It was a seminal day in the history of music. The year was 1956. There is a lack of clarity about how exactly the sequence of events unfolded. But fact remains that on December 4 that year, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins — who were all up and coming musicians at the time and not the rock 'n' roll legends they would eventually turn into — found themselves together at Sun Studio in Memphis, Tennessee, and ended up recording a bunch of Gospel tunes. There is a YouTube link to the song Jesus walked that lonesome valley that reflects the sort of unabashed fun they were having while performing with each other. And there is also a Broadway musical called The Million Dollar Quartet that's based on the incident, which will be performed at a Nariman Point venue all through this weekend.

The plot has been embellished to a certain extent, admits Avinash Shankar, the musical's producer in India. But the salient features of the narrative largely remain true to the actual event. The character of Sam Phillips, the Sun Studio owner who's widely regarded as having invented the rock 'n' roll sound, takes the audience through the story. What had happened is that Perkins was scheduled to record a song called Matchbox that had Lewis playing the piano. The two of them thus met for the first time on that day. Meanwhile, Presley was also in town. Phillips had launched the megastar's career and the latter had dropped in to the studio to pay him a visit. And realising that he could grab a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Phillips then called Cash and asked him to come over and jam with the other three artistes (though this is the ambiguous part, since Perkins claims that Cash had dropped by later to settle some monetary matters, while Cash himself says in his autobiography that he had been there throughout, before the others arrived).