Eighty-Five Years on One Floor.
SugarHill Recording Studios is the oldest continuously operating recording studio in the United States. It opened in Houston in 1941 and has not stopped since. This is the long version of that story, from a converted gas station to the records still being cut today.
A gas station on Telephone Road.
In 1941 an electronics man named Bill Quinn opened a recording operation in a converted gas station on Telephone Road in Houston and called it Quinn Recording. He never closed the doors. That single unbroken run is what makes SugarHill the oldest continuously operating recording studio in the United States, older than any other studio still working in the country today.
Quinn was an engineer first, and the studio carried that character from the start: a working room built to capture whatever Houston brought through the door, in a part of town where the music was already everywhere.
The birth of a Houston sound.
Quinn launched the Gold Star label in 1946, and by 1950 he had moved the operation into a building on Brock Street, the address the studio still works from today, and renamed it Gold Star Studios. The records that came out of those first years built the room's reputation.
In 1946 Harry Choates cut "Jolie Blon" here, the song that became the first modern Cajun hit. The next year Lightnin' Hopkins began recording at Gold Star, and the Houston blues went onto tape. Cajun music and the blues were documented in this room before most of the country knew either one had a sound of its own.
From a local room to the charts.
By the late 1950s the records were national. The Big Bopper cut "Chantilly Lace" in the room in 1958, one of the defining singles of early rock and roll. George Jones was cutting country sides in the same building around the same time. Two completely different American records, one floor, the tape machines barely cooling between sessions.
The launch pad for Texas psych.
In 1966 the 13th Floor Elevators cut "You're Gonna Miss Me" here for the International Artists label, and the studio became the launch pad for the Texas psychedelic sound. A generation of garage and acid rock followed the Elevators through the door. The International Artists mark is still on the wall.
Huey Meaux and the name it carries now.
In 1972 the producer Huey P. Meaux bought the studio and gave it the name it still carries: SugarHill. The decade ran hot. In 1975 Freddy Fender cut "Before the Next Teardrop Falls" here, the bilingual ballad that became a national number one. Across the seventies the room pulled in Doug Sahm and the Sir Douglas Quintet, Asleep at the Wheel, Dr. John, Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings, among many others.
Every kind of Texas music.
Through every era the studio kept its doors open to Black and Mexican-American artists decades before that was an easy thing for a Southern studio to do. Houston blues and soul came through in Lightnin' Hopkins, O.V. Wright, Barbara Lynn and Archie Bell and the Drells. Tejano and conjunto came through Little Joe y La Familia and others, and in 1983 a young Selena Quintanilla recorded her first album here for Freddie Records.
That openness is a big part of why the discography reads like a map of Texas music itself: jazz and country and blues and soul and Cajun and rock, all cut on the same floor.
The next generations of Houston.
The room never slowed down. Destiny's Child, Beyonce and Solange Knowles all recorded here, and the studio became part of the foundation of modern Houston hip-hop, with sessions running from UGK and Bun B through Paul Wall, Slim Thug and Lil Keke. The line continues right up to the present with Travis Scott and a steady stream of today's artists. Same brick, same address, eight and a half decades of records pulled out of one Houston room.
The same brick, real tape and steel.
The history is not just a list of names; it is in the rooms. The studio runs three live rooms, the Sugar Hill Room, the Goldstar room and the Duke Room, on a lineage of consoles from Neotek, Neve and Avid. The studio's live echo chambers were designed in 1964 by the legendary engineer Jack Clement, and the EMT 240 Gold Foil plate has been part of the sound for decades. It is a working studio, not a museum, but the equipment carries the same history the records do.
The oldest working studio in the country.
SugarHill is still recording every week, and a new ownership chapter opened in 2026 with a simple mission: protect what makes this the oldest continuously operating studio in the United States, and give the next generation of artists a reason to drive to Houston to record. The story has been documented in the University of Texas Press book "House of Hits," and the City of Houston recognizes October 14 as SugarHill Day.
- Wikipedia, SugarHill Recording Studios
- Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas
- Texas Monthly, "Houston's Legendary SugarHill Recording Studios Turns Eighty"
- "House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios," Andy Bradley & Roger Wood (University of Texas Press, 2010)
- Wikidata
Add to the story.
Eighty-five years in, the tape is still rolling. Tell us what you are making and come cut a record where Houston has been making them since 1941.