Memphis don't Bluff: Night and Day in Tennessee's Blues Capital

The girls have it, or at least, that's how I see it. Once, a kid in my middle school homeroom said that country made by women couldn't be considered real country. We didn't talk much after that. In my mind, you can never go wrong with Pam Tillis or Trisha Yearwood. Both were bona-fide Nashville Queens by the late 90s, but their hearts stayed in Tennessee's other music city: Memphis.

I've never been to Memphis before, and in fact I sort of arrived there on a whim this past weekend. I planned on visiting some small cities in northern Alabama, one of which being Florence, boasting the only Frank Lloyd Wright house in the state, and one of only a handful in the south. But, as happens most often on these sort of trips, after a four hour drive I yearned for much more than one museum house that was closed for the day.

Memphis has been on my list for some time. But due to its odd location relative to Atlanta--close map dots, but over six hour's drive--I've never managed to get there. Late that afternoon in Florence, though, I decided to give Memphis a shot.

Two and a half hours, about 160 miles of rural Mississippi highway lay between me and Beale Street, so I brimmed my gas tank and wound south through Muscle Shoals. Soon I was past the small town of Corinth, Mississippi, when a golden sunset sky painted the plain rolling hills.

I only had a faint idea of Memphis as a city, knowing Beale Street as a landmark home to some bright neon, street performers, and the blues. But other than that, I knew very little about Tennessee's largest city. (when factoring in metropolitan areas, Nashville is much larger, but Memphis beats its in-town population with around 600,000 residents)

Since the trip was last-minute, I used my old standby, Tripadvisor, to scope out some sights beyond Beale Street. I decided I'd pay a visit to the National Civil Rights Museum and maybe try to squeeze in a visit to Stax Records, a Memphis Soul recording studio and the only museum in the world dedicated exclusively to soul music. I arrived in Memphis around 9 and decided to trek down to Beale Street first thing.

If you've ever traveled with me, you know that it's my personal principle to pay as little as possible for parking regardless of where I go or how far I might have to walk because of it. Ideally, I'd like it to be free and usually that's is well within the realm of possibility with just a smidge of planning and luck. The first thing I do when approaching parking in a big city is to pay attention to where most people are parked on the street, but on streets without meters. You'll usually find this in more residential areas, but there be sure to look out for my next point which is: once you've found a place like this with a spot available, park and do a quick walk up and down the block to read enforcement signs. Sometimes there are none, in which case it's sort of a "power in numbers, park at your own risk scenario." But usually there are signs marking enforcement only during certain times of the day, and usually parking isn't enforced on weekends or after a certain time in the evening.

That whole segue is to say that I arrived at Beale Street, which is almost always blocked off for safe pedestrian-only access, and discovered I'd have to find a place to park away from the main drag. A good place I found was by the riverfront a few blocks west. There's a long row of diagonal end-on spaces, and a couple dozen of these are enforced by the city with another 35 or so being run by a private parking company. Choose the city spaces, because enforcement ends at 6p.m. From there, it's a safe five-minute walk to the westernmost end of Beale Street.

The street itself began as a project of entrepreneur and real-estate developer Robertson Topp in 1841. Originally it housed trade merchant shops, as Memphis had long been a center of the cotton and lumber industries and a major trade hub thanks to its location on the Mississippi River. Starting in the 1860s, traveling black musicians started performing here. But Beale Street mirrors the city of Memphis in its tumultuous history, which integrally involves race and public health.

In 1878, a Yellow Fever epidemic broke out in the city. It's said to have been transmitted by passing river boat passengers and by the time it was over, it had taken more than 5,000 lives and spurred 20,000 people to permanently leave the city. For Robert Church, though, it would mean a tremendous opportunity. Soon after the epidemic, Church, a black entrepreneur, purchased several plots around Beale Street and headed a large redevelopment effort. This effort resulted in the building of the Grand Opera House, which burned down in 1923 but was rebuilt and is now the Orpheum, and Church Park, an outdoor auditorium where blues musicians and speakers soon gathered. These efforts made Church the first black billionaire in the south, and kicked off Beale Street's new renaissance.

