Memphis creeps up on you. After miles of interstate and little to report of any note, the city suddenly emerges from the roadside shrubbery, all motels, shopping malls and diners at highway exits as you approach the city. Memphis is not as big as Nashville, but certainly punches above its weight in terms of influence in proportion to size. Home of Elvis Presley, and the city where Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr was fatally shot in August 1968, it remains a key part of the American story, existing as both a civil rights pilgrimage point, and a major music industry town. After the delights of Nashville, and the country rockabilly style of music played there, Dean and I were eager to experience the real Memphis music, the authentic blues, and not just Cher’s version of ‘Walking In Memphis’, even if we did feel like we were walking ten feet up in the air down the city’s famous Beale Street.
Some have suggested that Memphis is a moth-eaten relic, relying on its former glories to bring in residents and tourists alike. To some extent this is true, as many buildings present a façade that belies a shabbier nature inside, particularly the hotels. Ours seemed grand, with a large central chandelier and extravagant carpets, but in reality it felt like nothing had changed since the 1960’s. Perhaps, however, this is no bad thing. After all, the steadfast ‘southern’ attitude towards tradition, and maintaining age-old values, may well play badly on a political and even ethical level, but in terms of sustaining a cultural identity it works wonders. As a result, while Memphis may not appear to change, it instead helps focus its historical importance, to politics and music especially. Memphis can also be used, therefore, as a microcosm of the South more generally, steeped as it is in fabled customs and conventions, whether they be right or wrong, admirable or disgraceful, by any modern standard.
After familiarising ourselves with our surroundings, Dean and I felt it was only right to try and witness these customs for ourselves, and attempt a proper Memphis experience. We headed straight for Beale Street from our hotel on Union Avenue (both mentioned in the famous song). While we did not literally see the ghost of Elvis, his spirit pervades the entire town, with his voice crooning out of open shop doors and his face adorning roadside murals and posters. Down Beale Street, similar in length to Nashville’s Broadway, Presley songs juxtaposed against classic blues from key residents of the town and surrounding region, including legends like BB King, Jonny Cash, W.C. Handy, Booker Jones, and Carl Perkins, all of whom also cut their songs in Memphis recording studios. It was an exhilarating strip to walk down, and the first time on our trip that we discovered bonafide ‘southern’ architecture, as low-rise buildings with large windows and shutters stretched out down the street, some with the sort of ‘Main Street’ bunting that you would normally see in Disneyland mock-ups of the real thing.
We settled on a bar-cum-restaurant on the corner of Beale for some dinner and local cuisine. Being Tennessee, this was still prime rib country, although Dean came close to ordering catfish. Dean’s quest for a decent catfish dinner was fast becoming a hallmark of the trip. It is a story that will stretch down through Tennessee, into Alabama and Louisiana beyond. In Memphis, despite wavering towards this most ‘southern’ of fish delicacies, Dean sided on a more staple meat offering, with the largest plate of nachos I have ever seen (and, frankly, would ever want to see again) sandwiched between us, just in case we felt the portions were a little small. Across the room, on the stage, a blues band started up, alternating between 12-bar structures, complete with warbling trumpets and honky-tonk pianos, and more soulful folksy numbers that were delivered with gusto by the lead singer, a man who barely pronounced his consonants when he sang and yet articulated everything far clearer than any of us could.
Dinner consumed, it was time to walk back up Beale towards the legendary BB King’s bar, for another round of drinks and more live music. I have not been to two cities with so much free live music on display in so many places as I witnessed in both Nashville and Memphis. Tennessee has got its priorities right: lovely looking women in cowboy hats and tight jeans, glorious music on every street, and hearty food. BB King’s maintained this perception, as the live band launched into a variety of tunes, from the traditional styles of the region, to even an impressive version of U2’s ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’. So inspired were Dean and I after our evening out in central Memphis that the final thing we did before returning to our hotel was to buy some harmonicas from a nearby store. There is a decent chance we may return to London with a full Dick Van Dyke-esque one-man-band set-up on our backs.
