MEMPHIS TRILOGY III – GOODNESS GRACIOUS

Music doesn’t lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music. ​

​Wisdom Wherever You Find It – Special Edition
 
Music doesn’t lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.      Jimi Hendrix
 
New York and Los Angeles have an abundance of opportunities found only in smaller measure elsewhere.  Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, rich in cultural and ethnic heritage. The streets of Boston and Philadelphia lead to universities and colleges in every direction. Atlanta, Houston, Miami and so many others in the southern tier of the United States have a capacity to reinvent history.  But Memphis seems to pack more into every square mile than any place else in this country I have ever seen.
 
In a connect-the-dots picture of every important aspect of United States history and culture, Memphis seems to be a pivotal intersection.  It sits on the Mississippi River, it lays claim to Johnny Walker (distilled at the other end of the state), it has an elegant hotel where ducks live, it has a roster of sports teams, it is central to the civil rights movement.  And then there is the music
 
I know that Nashville will claim to be Music City and that the “recording industry” is really in LA. Atlantic Records grew out of jazz and the precursor to soul music performed at the Turkish embassy in Washington, DC. Austin is a destination no musician can resist. But block for block, starting with Beale Street, you can’t beat Memphis.
 
My visit wasn’t long enough to tour all of the sites devoted to music in Memphis.  But we saw two of the most important ones – the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and Sun Studio where, arguably, rock and roll was born.
 
The two places could not be more different, but for one thing (you’ll have to wait for it).  Sun Studio was and is an old building outfitted by Sam Phillips who, with friends and associates, built a single recording studio with materials at hand.  He looked for music that would sell, and he was known to give a chance to local talent. He also rented out recording time to private citizens, like a kid named Elvis who wanted to record a birthday song for his mama. Eventually, that kid and another named Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison would get their start with records produced and distributed by Phillips and Sun Studio.
 
(BTW, he took the $35,000 he received for the rights to Elvis’s talent and invested it in a growing local franchise called Holiday Inn.  He did all right. Mama.)
 
Stax was a neighborhood hangout owned by Jim Stewart (St) and his sister Estelle Axton (ax) who were both music lovers. Estelle’s record store attracted lots of local kids who discovered each other’s music and then went on to make it.  Otis Redding, Booker T and the MGs, Ike and Tina Turner, Isaac Hayes, Sam and Dave, and a lot of other names you know got their start at Stax.  Soulsville, as the neighborhood came to be known, was Motown before Motown was Motown.
 
Stax collapsed as a business but survives today as a museum.  Sun gives tours all day and operates as a studio at night – you can stand where Elvis stood and howl into the microphone he used to record “That’s All Right Mama.”
 
So what is that common point for these two competitors (and, truth be told, most of the rest of the Memphis music scene)? In a racially divided American South, black and white seemed remarkably irrelevant in those formative days. The prevalence of country and hillbilly music among the white population were the strongest influences on emerging black musicians. The church-based gospel songs and African rhythms embedded in the music of black musicians were used unselfconsciously by the pioneers of white rock and roll.  The music did not lie.
 
When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, the easy relationship among the communities of musicians changed, just like the rest of the country. The change that music carries is not always what we might want, but always holds the potential for our better inclinations.
 
And I think it is true of Memphis itself. The pervasiveness of music in this intensely rich community which is similar in culture to Jackson, Little Rock, and Birmingham -- all spitting distance away – means that there is a model of appreciation and collaboration you could find at the mostly-white Sun Studio and the mostly black Stax.  Music doesn’t lie.
 
Imagine if we could live into that change in the world.  Goodness gracious.