Did you also know? — We might not be alone. As everyone’s probably already heard, a Google employee dude was recently fired for releasing the transcript from his conversation with LaMDA, an AI he believes is conscious (it insists it has a soul and imagines itself as a “a glowing orb of energy floating in mid-air”). Google doesn’t want to recognize its rights… Is it a person or is it property? Heard that one before.
Did you ALSO know? — After Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) dropped out of high school and met her husband working for a drilling company, they founded Shooters Grill, a restaurant in Rifle, Colorado, where staff members are encouraged to openly carry firearms.
The Memphis Blues Again
Finally in Memphis again, for the first time, and it’s a day’s drive through South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama (I-20), followed by a slight northwestern tilt up through Mississippi and into Memphis, there in the far corner of Tennessee on the east bank of the One River to Rule Them All.
Let it be known: driving through Alabama’s thicc summer heat after an early Whataburger stop and just finishing Just Mercy is deadly for gastric. The honey-butter biscuits are good, but a burger, also? And those highway-side Confederate outposts every hundred miles? It really reifies things. We had to dig deep and fall back on Robert Johnson, Lightin’ Hopkins, and death penalty podcasts.
Listening to the blues in preparation for the city of blues itself: Memphis, Tennessee. The city, indeed, of music itself — from Elvis Presley to Three 6 Mafia. But then we think twice, because passing into Mississippi there’s a big sign and it says “Mississippi: the Birthplace of American Music,” and it’s like? Thought that was Tennessee. It’s all right though because our first stop in Memphis, Stax Records, clears things up.
Stax is an old recording studio-turned-museum (the way of things), and it was the mystical and prismatic bower out of which an entirely new genre of music emerged, music that came to be known as soul or Southern soul or whatever else you want to call it. From its founding in 1957 to shuttering in 1975, Stax recorded and released cocktails of gospel, funk, blues, and soul featuring Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, house band Booker T. & the M.G.’s, The Staple Singers, Carla Thomas, Albert King, and many, many more (Aretha lived nearby but never recorded at Stax). In so doing, it became a destination for musicians the world over.1 Stax’s one-studio setup and staffed musicians led to a certain musical coherence, and to a racial integration, apparently, that was way ahead of its time. By the time Stax closed in ‘75, the sounds they’d nursed and swaddled had already changed the world.
The first exhibit in Stax clears up the MS/TN confusion. It goes right to the source: the Black church in the Mississippi Delta. The exhibit has the preserved wooden frame and interior of an old church and a choir on the airwaves. It was out of this site of resistance that the holy, uplifting sounds and rhythms of gospel first flowed. The music that would eventually come to Memphis (TN) began somewhere deeper and further South, in the antebellum Delta (MS).
Blues came after the Civil War, with the relative increase in freedom for Black Americans, but it was concomitant with a life lived on the meanest of terms: Jim Crow on the heels of slavery, still working the same fields, no material changes for all the amending and emending. The plaques explain it like this: You take gospel music from the church and out into the sharecropping fields, secularize it, replace Jesus with the beloved, and you’ve got the blues, “the only truly American music.”
Blues came from work songs, spirituals, and the struggles of everyday life: putting food on the table, the departure of some man or woman you love. And it has elements like call-and-response, twelve-bar chord progressions, and the groove — but these terms don’t mean much if you’re not a musician. Put another way, blues is contained within a set form that loops back on itself, and it is out of this mournful, zen-like repetition that subtle variations, sudden illuminations, and deep emotional resonances leap forth. You know blues when you hear it. But hearing it’s one thing…
Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel. — Jimi Hendrix, Icarus of the Blues
And the blues that would inspire everyone from Miles Davis to Jerry Garcia, that underlies whole genres of music, from rock ‘n roll to R&B to funk, this blues was first crooned, wailed, and strummed in the Delta, in small towns just south of Memphis. There’s B.B. King himself, born on a plantation in Itta Bena and resident of Indianola (of the epic and eponymous album).
And Robert Johnson, who lived in Clarksdale and swapped his soul for some guitar skills in a crossroads deal somewhere outside of Martinsville. Re Mr. Johnson:
His 29 recorded songs are filled with metaphors of travel, with restlessness, with being pursued by the devil, and with sexual innuendo. Johnson personified the troubled but untamed spirit of Delta music; he went deeper into self-doubt and restless despair than any of his contemporaries…. He died at 27. — Plaque
Mr. Johnson was pure legend, with almost no biographical traces, but he influenced everything that came after, from Chuck Berry to Bob Dylan to the British Invasion — and not just with his guitar:
If I hadn't heard the Robert Johnson record when I did [circa 1963], there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down—that I wouldn't have felt free enough or upraised enough to write. [His] code of language was like nothing I'd heard before or since. — Bob Dylan
The route to white ears and a wider audience was northerly. The music that had been brewing in the fields of the Delta traveled to Memphis, the nearest metropolis and a city relatively more accepting of Black people than the surrounding ones, where it was recorded. Then it kept traveling north, along Highway 61, “the blues highway,” mirroring the Mississippi River, from Memphis, to St. Louis, and, finally, on to Chicago, Motown, and Muddy Waters, where the blues. went. electric. ⚡⚡⚡
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Music hasn’t been the only form of resistance, power, and beauty that Memphis has contributed to the world — the city also became a command-post and beacon in the Civil Rights movement, from fights to desegregate schools in the wake of Brown v. Board to decades-long electoral battles backed by the NAACP.
