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“Sun Records: Where Rock & Roll was Born” – it sounds like a masthead to a company, and it is for Sun Records. They are the backbone of Musicbed’s most recent collaboration of “Vintage” music selections. Artists like Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and other successful musicians of the ‘50s,‘60s and ‘70s are a part of this collection.

The main portion of the story behind this collaboration can be found here on the Musicbed Blog: “Pure Musicianship and Digging Up Gold: A Conversation with Sun Records.” This is the story of Collin Brace, Vice President of Sun Records, and his vision to see an opportunity from the past and bring it to the present. Collin states in the article that 90% of Sun Records’ activity was made up of just a few “hits” yet there were hours and hours of recordings from B-sides, to outtakes and from artists who never went mainstream, that were just sitting collecting dust in a basement.

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Carl Perkins

“Did you come across any good outtakes from the big stars?
I can’t remember any from Cash, but there is this very interesting outtake from Jerry Lee Lewis. The engineer let the tape roll, and Jerry is in an argument with Sam Phillips (the owner of Sun Records) about the doctrine of salvation. It goes on for a good three minutes. You can tell Sam is laughing about it and he knows he’s egging Jerry on. But Jerry is just taking it to him with his classic fiery passion. It’s an awesome outtake to listen to. Back then, an outtake had to be pretty good for an engineer to keep the tape running, because tape was so expensive and you only had so much of it. I’m sure there were a lot of great outtakes that were recorded over.”

I wanted to talk about this collection because it’s absolutely breathtaking to hear the tracks that are available. It blew my mind that there is a collection of music available like this for commercial use, which is what has been setting Musicbed apart from the pack for the last two years (maybe even longer). A lot of you know how difficult it is to find music that separates your piece of work from the rest. Having a resource like Musicbed only makes the process even easier. I’ve personally enjoyed working with them because THEY GET IT. Yes, that is in ALL CAPS because I AM YELLING IT. A lot of businesses are just out to make a profit and are not concerned with the customer and what they can do for YOU. That isn’t the case with this team and it’s important for us here at Hurlbut Visuals to spread that word.

This Vintage collection is put together from many tracks that have never been released and you can only find them at Musicbed. It’s over 1,100 tracks and growing. Prior to teaming up with Musicbed, tracks from Sun Records have appeared in AMC’s Breaking Bad, Mad Men, HBO’s Vinyl and in the film Joy. This looks to be a great collaboration between Musicbed and Sun Records, which should lead to more great options coming to Musicbed and their licensing overall.