Walking down Beale, you'll see plaques commemorating this swinging period in the corridor's history. Many African American-owned shops, clubs, restaurants, and newspapers created a lively stretch of pavement in the early 1900s. Ida B. Wells, a black journalist, news editor, and civil rights leader co-owned and edited Free Reason and Headlight, an anti-segregationist newspaper based out of the Beale Street Baptist Church in 1889.

According to Beale Street's official website, the corridor hit its stride in the 1920s, when it resembled a "carnival atmosphere" with nightclubs and restaurants alongside gambling houses and brothels. Of course, this rough-and-tumble picture and the stories that go along with it enjoy their fair share of embellishment, but this time period left no question that Beale Street was the center of activity in Memphis.

Walking around it in 2017 yields a different feeling, although you can still feel bits and pieces of that past atmosphere. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Memphis Blues developed along Beale street. B.B. King, Rosco Gordon, Muddy Waters, and Louis Armstrong were just a few of the names who performed in the bars and parks along Beale street. Nowadays, Memphis Police monitor most intersections in the main drag, and bars offer walk-up windows that sell pitchers of frozen drinks instead of absinthe. (the latter can still be found if you ask the right people)

By the 1960s, many businesses on Beale Street had closed. Only one, A. Schwab, has been open continuously since 1876--its original sign can still be seen through the maze of neon that lights up every night. Conditions on Beale became so dire that in 1977, the United States Congress officially declared Beale Street "The Home of the Blues," in an effort to thwart destruction that was already taking place in neighborhoods surrounding it. Eventually, a grassroots group formed and began redeveloping the area with the help of grants in the mid-1980s, but eventually lost management rights to the area in 2012, when they were turned over to the city of Memphis in a court case.

My walk down that historic street gave me a good idea of what Memphis might feel like as a city, but it wasn't until my visit the next day to the National Museum of Civil Rights that I gained a bit of context regarding its oft-troubled history.

To understand the unique place Memphis holds in American history, you've got to go all the way back to the beginning. It's a fairly young city, established in 1819 by a group of wealthy founders including Andrew Jackson, but true Memphians know that their history must begin shortly before the American Revolution, when millions of African slaves were forcibly brought to the colonies to fuel an industrial boom and sparked a human rights debate in this country that lasts to this day.

Getting a comprehensive view of the history of Civil Rights in America requires looking beyond the textbooks and lessons you were given in grade school. In many cases, these skirt the main issues and practices that took place during the Atlantic Slave Trade and far beyond. In all cases, these fail to address the uncomfortable truths that all Americans should realize about our country, ones which took place centuries ago, and those which still take place today both here and in other parts of the world.

I arrived at the Lorraine Motel around 11a.m. Saturday morning. It was an overcast day, but already a large crowd formed outside of the museum and surrounding the faquade of the motel. A wreath marks the precise location where Dr. Martin Luther King stood on the balcony outside of room 306 in 1968 when he was fatally shot by a sniper from a bathroom window across the street.

As I mentioned earlier, Memphis has an inherently tumultuous relationship with race that stretches back to the time of its founding. Being a major transportation hub, Memphis was the center of the cotton trade, much of the raw material came from plantations just outside of the city. It was processed in Memphis and shipped to South Carolina via the Memphis to Charleston Railroad, which was completed in 1857. From Charleston, it was shipped to England, this trade benefitting all who took part--except those slaves who performed the hard manual labor to harvest it.

The Old Slave Mart on Chalmers Street in Charleston. The city prohibited public slave trade in 1856, so this private facility opened. It later became a tenement, car showroom, and now houses a museum.

