But the historical fact is that it happened in Memphis. Sam Phillips’s description of his entry into the city in 1939 suggests one of the main reasons. Following a path blazed by thousands of young men growing up in the backwoods South, the sixteen-year-old Phillips “went to Memphis with some friends in a big old Dodge. We drove down Beale Street in the middle of the night and it was rockin’! It was so active—musically, socially. God, I loved it!”
If you were looking for good times, Memphis offered plenty. Suspended midway between brutal reality and regional hallucination, Memphis occupies a strange place in the psychic landscape of the region. The Mississippi Delta, it is said, begins on Catfish Row in Vicksburg and ends in the lobby of Memphis’s Peabody Hotel. In the semifictional geography created by William Faulkner, who grew up just down the road in Oxford, Mississippi, Memphis provides a safety valve for the tensions created by the hard-shell religious fundamentalism and white supremacist orthodoxy of the small-town white South. When they aren’t running off to the wilderness to arm-wrestle enormous mythic animals, Faulkner’s Mississippians love nothing better than road-tripping up to Memphis for a few days in the brothels and gambling dens. Like the Harlem where a young Malcolm X made his living guiding whites to whatever sexual adventures they could imagine, Memphis revealed the white obsession with segregation as a pious mask over a moral vacuum. As in Harlem—and Berry Gordy’s Detroit for that matter—the bottom line was the dollar bill.
Memphis had a different sort of appeal for the black musicians who brought the musical forms from their Delta homes to the big city. Although black Memphis as a whole was never affluent, it offered far more opportunity than the even poorer rural places most of them came from. Providing semipublic interracial spaces that just weren’t available in Sunflower County, Mississippi, or Osceola, Arkansas, Beale Street gave black musicians a chance to cash in on the white folks’ desire to walk on the wild side.
The comparatively open racial atmosphere that brought black musicians together with both black and white audiences on Beale Street hadn’t happened by accident. Unique in the Jim Crow South, the white power structure in Memphis depended on black votes and black money. The central figure in Memphis politics from 1910 until his death in 1954 was E. H. “Boss” Crump, head of a machine as powerful as Richard Daley’s in Chicago or Fiorello La Guardia’s in New York.
When Crump arrived in Memphis just after the turn of the century, the city’s politics followed the classic Southern pattern: aristocratic white planters manipulated racial animosities to set blacks against poor whites, who were only too eager to be manipulated. Often the aristocrats relied on sanctimonious appeals to religious purity, invoking the ideals of “pure white womanhood” and the “white Christian nation.” Such appeals deflected attention from the Delta’s economic system, which enabled Mississippi to rank near the top of the list of millionaires per capita at the same time it held a firm grip on its status as the poorest state in the nation.
Recognizing the economic reality of the city’s underground economy—based on gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging—Crump organized a coalition of white and black businessmen with Beale Street interests. Whatever their color, the entrepreneurs were sick of the periodic crackdowns ordered by politicians seeking to maintain their standing with the good Christian voters. The respectable black citizens of Memphis, every bit as dedicated to their churches as their white neighbors, viewed Beale Street with Godfearing suspicion. They most definitely wanted to keep their daughters as far as possible from its dens of sin. But they knew that Crump was preferable to the Klan. If nothing else, he needed their votes to maintain political control. It probably didn’t hurt that W. C. Handy, the “Father of the Blues,” had written Crump’s campaign song.
Rising to power with the support of this bizarre coalition, Crump guaranteed tolerance of the black- and white-owned businesses—mostly bars and brothels—that operated side by side, drawing a mixed crowd to the two-block free zone just off the Mississippi waterfront. Although segregation remained nominally in effect, there was plenty of crossing of racial lines. The Memphis whorehouses were the only ones in the South which condoned black men’s access to white prostitutes, though only after three a.m., by which time white men had presumably had sufficient time to exercise their racial privilege. In the Beale Street clubs, Sleepy John Estes, Furry Lewis, and Memphis Minnie took the blues songs from the Delta and reshaped them into something new while playing for customers of all races. It was a perfect workshop for Handy, who deserves his title only in the sense that he wrote down and marketed a form that was taking shape all around him.
If Handy’s claim was ambiguous, Memphis had certainly earned its designation as the “murder capital of America.” In part because Crump’s police tolerated the open sale of cocaine, drug addiction was epidemic. Plenty of dark corners were available for anyone eager to explore the night side of the Southern psyche. Beale Street simmered and sometimes exploded. The 1938 murder of eight prominent white citizens by three black men in a Beale Street turf war precipitated a public outcry that closed down the old wide-open Beale Street. But Memphis musicians never quite forgot the vibrant interracial scene that would resurface at Sam Phillips’s Sun Studio in the fifties.
However exhilarating Beale Street could be, black folks recognized its limits. If Faulkner’s Memphis signified an ambiguous sort of freedom for small-town whites, black novelist Richard Wright’s autobiographical Black Boy portrays the city as something more like purgatory, a halfway house for Delta blacks on their way to Chicago. If moral or sexual lines blurred in Memphis, a black man or woman had to be a fool to trust it very far. For anyone paying attention, Memphis history provided plenty of warnings against accepting white fantasies at face value. In 1892, the white citizens of Memphis responded to black journalist Ida B. Wells’s antilynching campaign, during which she suggested white women might conceivably be sexually attracted to black men, by destroying the offices of her Free Speech newspaper and driving her out of the city.
A half century later, the civil rights movement consistently avoided Memphis, preferring to deal with white supremacy in the small towns of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. Martin Luther King’s advisers expressed grave reservations about his decision to engage the garbage collectors’ strike, a decision that took him to the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. There was no shortage of whites who thought James Earl Ray was a hero, many of them the same ones who, angry over the Kennedy administration’s role in the desegregation of Ole Miss, had cheered the news of JFK’s death in Dallas. They had company, of course, throughout the nation.
In Memphis, then, white supremacy coexisted with the most fluid interracial musical heritage in the South (with the complicated exception of New Orleans). The blues were a way of life, not just a musical form. Despite the money black businesses made under Crump, many black citizens simply kept their distance from Beale Street and everything it represented. Holding firmly to the church that provided their rock in a weary land, they tried their best to keep their families and communities together. It wasn’t easy: prostitution was by far the most lucrative employment available to black women; their brothers often preferred to take their chances on the street rather than scrambling for manual labor in an economy that didn’t pay white folks much. The black community was all too familiar with lost souls; it knew that every minute of every day someone you loved was standing at the crossroads, wondering which way to go.
That’s one of the reasons why the blues and gospel have such a complicated relationship in Southern soul. When Southern singers strike out to make some money, they’re more likely to sing about sex than salvation, violence than the promised land. They don’t always bother to distinguish love from hate or sex from death. But almost all of them learned to sing in church. When Wilson Pickett testifies to that moment in the midnight hour when his love comes tumbling down, he’s remembering the savior waiting for the sinner in the dark night of the soul. When Sam Moore and Dave Prater whipped their listeners into a frenzy of call and response, the energy came right out of the sanctified church.
Describing