The National Civil Rights Museum is housed in the former Lorraine Hotel, site of MLK’s assassination. Dr. King was in Memphis in 1968 to support the Sanitation Workers’ Strike, and on April 3rd he delivered his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech:
Like anybody, I would like to live – a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
On April 4th, he was assassinated. The exterior of the hotel-turned-museum hasn’t been changed; his car’s outside his room and a wreath’s outside his door.
The museum’s exhaustive, beautiful, haunting, and inspiring. Someone in the museum asks if we’re okay. Uh, are you? Maybe we’ve got the blues.
Then there’s Overton Park, too, in the flesh, subject of numerous SCOTUS decisions, first in Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe (1971), where residents banded together to (successfully) challenge the Secretary of Transportation’s cursory approval of plans to build I-40 through the public park and Black homes, and, second, in City of Memphis v. Greene (1981), where a white community walled off a street facing the park and a Black community, Black residents sued (unsuccessfully), and Justice Stevens held that there was “no evidence that closing depreciated value of blacks’ property and [no evidence of a] discriminatory motive.” It looks great now, the park, albeit drooping under the humid heat like all the rest of us. Cars enter at 5 mph and head to various destinations:
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We pass by house after house with this distinctive, low-slung, buttressed porch architecture (with pillars sloping upwards) and finally arrive to the great brown Mississippi, which lies below interlooping freeways in the sky and a mahoosive silver pyramid bedecked with a Bass Pro logo. Must be a Hard Rock Cafe. We pass churches and Young Life Urban Centers of Hope alongside “Choices: Memphis Center for Reproductive Health.” Choices?
On one such street, all is forlorn and neglected until a busload of nondescript middle-aged white tourists spills out onto the empty sidewalk. They’re here for Sun Studio, or Sun Records, another historic music destination. B.B. King did his first records here, up from Indianola, MS. Howlin’ Wolf, too. And Johnny Cash (see: Walk the Line). But Elvis is the main selling point, and Graceland is just down the street.
For the tour of Sun Studio, they tell us how Ike Turner and Jackie Brenston jerry-rigged a broken amp by stuffing it with newspaper — and by chance made a scratchy guitar noise, creating “Rocket 88” which is considered the first rock ‘n roll song. How, after Elvis’ audition, the producer/owner went out back to smoke, unimpressed — and came running back in when he heard Elvis playing the blues, the rest being history.
The recording studio is unchanged from back then. Those flat square floor tiles. The V-shaped ceiling. A drumset U2 left behind from some Rattle and Hum sessions with B.B. King. And the original metal-grilled mic. Almost upsetting how sick it must have been.
The tour guide, who plays in an indie band and used to be a kindergarten teacher, lets us pose with the mic. The oldies in the crowd all guess his trivia questions. Like: the train-like chugga-chugga noise in “Walk the Line,” how is it made?2
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If Beale Street could talk nowadays, almost fifty years later, we don’t know what it would say. We wouldn’t. It’s like Bourbon Street 2.0, to our virgin eyes, with its neon signs, hustlers, cops, drinking in the streets, and live music — or rather, the bigger Bourbon St. is like Beale St. 2.0. The lit section of Beale Street stretches just a few blocks, and all else is quiet, empty, much of it shuttered, in disrepair… A Sunday night.
The museums and cultural landmarks in Memphis are surrounded by closed storefronts and dilapidated dwellings. The record studios that were once dynamite now sit in indolence, feeding off of ancient glories of the past. They’re getting by, but what about their neighbors?
But that’s wrapped up in a more general gripe we have about museums, the pinning of the thing wriggling on the wall (“that is not it, at all”), and you can learn more about it in our style guide — or through the history of the Hagia Sophia.
Anyway, generality breeds oversight.
Memphis, after all, is home to another young king in Ja Morant, an august king in Juicy J, and an Italian restaurant fit for kings in Dinos, if you’re ever passing through (not to mention countless soul food gems and a whole lotta other things that 24 hours didn’t lay bare — ikr? outrageous). And, we hate to lapse into Southern cliche, but what-all-the-studios-turned-museums-maybe-don’t-get is that Memphis’ history is not dead at all, it’s not even past. As a wise one once told us: just. pay. attention.
You can’t stand too long on holy land, though, so it’s across the River and on up a bluff into Arkansas. Per Rumi:
On the way to Mecca, many dangers: thieves, the blowing sand, only camel's milk to drink. Still each pilgrim kisses the black stone there with pure longing, feeling in the surface the taste of the lips he wants. This talk is like stamping new coins. They pile up, while the real work is done outside by someone digging in the ground.
What We Been Grokking
Rocky Mountain Oysters: it’s a delicacy. Maybe just Google it.
“The Red Scare”: it’s a podcast with the MSM-given epithet of “offensive.” The hosts, Dasha and Anna, are 30-somethings New Yorkers, self-described “bohemian layabouts,” with wit, irony, and hot takes to spare. Full of healthy disgust for the bourgeois and blasphemous departures from the party line.
Y Tu Mamá También (2001): it’s a magnificent movie directed by Alfonso Cuarón about desire, youth, betrayals, and a road trip.
The Beatles wanted to record Revolver at Stax, but word got out to America’s youth (who began planning a siege) and John dropped his “more popular than Jesus” line, so it didn’t happen.
They made the train noise by wrapping a dollar bill around the guitar strings to muffle them. For some reason drums were frowned upon. It works better with a twenty dollar bill.
Thanks for taking us to Memphis. The way you tell it, so elegantly, It tempts us to go….again, finally, for the first time.