OUR FIRST VISIT TO BEALE STREET, MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

 

Hernando de Soto Bridge over the Mississippi

Crossing the Mississippi River on the Hernando de Soto Bridge into Memphis, one gasps in respect to the power, swift current and sheer volume of the river, recognizing the death and destruction the overflow of its banks has caused over thousands of years.  

The Memphis skyline, including the familiar Pyramid, startles, because nothing in West Memphis on the Arkansas side gives any indication this big, serious city exists just across the river.

Downtown, white men in business suits scurry around, making money, while just a few blocks away, black women are raising kids in housing projects with laundry on the line.

Memphis has multiple personalities:  the mecca for pork barbecue with super-serious competitions,  the location of the famous Peabody Hotel with its streetwalking ducks, Mud Island, where promising musical genius Jeff Buckley drowned in 1997 and, of course, the home of Graceland, Sun Records and Elvis.

Yet, Memphis can never escape its bad aura for being the place Martin Luther King was killed just as Dallas can't shake its image of being the death place of JFK.

So far, I haven't mentioned the Blues, that unique form of music, along with Spirituals, created in the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta by Black slaves of white plantation owners, filtering into little juke joints all over the place, winding up on Beale Street by the 1890's.

The Beale Street area, dozens of blues clubs in old, two story brick, covered with neon lights, is so irresistible, you can't get out of the car fast enough.

We were drawn immediately into BB Kings Blues Club, but there are so many more, each with legit blues musicians.  Even on the street or between buildings, there are players just as good as those indoors, passing around a bottle of Jack Daniels while doing their thing.

Ruby Wilson

Our first time at BB's, we were enthralled with Ruby Wilson, Memphis's Queen of the Blues, with the bonus of Ruby's five year old granddaughter on a stool a few feet away mimicking grandma's every gesture, hand or facial, also singing every note.  

Since we stayed until closing that night, we got the added bonus of grandma handing the little girl the mic and watching this wonderfully poised and talented little one totally knock it out of the park.(Goodness, adding the years since that visit, the "little girl" in our story would now be 38)

That was the first of several trips to Beale Street, but we soon heard about the Blues in a concert venue called Memphis in May.

That will be the subject of our next segment.