In 1862, the Battle of Memphis saw Union occupation of the city and during this time, many fugitive slaves relocated here, joining a large group of Irish immigrants who'd arrived a decade prior. Irish and black populations clashed in the Riot of 1866, during which white residents, mostly Irish, destroyed homes, churches, and schools in predominately-black South Memphis--killing 46 black residents in the meantime. After this riot, and the Yellow Fever Epidemic that followed two years later, many of the middle and upper class white residents fled the city--a trend that would continue into modern times.

The museum's exhibits comprehensively cover the history of the Civil Rights movement in America, beginning with the Atlantic Slave Trade. The first room in the museum holds this exhibit, which features a reproduction of cramped slave quarters Africans encountered during the months-long passage. There's also quite a bit of information regarding just how big a part of the economy slavery was during this time, and the exhibit does a great job of tying together how raw materials were often harvested in the south, processed in the northeast, then shipped to England. Visitors can also watch a 12-minute film that serves as a primer for the rest of the exhibits.

You can be sure there was still strife in Memphis following the race riot and fever epidemic. The city afterwards gained a reputation for being a dirty, sickly place and indeed there was no water treatment system in place until much later on. The big news, however, only picks back up during the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement where, coincidentally, the museum heads next.

Beginning with a recreation of a Montgomery City Bus and somewhat interactive exhibit on the Montgomery Bus Boycott sparked by Rosa Parks in 1955, visitors wind their way through colorful, succinct, and well thought-out exhibits marking important and dark moments in Civil Rights history. Birmingham, Albany, Georgia, Oxford, Mississippi, and Memphis, Tennessee are major settings for demonstrations and violence that took place, largely in the deep south, during the 1950s and 1960s. There's also a great exhibit on integration, which follows several of the first students to integrate southern schools.

It isn't until the very end of the winding path through that visitors get to learn about the events that led to Dr. King's death on that balcony in 1968. A fairly inconsequential exhibit, at least on face value, outlining the Memphis Sanitation Worker's strike of 1968 follows an exhibit that looks at the Black Pride movement. Soon, though, you find out the significance of the strike, as it was King's last project before being assassinated.

The night before his death, King made his ominous "Mountaintop" speech at a local church, in which he says: "Longevity has its place, but I'm not concerned about that now." King goes on to say,  "I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you.. And I'm not worried tonight. I'm not fearing any man."  

Visitors cycle slowly through the open space between two restored motel rooms. The one on the left was where Dr. King stayed, and the one on the right, where Ralph David Abernathy and several other associates stayed. Every detail of both spaces was brought back to the way it looked on the day of King's assassination, right down to the cigarette butts in the ashtray. Two picture windows give every museum patron a view from the balcony, the same one King saw before he was shot. I'd been in the museum for over two hours at that point and the clouds had cleared; the sun shone bright and I stood for a moment longer.

The two-story building in the middle right is where authorities believe the shot was taken. It is now a part of the museum, housing an exhibit on James Earl Ray, Kings assassin's, eventual capture.

A recreation of the motel room occupied by Ralph Abernathy and others, directly adjacent to King's room.

Afterwards I walked around downtown Memphis a little longer, taking in the lively restaurants, art venues, and the street scene in general. Faded murals and metal sculptures categorize the area surrounding the Lorraine Motel, and give a good glimpse at what Memphis is like moving forward. Due to the last-minute nature of my trip, I didn't have the funds to stay another night here, otherwise I would have visited other attractions like Stax Recording Studio and Sun Studio, both of which have signed musical rosters nothing short of legendary during their heydays.

Memphis is now home to a handful of Fortune 500 companies, Autozone and Fedex being the largest. It's still a transportation hub, too, with the Memphis Airport holding distinction as the second busiest cargo airport in the world next to Hong Kong. But it's still a city divided along color lines, as a map in the National Civil Rights Museum showed alongside maps of Atlanta, Kansas City, and New York City.

I'm not sure what the future holds for Memphis, but I now know that every one of us has something to learn from its history--the music, culture, commerce, and immense struggles that make up Bluff City.