RCA received tapes from Sam Phillips in December 1955, and where no tapes existed they used dubs from Sun singles for their masters (see below).

This recording session may have taken place on November 15 or between December 12-20 1954. On November 16 1954, Elvis received a check for $82.50 that was a payment for "sessions 11-15-54". One thing that is certain is that it was focused on the recording of Elvis' third single ('Milkcow Blues Boogie' / 'You're A Heartbreaker') which came out on December 29 1954.

Doug Poindexter claimed to be at this session, although he can't be heard on the surviving recordings. He does however receive a cheque from Sam Phillips along with Elvis, Scotty and Bill on November 16th 1954.

It appears that Doug was at the session on the 15th as he claimed, but just got a token $8 payment as he does not feature on the recording and therefore does not feature in the union log.

Until the cheque showed up there was no evidence to connect Doug to this session other than his claim.

It seems Doug tagged along for the September and November 1954 sessions.

In March of 2007, Sony decided to go through all of Elvis' masters. They retransferred everything and remastered all tracks including repairing as many clicks, pops, bad edits and dropouts as they could. They have used these newly mastered recordings on their new releases since 2007 including budget soundtracks, Legacy releases, the 30 disc Complete Elvis Presley Masters collection and the Franklin Mint package. These 2007 remasters were not used on FTD's A Boy From Tupelo, the masters were all remastered again from scratch on that set.

Thanks to Kevan Budd for the information regarding Doug Poindexter.

Elvis At Sun - Restoration (Courtesy of 'Master & Session')

The master tapes for 'Milkcow Blues Boogie' and 'You're a Heartbreaker' were never turned over to RCA, possibly because they had been recorded over by mistake. RCA made dubs of a mint 78 RPM copy that were used to produce replacement masters for a late 1955 single re-release and for future use by RCA. Both were processed during this process and many artifacts from the shellac source have remained. All restoration efforts for later CD releases have been extremely poor and actually mainly had the opposite effect with introduction of extra distortion and elimination of ambiance. It is therefore a relief that it has been possible to replace both masters of the third single with fresh transfers from a huge selection of other 78 RPM's. If anybody thought that restoring old sources like this is equivalent to sitting in a nice air-conditioned office being served grapes and dinners while pressing buttons of a lot of luxury software to automate the process, think again. The result from a tedious, manual job on 'Milkcow Blues Boogie' is stunning and simply has to be heard to be believed. 

The pitch is not that easy to solve, with guitar tuning in contradiction with original 78 RPM pitch and the 60 cycle hum distribution over time (such low frequencies needs ridiculously high FFT values to even measure with decent accuracy). It is presented at original speed, which if correct, could be the only Sun recording where Scotty's guitar wasn't carefully tuned. Going by guitar tuning only, the pitch would have had to be set slightly slower.

'You're A Heartbreaker' is a big improvement as well, but not quite as good as' Milkcow Blues Boogie'. The reason for this is that few copies were pressed, as it was the least successful Sun single and that the 'You're A Heartbreaker' side appears to have been played a lot more than the R&B side by the few people who bought a copy. If an unplayed/mint copy of this side could be located, 'You're A Heartbreaker' could have been presented with slightly less surface noise.