press down your gullet, and scream, “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?!!!”
American Songwriter—a website I found to be credible, until now—published a piece on July 11, 2025, claiming the Million Dollar Quartet participated in Elvis Presley’s recording of “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” That’s not just wrong—it’s a complete distortion of American musical history. It’s also totally irresponsible journalism.
“On a hot Memphis day in July 1954, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Elvis Presley were improvising their way through the Bill Monroe classic, ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky,’” the writer, Melanie Davis, flat-out lies. “That Presley and Perkins were there has been accepted as common knowledge,” she continues, her nose growing longer by the word. “But Cash was there, too, despite what the records might say.”
Here’s why that’s impossible, and insulting to anyone who actually cares about Sun Records, Elvis, or rock ‘n’ roll’s origin story.
July 9, 1954: Elvis, Scotty Moore, and Bill Black record “Blue Moon of Kentucky” at Sun Studio, as B-side to what would be Presley’s debut 45, “That’s All Right,” arguably the birth of rockabilly, if not rock ‘n’ roll. You can find this information all over the place, but an irrefutable source would be the first volume of Peter Guralnick’s comprehensive two-part Presley biography, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley.
My personal copy of the “Blue Moon Of Kentucky” 45…which Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash most assuredly DID NOT appear on! Taken from Third Man Records’ Elvis Presley at 706 Union Ave: The Sun Singles 1954-55 box set. (📷 Pic by Tim Stegall)
Fall 1954: According to Page 228 of Guralnick’s equally exhaustive Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, this is when Perkins first arrives at Sun—after hearing “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”
Feb–Mar 1955: Guralnick notes on Page 242 that Cash begins pestering Phillips in this time period, after hearing Elvis on the radio.
Oct 1956: Jerry Lee Lewis arrives at Sun for the first time (page 323).
Dec 4, 1956: Perkins cuts “Matchbox” with Jerry Lee on piano. Elvis drops by. Cash poses for the photo, after Phillips calls him and The Memphis Press-Scimitar’s Bob Johnson. The Million Dollar Quartet jam session occurs (p.327): Perkins and his band, Elvis on piano and singing with Perkins and Lewis, possibly Cash, on a mix of gospel tunes and current country and rock ‘n’ roll hits. This is most-decidedly NOT the “Blue Moon Of Kentucky” session, as claimed by Davis. [NOTE: The term “Million Dollar Quartet” first appeared in Johnson’s Dec. 5, 1956 Press-Scimitar piece, running alongside the now-iconic photo.]
One of many ways you can own the Million Dollar Quartet recordings…most assuredly NOT the “Blue Moon Of Kentucky” session! (📷 Pic courtesy of Memphis Mansion website)
Davis links to an article—at American Songwriter itself(!!)—about “That’s All Right.” Which has nothing to do with the Quartet. Then she links to a 1988 Johnny Cash interview with J. Kordosh in CREEM Magazine where he himself places the Quartet session in December 1956. Neither source supports her claim. They contradict it.
If she’d actually read Kordosh’s interview, she’d know her claims were erroneous. Did she just not care?
Melanie Davis and American Songwriter dropped a flaming bag of historical wrong on the doorstep of American music. This wasn’t a typo. Nor even a full-length typo. This was either lazy journalism, intentional misinformation, or reckless clickbait.
And whichever it was, it means someone at American Songwriter should no longer have a byline or a publishing login.
Either Davis lacked basic comprehension, or she simply didn’t care enough to verify anything. And some editor down there equally gave no fucks, either! They also apparently do not have a fact-checking department at the website!
That’s not an oversight. That’s negligence. What she’s done is fictionalize American cultural history…while linking to the very sources that disprove her. That’s not just bad journalism. That’s arrogant sloppiness with a side of institutional failure.
Somehow, an American Songwriter editor still passed it along? It’s like they think music fans don’t read past the subhead. Just feed ‘em something sentimental and half-plausible, and boom—done.
This isn’t harmless. This rewrites the past with fantasy. It’s how icons get turned into memes and folklore into mush. They took real people and collapsed them into a fiction, just to generate content fast.
This is how proper journalism dies a bloody, violent death. Someone who does not give a fuck doesn’t even bother to support her mendacious statements, turning them in anyway. An editor and copy editors don’t bother to verify anything, and publish this shit anyway. And history gets warped and distorted, and no one’s head rolls, as they would in the bad old days when veracity and accuracy in journalism counted.
Then the plot thickens. Champion rock journalist, ‘Stack reader, and my adoptive father, Chris Morris, in replying to a post I made at Facebook’s Music Journalism History page, commented: “I actually spoke to this ‘publication’ about an editorial job two years back. I think the guy I spoke to, who never followed up, has been replaced by AI. It's just junk now.”
So, this would actually make sense: the piece was likely written by AI, and “edited” by AI, as well. AI hallucinates all over the place, and you have to scrupulously check its work…or it starts imagining that Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins appeared on Elvis’ “Blue Moon Of Kentucky” session, and that this is common knowledge! It will even link to sources that refute its very claims, and present it as the gospel truth!
Which suggests something even more sinister: What if Melanie Davis does not exist? What if she is AI?
That… would track. The contradictions, the mismatched links, the hollow prose dressed up as authority? Classic unvetted AI.
What if they just made her up? Like, some intern typed “Write an Elvis piece,” and a soulless server somewhere barfed out Melanie fuckin’ Davis?!
That’s worse than clickbait. That’s ghostwriting by ghosts. And if Davis isn’t AI, she’s working like one—badly.
Which means, like every sentence coming out of the “president’s” mouth, we now have to run all American Songwriter articles through Snopes. And that they really shoulda hired Chris Morris.
And like that, I will never trust a word American Songwriter prints again. But hey! In an age when Fox News counts as “journalism”? What does it matter, anyway? *shrugs*
🧨 If This Pissed You Off, Good. 🧨
Because it should. Because music journalism matters. Because truth matters.
And because if we let AI, clickbait, and factless hacks rewrite the history of American music, we lose more than just facts—we lose the soul of the story.
If you felt that in your gut—if you slammed your fist on the desk halfway through this piece—then you’re my people.
The Tim “Napalm” Stegall Substack runs on fire and faith. It runs on people who give a damn.
And right now, I need more of those people in this fight.
🎯 $7 a month. $52 a year. That’s all it takes.
To keep this voice independent. To keep the facts straight. To keep the machines out of the bylines.
If you're already paid? Thank you. You're the proof this still works.
If you're not yet? Now’s the time. Because someone has to say it, and say it loud:
Melanie Davis is either fake… or worse.
I’m real. This work is real. And it only survives if you make it count.
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Next Melanie and/or American Songwriter will be telling us that the Masked Marauders album actually DOES feature Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, George Harrison, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney!
Ken Burns’ Country Music doc would refute the claims of this AI article, too, if memory serves correctly.