A further coup for the south is the weather (hurricanes aside). Yes, it can be sticky and humid, but Memphis is already far enough south for November to feel like spring back in London and, with the promise of even warmer weather to come, it was time to get the sunglasses out and abandon the parka that served me so well in chilly Boston. Our first stop the next morning took us to the second most visited site in the whole of America (the White House comes in a number one): Graceland. Famed all over the world, and travelled to by devoted Elvis fans from every part of the planet, Graceland exists today as a shrine to the King, who lived in the house for much of his adult live, and is buried there today. I was expecting a tacky American nightmare, full of blazing neon, awful tour guides, unwarranted superlatives at every turn, and random foreign people crying in the hallways, wailing at the loss of one of music’s greats. I was instead greeted by a genuinely pretty (and not as large as you might imagine) house, incredibly well maintained and run, and with a very informative tour. There were no histrionics, just a dedication to showing you where one of the twentieth century’s key icons lived and worked, and what he managed to achieve.
The house itself is postcard perfect, with a long, winding driveway past the fabled gates, up to a two-storey house complete with large windows and classic shutters, steps leading up to the front-door, and significant grassland to both the front and rear of the property. Inside, we both felt that the majority of the rooms were remarkably normal, with neat furnishings and a homely touch that most of us would no doubt be comfortable with. The excesses of global iconography, like at Michael Jackson’s Neverland in California, were absent from Graceland. It really did feel like an actual family could live in the house. The only exception to this was the Jungle Room, a bizarre concoction of carpeted floors and walls, with fake palm trees, statuettes of monkeys and elephants, oddly positioned and carved fountains, and green leather seats. That, friends, is what a lot of prescription drugs will make you do.
At the back of the house is a small swimming pool, a racket-ball building, land for horses to graze, and the graves of Elvis and his family, positioned a little weirdly at the foot of the swimming pool. Only here were there signs of his mass appeal, with flags of different nations strewn about, and messages in a variety of languages left close to the memorial, as well as a newly erected building designed as a more general Elvis museum, featuring his platinum disc sales certificates, numerous touring costumes, movie memorabilia, and much more. Beyond Graceland, back at the reception centre across the street, were two other exhibits of note: Elvis’s car collection, and his private plane, donated back to the Graceland Centre by Lisa-Marie Presley. The car collection is quite astonishing, featuring an impressive number of classic models, from Rolls Royce Silver Clouds to a convertible Mercedes and black Ferrari. The private plane included a bar, living room and bedroom: a far cry from British Airways economy.
Graceland, then, could have been a disaster. Somehow, the Trust that leases and operates the site has managed to tone down the excesses of a brilliant but bizarre man enough for genuine information about his life and music to filter out. Presley’s influence is enormous, even today. To set the tone of the scale of his popularity, more people across the globe watched the live televised broadcast of a touring stop in Honolulu, Hawaii, than the footage of man landing on the moon in 1969. Some say Elvis is still alive. These people are delusional. All that lives on is the music. Yet what music it is, and what a voice! Effortlessly crooning through a succession of hits, that Tennessee drawl will outlive any piece of real estate, even if Graceland is a genuinely (and surprisingly) informative and pleasurable way to spend a few hours.
From Graceland, situated just a few miles out of town on the aptly named Elvis Presley Boulevard, Dean and I travelled to Sun Studio. The story of Sun Studios reads like a who’s who of early modern music. Sam Phillips founded Sun Records in 1952. He would travel around with a portable (and hilariously massive) recording system, before settle down in Memphis and leasing a studio. Although in a major music venue, Phillips struggled to get people through the door to cut their records with him and faced financial ruin. A number of performers were in Memphis at the time, including a young Elvis, as well as Jonny Cash, Roy Orbison, BB King, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Elvis himself used the studios as an eighteen-year-old amateur, telling the receptionist he wanted to record a song for his mother’s birthday as he was too shy and polite to say that he wanted to record music as a career. Sam Phillips was not impressed with what Elvis recorded, and continually rebuffed the young man’s attempts to get work as a vocalist for different groups that Phillips assembled to record various tracks. Eventually, a year later, and simply due to the fact that nobody else was available, Phillips brought Elvis in. It was a disaster, as Phillips hated the ballads Elvis was singing. He told the band to pack up, and headed back for the editor’s suite, while Elvis, in a desperate and final attempt to get noticed, began singing a rocked up version of ‘That’s Alright (Mama)’. Finally, Phillips was impressed, and saw in Elvis’s odd dancing style and swooping vocals an opportunity to fuse early blues with the ultra-modern rock’n’roll of the time. Signing Elvis was a masterstroke (for all concerned). It helped Phillips pay off his many debts, especially when he sold his contract with Elvis to RCA for a then astronomical figure. It released funds for Phillips to bring in to Sun Records a whole host of Memphis-based unsigned artists who went on to have worldwide hits for the label, including Jonny Cash.
