"Birthplace of Blues and Rock n Roll" Memphis by atufft

Located on a bend in the Mississippi River, Memphis is the most important city on the river between St Louis, to the north, and New Orleans, to the south. The city is clearly in the south, and yet it's cosmopolitan style makes for easy mixing of white and black. This is the place where MLK was assassinated, but if one goes into any breakfast diner around town, the camaraderie, and frankly variety of skin color tones, reveals a sincere desire to celebrate life together.

This surprising lifestyle resembles the creole culture of New Orleans, but was actually a much more recent development because Memphis was founded a hundred years later than New Orleans by white plantation owner, Andrew Jackson, and the first immigrants were mostly white Germans and Irish. The unique tolerance of white and black integration, which contrasts with other southern cities, including Nashville, Atlanta, or Jackson, MS, is apparently almost exclusively related to musical heritage that began during the late nineteenth century, a development that occurred for several reasons.

First, by the early 1900's agriculture in the region surrounding the port at Memphis was mostly a mixture of small poor white and black sharecropper farms, where white folk appreciated early on the musical talents of neighboring black laborers. In contrast, further east or south, black sharecroppers competed with larger corporate plantation farms owned by wealthy whites who had little or no contact with black culture. Second, following the yellow fever epidemic of 1878, newly emancipated black businessmen purchased large parts of Beale Street in downtown Memphis. Third, in part as a result of this new black business wealth, white owned dance halls hired black musicians who were raised on slave folk chants and gospel church music in the delta area, and these venues were the first in the south to allow whites and blacks to co-mingle on the ground floor seating area. Finally, after WWII, middle class and wealthy white youth flatly rejected Nashville country music as hick and unsophisticated, demanding instead popular releases by black musicians be played at parties, nightclubs, and in juke boxes.

Thus, during this transition, black master blues guitarists, like the legendary Robert Johnson, who came up from the Mississippi delta region into Memphis to perform to larger mixed black and white audiences, began to experiment with electric guitars and amplified sound systems, ultimately turning their melancholy blues chants into powerful and soulful repetitions to which anyone--white or black--could dance. At this point numerous blues, jazz, and rock n roll artists comingled on Beale Street, celebrating within their lyrics the very name of Memphis.

Main Street Trolley in Memphis

Across the Mississippi River is West Memphis, Arkansas, which has one of the largest collection of corporately owned truck stops in the USA. This place is notorious for hookers and mediocre food, and the fuel prices aren't really that cheap either. And yet, it's hard to avoid a stay here when traveling east or west along I-40. Just 5 miles east is the birthplace of rock-N-roll, but until recently I couldn't figure out how to get into the city with my big rig.

Front Street exit off the I-40 bridge is a No Truck ramp, and frankly I don't like the risk of just randomly taking some other exit and to doubling back along the surface streets in hopes of finding Beale Street. I called the Memphis Transit system hoping for a bus connection, but the transit system doesn't reach West Memphis but once or twice a day for commute runs. I called taxi companies, and learned that the interstate nature of the fare made the 5 mile ride a $40- one-way trip---Too expensive for me.

Then, I talked to a local trucker hauling pallets, and with the help of Google Earth on my iPad, he showed me the exact route I should to take in order to park the truck and trailer downtown, and then walk into Beale Street--the primary tourist center in Memphis. See my transportation tip for these details, but needless to say, my wife and I were able to enjoy a couple hours of fun just after dusk in this truly great city of music.