Memphis

Since the start of the twentieth century, Memphis has been a meeting place for black musicians from the Delta and beyond. During the Twenties, its downtown pubs, clubs and street corners were alive with the sound of the blues. Jug bands, in which singers were given a bass accompaniment by a musician blowing across the neck of a jug, were a specialty. Several songs by Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers – such as Walk Right In – became hits for white artists during the folk revival of the Sixties. Bukka White, Memphis Slim and guitarist Memphis Minnie appeared at nightspots like Mitchell’s Hotel and Pee Wee’s Saloon, all long since defunct. After World War II, young musicians and radio DJs such as Bobby Bland and B.B. King experimented by blending the traditional blues sound with jazz, adding electrical amplification to create rhythm’n’blues. White promoter Sam Phillips started Sun Records in 1953, employing Ike Turner as a scout to comb the Beale Street clubs for new talent. Among those whom Turner helped introduce to vinyl were his own girlfriend, Annie Mae Bullock (later Tina Turner), Howlin’ Wolf and Little Junior Parker, whose Mystery Train was Sun’s first great recording. In 1953, the 18-year-old Elvis Presley hired the studio to record My Happiness, supposedly as a gift for his mother, and something prompted Phillips’ assistant Marion Keisker to file away his details. The next summer, Phillips called Elvis back to the studio to cut That’s All Right, and thereby set out towards proving his much-quoted conviction that “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars”. Phillips swiftly dropped his black artists and signed other white rockabilly singers like Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis to make classics such as Blue Suede Shoes and Great Balls of Fire. Elvis – who in the words of Carl Perkins had the advantage that he “didn’t look like Mr Ed, like a lot of the rest of us” – was soon sold on to RCA (for just $35,000), and didn’t record in Memphis again until 1969, when at Chips Moman’s American Studios he produced the best material of his later career, including Suspicious Minds. In the Sixties and early Seventies, Memphis’s Stax Records provided a rootsy alternative to the poppier sounds of Motown. This hard-edged southern soul was created by a multiracial mix of musicians, Steve Cropper’s fluid guitar complementing the blaring Memphis Horns. The label’s first real success was Green Onions by studio band Booker T and the MGs; further hits followed from Otis Redding (Try A Little Tenderness), Wilson Pickett (Midnight Hour), Sam and Dave (Soul Man) and Isaac Hayes (Shaft). The label eventually foundered in acrimony; the last straw for many of its veteran soulmen was the signing of the British child star Lena Zavaroni for a six-figure sum. For gospel music in Memphis.

Memphis has been renowned for its gospel music since the Thirties, when Rev Herbert Brewster wrote Mahalia Jackson’s Move On Up a Little Higher. Following a religious revelation, the consummate soul stylist Al Green, who achieved chart success for Hi Records with hits like Let’s Stay Together and Tired of Being Alone, has since the early 1980s ministered at his own Full Gospel Tabernacle, at 787 Hale Rd in the leafy suburb of Whitehaven. Visitors are welcome at the 11am Sunday services; continue a mile south of Graceland, then turn west (phone ahead to check he’s in town; t 901/396-9192; w www.algreen.com). While they’re very much church services rather than concerts, Green remains a charismatic performer and he does sing, backed by a smoking soul band. For more on Memphis music.