Sun Studios is still a functioning studio to this day, but also runs tours, and Dean and I were excited to stand in the same room that Elvis himself had stood in all those years ago. The walls, tiled floor, glass partition to the producing suite, indeed the entire set-up was exactly as it was back in the 1950’s, even down to taped marks on the floor for where musicians and vocalists were required to stand. We were able to position ourselves at the same spot Elvis was in when he achieved his big break, and even played around with an original microphone from that time also. This helps illustrate the idea that the King lives on. Elvis may well have left the building, but you cannot help but feel connected to him and his contemporaries when you stand in the very room that started the story.
Our day of musical inspiration was rounded-up nicely by a trip to the Gibson guitar factory, just around the corner from Beale Street. As an owner of a cherry red Gibson Epiphone Riviera, this was obviously rather exciting, and our tour took us deep into the main factory warehouse where the guitars are manufactured. It was bizarre to look at the hollow, wooden shells that would soon become musical instruments, and my respect for Gibson has only been enhanced by witnessing the dedication that goes into making a guitar. It is a painstaking process, sped up by modern lathes, but still requiring a steady hand (and musical ear) by individual workers who test and re-test the final models, and paint on the legendary Gibson colours (sunburst, black, cherry red, and white) by hand, one guitar at a time. From learning about music and musicians earlier on in the day, it was only appropriate to finish off with a guide to how the instruments needed to produce such sounds and create such genius are made.
It was also a fitting end to our tour of musical America (apart from a sojourn in New Orleans to come). We had the razzmatazz of New York, with its show tunes and modern indie rock, the motown of Detroit and surrounding Michigan, the jazz and urban rap of Chicago, as well as Tennessee’s big three: country, blues and rock’n’roll in Nashville and Memphis. Singing our hearts out as we left this remarkable, inspiring and exciting state, Dean and I set a course for an even deeper southern landmark: Birmingham, Alabama, with its controversial socio-political history and divided present. From music, to politics and society: we’ll be teaching American Studies at universities across the UK upon our return.
Some have suggested that Memphis is a moth-eaten relic, relying on its former glories to bring in residents and tourists alike. To some extent this is true, as many buildings present a façade that belies a shabbier nature inside, particularly the hotels. Ours seemed grand, with a large central chandelier and extravagant carpets, but in reality it felt like nothing had changed since the 1960’s. Perhaps, however, this is no bad thing. After all, the steadfast ‘southern’ attitude towards tradition, and maintaining age-old values, may well play badly on a political and even ethical level, but in terms of sustaining a cultural identity it works wonders. As a result, while Memphis may not appear to change, it instead helps focus its historical importance, to politics and music especially. Memphis can also be used, therefore, as a microcosm of the South more generally, steeped as it is in fabled customs and conventions, whether they be right or wrong, admirable or disgraceful, by any modern standard.
After familiarising ourselves with our surroundings, Dean and I felt it was only right to try and witness these customs for ourselves, and attempt a proper Memphis experience. We headed straight for Beale Street from our hotel on Union Avenue (both mentioned in the famous song). While we did not literally see the ghost of Elvis, his spirit pervades the entire town, with his voice crooning out of open shop doors and his face adorning roadside murals and posters. Down Beale Street, similar in length to Nashville’s Broadway, Presley songs juxtaposed against classic blues from key residents of the town and surrounding region, including legends like BB King, Jonny Cash, W.C. Handy, Booker Jones, and Carl Perkins, all of whom also cut their songs in Memphis recording studios. It was an exhilarating strip to walk down, and the first time on our trip that we discovered bonafide ‘southern’ architecture, as low-rise buildings with large windows and shutters stretched out down the street, some with the sort of ‘Main Street’ bunting that you would normally see in Disneyland mock-ups of the real thing.
