WALKING NG IN MEMPHIS A MUSICAL MAP

Tony Russell takes a leisurely stroll round the Grand Junction of Southern music

Memphians believe they live in a city like no other in the United States. They are right. All the railroad lines of Southern music intersect here: blues and gospel, country, rockabilly and rock’n’roll. On the platforms of this imaginary station, Elvis Presley rubs shoulders with B.B. King, Johnny Cash with Rufus Thomas, the Spirit Of Memphis Quartet with Jerry Lee Lewis… Gus Cannon with Ace Cannon, Booker White with Booker T.

We venerate musicians like these, but in the days when they were active, many of them were not objects of civic pride. The River City had bigger catfish to fry. “Memphis,” wrote the social historian David Cohn in 1935, “is the metropolis of the [Mississippi] Delta. It is its financial, social, and cultural capital… To Delta citizens in search of light it glows with the beauty of the honey-coloured pile of the Acropolis seen at sunrise from a high Athenian hill.”

Had he seen it 50 years later, he would have had to revise that lyrical description. In the 70s and 80s a fog of decay and neglect hung over downtown Memphis, and its status was threatened by wealthier Southern cities like Nashville and Atlanta. Today, though, things are looking up. The fog has been blown away, and the downtown lights are coming on again.

But even if Memphis is not …

by Tony Russell
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