MEMPHIS, TENN.- The day’s last batch of tourists filed out of an exhibition space and entered a room overflowing with the sound of Johnny Cash’s “Cry! Cry! Cry!”

They’d spent the late afternoon soaking up stories about this small space with an outsize weight — Sun Studio, in Memphis, Tennessee — where the nascent sound of rock ’n’ roll took shape in the mid-1950s. It’s where Elvis Presley became Elvis and Sun Records made household names of Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and others. It happened between the same well-worn acoustic tiles that still line the studio walls and its rolling, wavelike ceiling, and on top of the same linoleum where a hand-taped “X” marks the spot where Sun vocalists once stood.

The visitors took turns with a nonfunctional but studio-original Shure 55-series microphone, made available under two conditions: no stealing it and no kissing it. They settled for photos instead before exiting into the hot, late-July evening.

Then, almost as soon as the front entrance was locked, the back door opened and the local indie-rock band Blvck Hippie began to trundle in with gear.

The no-kissy mic was swapped for a working one and cables were threaded across the studio floor in an electric web, as the drummer screwed down cymbals and riffs rang from warming fingers on two guitars and a bass.

Before long a room intended to keep alive the memory of old songs had transformed, and was wired to capture new ones.

“We’re good. We’re ready, locked in,” Josh Shaw, 29, a guitarist who fronts the band, said after a couple of run-throughs of a song. “Put me in, coach.”

The after-hours life of this site, a designated National Historic Landmark, is an echo of the initial business set up here by Sun Records’ founder, Sam Phillips: an open-to-all recording service that first brought an 18-year-old Presley through the door in 1953, when he spent his own $3.98 to cut two ballads. (A year later, this time for Phillips’ Sun Records label, he recorded his breakout song, “That’s All Right.”)

Phillips, who died in 2003, was 26 when he signed the lease on the one-story building at 706 Union Ave., in October 1949. From just over 1,000 square feet he carved out a front office, recording studio, control room and a half bathroom. In January 1950, he opened it as the Memphis Recording Service, aiming to amplify the verve of an “overlooked humanity,” particularly that of Black musicians, which he believed could transcend societal divisions.

“I knew the physical separation of the races — but I knew the integration of their souls,” he told author Peter Guralnick for the 2015 biography “Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll.”

Through walk-ins and studio-for-hire work with record labels, Phillips made early recordings of future stars there, including B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf and Ike Turner. To keep the lights on, he also recorded audio of weddings, funerals and anyone who wanted to cut a record for themselves. Sun Records was launched in the space in 1952 and remained there until he opened a bigger recording studio in 1960, just blocks away. In 1969, he sold the label, which is now based in Nashville.

The original building, in the ensuing years, survived intact and in relative obscurity as a barbershop, an auto-parts store, a scuba shop and an empty husk until the 1980s. It was reopened in 1987 as a tourist destination and nighttime recording studio by local musician Gary Hardy, who eventually incorporated the two-story building next door, which now serves as a souvenir shop and exhibition space.

Mike Schorr, who now owns and operates the business and the buildings with his brothers, John and Chris, said visitors usually ask whether the site is still functional. “We think, frankly, it’s essential to remain an active studio,” he said. “That’s the heart and soul of this business, this place.”

The recording studio is typically booked four nights per week, with enough demand to fill seven, said Lydia Fletcher, Sun Studio’s recording engineer and booker. Rates, which reflect having to set up the studio and then make it tourist-ready again, run $200 an hour with a three-hour minimum for an individual, and five hours for a band. Those musicians are occasionally well-known names — including, in recent years, Wynonna Judd and Grammy winners Dom Flemons and Steve Cropper — but the majority are more likely regulars on hometown stages rather than the Billboard charts.

“This place just feels more punk rock,” said Shaw, the Blvck Hippie bandleader. Though Shaw has recorded at Sun (and other Memphis studios) before, and even leads tours there when the band isn’t on the road, none of it has bleached the uniqueness of the room: “You can pay a bunch of money and go to a place that has it all — or you can go to a place that has everything it could possibly take to bring out the best of what you can do creatively. That’s why a bunch of famous people still come here. There’s stuff that you can’t buy.”

Some of that is the afterglow of a mythical past. But it’s also that the studio has changed relatively little, Fletcher and other engineers said. Structurally, the room is the same, and band members still record in one shared space rather than playing in isolation booths. Microphones from the ’40s and ’50s are available and the sound runs through vintage equipment in the control room before being converted to a digital signal for editing.

There’s also still an emphasis on what Phillips termed “perfect imperfection,” his zeal to bottle the brilliance of an authentic moment, in spite of a flubbed note or lyric.

“Perfect? That’s the devil,” he told Guralnick, recounting how the sound of a phone ringing in the office made it onto one of the bluesman Jimmy DeBerry’s records. “Who in this world would want to be perfect?”

That liveliness and looseness drew 10-year-old Ben Scruggs and his father, Chris Scruggs — a member of country musician Marty Stuart’s band, the Fabulous Superlatives — to drive 200 miles from Nashville recently to record Ben’s first album. Backed by his father and a few other professional players, Ben sang and strummed through “Red Hot,” “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On” and other Sun favorites.

“Once I got in there, I was kind of nervous,” he said in June, two days after the session. But then he thought about a quote from Jack Clement, a 1950s Sun recording engineer known as Cowboy: “He said, ‘We’re in the fun business. If you’re not having fun, you’re not doing your job,’” Ben recalled. “Once I got in there, I told myself I wasn’t scared to have fun.”

Chris Scruggs, 41, the son of singer and producer Gail Davies and the grandson of banjo icon Earl Scruggs, said they’d decided to record the vocals live with the music. “You can squeeze the life out of a record when you get too picky about overdubs and about isolating different sounds,” he said. “Part of the magic of those Sun Records is how rough and raw they are. Sometimes those things that were maybe mistakes almost become the ——”

Ben jumped in to complete the thought: “Sun sound.”

David Cosma, a singer and songwriter in Melbourne, Australia — who’s also a co-creator of a touring stage show that celebrates Sun’s first decade — had been to Memphis three times before and looked to connect with objects that had seen time harden into music history. (During a video call, he pulled out a plastic soda bottle he’d half-filled with Mississippi River murk in 1998.) Despite visiting Sun in the past, he hadn’t yet stood where his heroes once did and played his heart out.

“It was one of those things that I don’t want to die wondering” about, said Cosma, 49.

In late October of last year, he arrived at Sun Studio in the dark and cold, with the traffic lights swinging in the wind. He sat at the hand-taped “X” for vocalists and recorded two songs for his next album, then played some of Presley’s songs and others that had emerged between those walls. With time remaining on the clock, the engineer left the room to do some paperwork but encouraged Cosma to stick around in the studio, if he wanted.

“I think that moment and that experience was probably greater than them all, just being in that space on my own,” Cosma said. “I wouldn’t say I’m so much a religious person as much as I’m probably spiritual, but there was a connection there; just me and the ghosts of Sun Records.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.