We settled on a bar-cum-restaurant on the corner of Beale for some dinner and local cuisine. Being Tennessee, this was still prime rib country, although Dean came close to ordering catfish. Dean’s quest for a decent catfish dinner was fast becoming a hallmark of the trip. It is a story that will stretch down through Tennessee, into Alabama and Louisiana beyond. In Memphis, despite wavering towards this most ‘southern’ of fish delicacies, Dean sided on a more staple meat offering, with the largest plate of nachos I have ever seen (and, frankly, would ever want to see again) sandwiched between us, just in case we felt the portions were a little small. Across the room, on the stage, a blues band started up, alternating between 12-bar structures, complete with warbling trumpets and honky-tonk pianos, and more soulful folksy numbers that were delivered with gusto by the lead singer, a man who barely pronounced his consonants when he sang and yet articulated everything far clearer than any of us could.
Dinner consumed, it was time to walk back up Beale towards the legendary BB King’s bar, for another round of drinks and more live music. I have not been to two cities with so much free live music on display in so many places as I witnessed in both Nashville and Memphis. Tennessee has got its priorities right: lovely looking women in cowboy hats and tight jeans, glorious music on every street, and hearty food. BB King’s maintained this perception, as the live band launched into a variety of tunes, from the traditional styles of the region, to even an impressive version of U2’s ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’. So inspired were Dean and I after our evening out in central Memphis that the final thing we did before returning to our hotel was to buy some harmonicas from a nearby store. There is a decent chance we may return to London with a full Dick Van Dyke-esque one-man-band set-up on our backs.
A further coup for the south is the weather (hurricanes aside). Yes, it can be sticky and humid, but Memphis is already far enough south for November to feel like spring back in London and, with the promise of even warmer weather to come, it was time to get the sunglasses out and abandon the parka that served me so well in chilly Boston. Our first stop the next morning took us to the second most visited site in the whole of America (the White House comes in a number one): Graceland. Famed all over the world, and travelled to by devoted Elvis fans from every part of the planet, Graceland exists today as a shrine to the King, who lived in the house for much of his adult live, and is buried there today. I was expecting a tacky American nightmare, full of blazing neon, awful tour guides, unwarranted superlatives at every turn, and random foreign people crying in the hallways, wailing at the loss of one of music’s greats. I was instead greeted by a genuinely pretty (and not as large as you might imagine) house, incredibly well maintained and run, and with a very informative tour. There were no histrionics, just a dedication to showing you where one of the twentieth century’s key icons lived and worked, and what he managed to achieve.
The house itself is postcard perfect, with a long, winding driveway past the fabled gates, up to a two-storey house complete with large windows and classic shutters, steps leading up to the front-door, and significant grassland to both the front and rear of the property. Inside, we both felt that the majority of the rooms were remarkably normal, with neat furnishings and a homely touch that most of us would no doubt be comfortable with. The excesses of global iconography, like at Michael Jackson’s Neverland in California, were absent from Graceland. It really did feel like an actual family could live in the house. The only exception to this was the Jungle Room, a bizarre concoction of carpeted floors and walls, with fake palm trees, statuettes of monkeys and elephants, oddly positioned and carved fountains, and green leather seats. That, friends, is what a lot of prescription drugs will make you do.
At the back of the house is a small swimming pool, a racket-ball building, land for horses to graze, and the graves of Elvis and his family, positioned a little weirdly at the foot of the swimming pool. Only here were there signs of his mass appeal, with flags of different nations strewn about, and messages in a variety of languages left close to the memorial, as well as a newly erected building designed as a more general Elvis museum, featuring his platinum disc sales certificates, numerous touring costumes, movie memorabilia, and much more. Beyond Graceland, back at the reception centre across the street, were two other exhibits of note: Elvis’s car collection, and his private plane, donated back to the Graceland Centre by Lisa-Marie Presley. The car collection is quite astonishing, featuring an impressive number of classic models, from Rolls Royce Silver Clouds to a convertible Mercedes and black Ferrari. The private plane included a bar, living room and bedroom: a far cry from British Airways economy.
