“Beyond Beale Street”: Postcards from Memphis Part

Sam Phillip's Sun Studio, currently a museum and a studio for rent

Memphis, Tennessee like its popular sister city downriver, trades on its culinary and music heritage. Elvis, Al Green and Johnny Cash, among many other musicians all began their careers in the Bluff City at Sun Studio, and institutions like Interstate and Rendezvous Barbeque have secured the town as a Mecca for smoked pork.

As a tourist, you have the convenience of one stop shopping for all things Memphis right in one location: Beale Street. And because you have thought of nothing but smoke ribs or beef tips since you arrived, you enter Beale Street through the doors of the Blues City Café.

Despite warning signs all around like the name itself, the affected diner décor and the all-things-for-everyone-menu (“Low Carb corner”, and “For the Kids”), you sit down and load up on the “world’s best temales”, and do your best with the respectable but not life changing baby backs.

In the end it all hits the spot.

You ask for the bill and realize that the cost to “put the South in your mouth”, as mandated at the door, has a very high-Yankee after taste.


From there on it is bar crawl and the Blues City Café has set the tone for this place.

You work your way down from bar to bar listening to fun but not great blues and juke joint performances. The crowd is middle aged and suburban. They are drinking more than they should and there is a lot of khaki against khaki on the dance floor. You continue to drink to make sense of it all, and by the time you get to the statue of W.C Handy, you ask yourself two questions: “How did I get so wasted?” and “How the hell did I arrive at Disney World?”

You may be drunk, but you are not mistaken, you have arrived at the Epcot Center for blues and barbeque.

It might seem like a bait and switch, but Beale Street is not a contrivance of the chamber of commerce. It is a real historical site of social and cultural significance for American music and African Americans. What we know as Memphis Blues style (BB King, Albert King, Muddy Waters) emerged from Beale Street and the groundwork of bandleader W.C Handy. Early civil rights activist, suffragette and co-founder of the NAACP Ida B. Wells published her anti-segregationist paper “Free Speech” on the same street.

In 1977 Congress officially declared Beale Street “Home of the Blues”. The official declaration helped boost an ailing inner city’s pride and positioned Beale Street to become the tourist draw that it is today for Memphis.

And so you stand there looking up at the famous local music venues such as The Hard Rock Café and BB King’s Blues Club and Restaurant and witness the commercial compromise that saved Beale Street, the result, like on Height, Bleeker and Bourbon Streets, is caricature of its former self.

You soon realize that kitsch brings both life and death to a place.

You now hear music in a different part of the city, and smell more barbeque and so you leave.

Now out of Beale Street, you have the rest of this wonderful, under appreciated city, all to yourself. Well, kind of all to yourself. Memphians also love to go out.




Downtown Memphis for the most part has been overlooked by gentrification. What remains is an urban façade of another era. On certain stretches you can make believe that you are back in the early 1970’s thanks to the backdrop of department stores, peanut vendors, and tobacconists. The signage and murals are not the wards of the historical society. They have just hung around.





"Why wait? Open Your Account Today", encourages the card.



Memphis welcomes the rest of world in May for the The Memphis in May Festival.

Live music and the International Barbeque Festival along the river celebrate this town's best assets as well as recognizing that there is barbeque from places beyond its river bank.

Upcoming Postcards from Memphis, Beyond Beale Street: For barbeque, the cab driver knows best....

and Graceland, a place of obsession and great carpet.