Graceland, then, could have been a disaster. Somehow, the Trust that leases and operates the site has managed to tone down the excesses of a brilliant but bizarre man enough for genuine information about his life and music to filter out. Presley’s influence is enormous, even today. To set the tone of the scale of his popularity, more people across the globe watched the live televised broadcast of a touring stop in Honolulu, Hawaii, than the footage of man landing on the moon in 1969. Some say Elvis is still alive. These people are delusional. All that lives on is the music. Yet what music it is, and what a voice! Effortlessly crooning through a succession of hits, that Tennessee drawl will outlive any piece of real estate, even if Graceland is a genuinely (and surprisingly) informative and pleasurable way to spend a few hours.
From Graceland, situated just a few miles out of town on the aptly named Elvis Presley Boulevard, Dean and I travelled to Sun Studio. The story of Sun Studios reads like a who’s who of early modern music. Sam Phillips founded Sun Records in 1952. He would travel around with a portable (and hilariously massive) recording system, before settle down in Memphis and leasing a studio. Although in a major music venue, Phillips struggled to get people through the door to cut their records with him and faced financial ruin. A number of performers were in Memphis at the time, including a young Elvis, as well as Jonny Cash, Roy Orbison, BB King, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Elvis himself used the studios as an eighteen-year-old amateur, telling the receptionist he wanted to record a song for his mother’s birthday as he was too shy and polite to say that he wanted to record music as a career. Sam Phillips was not impressed with what Elvis recorded, and continually rebuffed the young man’s attempts to get work as a vocalist for different groups that Phillips assembled to record various tracks. Eventually, a year later, and simply due to the fact that nobody else was available, Phillips brought Elvis in. It was a disaster, as Phillips hated the ballads Elvis was singing. He told the band to pack up, and headed back for the editor’s suite, while Elvis, in a desperate and final attempt to get noticed, began singing a rocked up version of ‘That’s Alright (Mama)’. Finally, Phillips was impressed, and saw in Elvis’s odd dancing style and swooping vocals an opportunity to fuse early blues with the ultra-modern rock’n’roll of the time. Signing Elvis was a masterstroke (for all concerned). It helped Phillips pay off his many debts, especially when he sold his contract with Elvis to RCA for a then astronomical figure. It released funds for Phillips to bring in to Sun Records a whole host of Memphis-based unsigned artists who went on to have worldwide hits for the label, including Jonny Cash.
Sun Studios is still a functioning studio to this day, but also runs tours, and Dean and I were excited to stand in the same room that Elvis himself had stood in all those years ago. The walls, tiled floor, glass partition to the producing suite, indeed the entire set-up was exactly as it was back in the 1950’s, even down to taped marks on the floor for where musicians and vocalists were required to stand. We were able to position ourselves at the same spot Elvis was in when he achieved his big break, and even played around with an original microphone from that time also. This helps illustrate the idea that the King lives on. Elvis may well have left the building, but you cannot help but feel connected to him and his contemporaries when you stand in the very room that started the story.
Our day of musical inspiration was rounded-up nicely by a trip to the Gibson guitar factory, just around the corner from Beale Street. As an owner of a cherry red Gibson Epiphone Riviera, this was obviously rather exciting, and our tour took us deep into the main factory warehouse where the guitars are manufactured. It was bizarre to look at the hollow, wooden shells that would soon become musical instruments, and my respect for Gibson has only been enhanced by witnessing the dedication that goes into making a guitar. It is a painstaking process, sped up by modern lathes, but still requiring a steady hand (and musical ear) by individual workers who test and re-test the final models, and paint on the legendary Gibson colours (sunburst, black, cherry red, and white) by hand, one guitar at a time. From learning about music and musicians earlier on in the day, it was only appropriate to finish off with a guide to how the instruments needed to produce such sounds and create such genius are made.
It was also a fitting end to our tour of musical America (apart from a sojourn in New Orleans to come). We had the razzmatazz of New York, with its show tunes and modern indie rock, the motown of Detroit and surrounding Michigan, the jazz and urban rap of Chicago, as well as Tennessee’s big three: country, blues and rock’n’roll in Nashville and Memphis. Singing our hearts out as we left this remarkable, inspiring and exciting state, Dean and I set a course for an even deeper southern landmark: Birmingham, Alabama, with its controversial socio-political history and divided present. From music, to politics and society: we’ll be teaching American Studies at universities across the UK upon our return.
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