One year after the United States celebrated its 200th birthday, the U.S. Congress declared (no hurry, boys) Beale Street is the official Home of the Blues. The bill was sponsored by Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. in 1977. This was a nice gesture, but hardly a newsflash. Everybody who knows anything about the blues knows the blues was/were born on Beale Street in downtown Memphis, Tennessee more than 100 years ago. Whether Congress agrees with them or not.
It wouldn’t be until 1983 that the first bars and restaurants in the Beale Street Entertainment District opened for business. Today, it’s the section closed to vehicles from Second Street to Fourth Street, blocked off by those short and wide metal posts they call bollards. Special ordinances allow bars to serve alcohol until 5 a.m. and Beale Street is the only area in the city where people are allowed to stroll around with liquor, beer, and wine in their hands. You can even walk around drunk and/or stoned as long as you do nothing stupid. Visiting Beale Street to hear the blues? Poke around and you’ll find it among the rock, fusion, soul, jazz, gospel, and reggae clubs.
Let’s Take a Closer Look at Beale Street in Memphis
Those who backed the new Beale Street predicted it would soon become the centerpiece of Memphis nightlife and a top tourist attraction.
J.T., a crusty old-time Memphian, scoffed at the idea.
“Beale Street was gambling, opium dens, whores, pickpockets, pawnshops, knifings, and shootings,” he said, adding that “A pseudo-Beale Street won’t be anything more than a miniature theme park, a carnival midway to fleece the rubes.”
While researching this topic, I spoke with a lifelong Memphis musician.
Coolguy is a blues musician who played in several clubs on the new Beale Street. He told me it was a real hot spot for a time. Some came to hear the blues, he said, but most of the crowds associate Memphis with the early days of Rhythm and Blues (Note to Young Moderns: What they call R&B today ain’t).
People came from far and wide to hear Eddie Floyd.
Coolguy calls them the Knock On Wood crowd. They came to hear Sam and Dave Hold On, I’m Coming.* They came to Beale Street to hear Booker T. and the M.G.s play Green Onions and Isaac Hayes get the Shaft. Right on. Can you dig it? They came to hear Wilson Pickett. When the band plays Midnight Hour, everybody gets up and dances.
They came to hear Otis Redding’s Try a Little Tenderness, and to feel the near-eternal presence of Rufus Thomas, Walkin’ the Dog and doing the Funky Chicken in his hot pink hotpants and white go-go boots. It was a special brand of R&B that featured powerful horn sections and driving bass, organ, and drums. You might well call it Southern Funk and Soul Music.
They came because they were as Tired of Being Alone as the Reverend Al Green. Just call the Staples Singers and (They’ll) Take You There.
What was Beale Street like long ago?
W.C. Handy is credited by many as being the Father of the Blues. What is more likely is that he shaped and popularized the blues. In those days, no Southern music was written down. Handy was undoubtedly the first to publish blues music. There is no doubt Handy was the first of two black musicians who put Beale Street on the musical map.
A 1917 New York Times article opened with:
“W. C. Handy titillated the nation with ‘Beale Street Blues,’ his song about the true-life Sodom and Gomorrah in downtown Memphis. “If Beale Street could talk,” he wrote, “married men would have to take their beds and walk.”
Ed Sullivan called W.C. Handy the Dean of Tin Pan Alley.
He introduced Handy playing his famous St Louis Blues live on tv before a studio audience in 1949. You can see and hear it here:
Long before it became Beale Street it was Beal Avenue.
In 1841, Memphis had fewer than 10,000 residents. Beale Street’s cobblestones started at the edge of the Mississippi River and went uphill for several blocks of two- and three- story buildings. There, black and white shopkeepers lived above their street-level stores that catered to the river trade. Beale Street ended less than two miles away at mansions in the suburbs. In between is the area most think of as being Beale Street.
In the years leading up to the Civil War, Beale Street was the most wide-open section of a wide-open town.
Prostitution was a big draw. Black and white prostitutes serviced men who had money, both black and white. White men fornicating with black women had been a Southern tradition since the earliest days of slave laborers. Black men fornicating with white women was the terror of polite Southern society and how the Ku Klux Klan got started.
Remember, this was in a period in Dixie history when Negroes (period-correct) were lynched for in any way offending white women, the delicate flowers of the South.
One of the reason so many have long been drawn to Memphis from surrounding areas is because it’s more isolated than most cities of more than a million.
To the South, the closest big city is New Orleans, 358 miles away. To the north, it’s St. Louis (283 miles). Dallas is to the west (455 miles) and Atlanta to the east (384 miles). For millions, Memphis was the nearest bright lights, big city.
Fort Pillow was a Union outpost 40 miles from Memphis.
It was occupied by black Union soldiers during the Civil war. Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest attacked them. Overwhelmed by the Rebs’ numbers and ferocity, the soldiers surrendered. Forrest’s men killed 200 of them, setting off riots in Memphis.
The city surrendered to Union soldiers.
It was the first Southern city to do so since Richmond fell, and the source of racist Memphians’ shame ever since.
The Civil War transformed Memphis into one of the country’s great centers of prostitution.
Riverboats brought travelers from both North and South, and boats always stopped at Memphis. In addition, the South’s first east-west railroad connected the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River. Dignitaries signified the completion of the line by pouring a pail of clear ocean water into the muddy brown Mississippi.
After the Civil War, many brothels had both white and black prostitutes servicing both white and black customers, and you know already what the racists thought about that.
The elite of colored <sic> brothels were patronized exclusively by white men.
With no more slave women to rape, wealthy white men turned to the “fancy girls.” It is safe to say that at the beginning of the twentieth century, vice dominated the economy and the culture of Memphis. It became a city of sex tourism.
Reformers were elected on their promises to clean up the city.
Clean up the city? No way. Memphis was always a rough and rowdy city of pleasure. The city had a steady income stream from licensed and taxed brothels and collected plenty more in bribes.
But there was too much graft flowing into too many hands to put a stop to it.
There was no red-light district because brothels were everywhere. City officials confined it to isolated areas in predominately black areas. And wouldn’t you know it, Beale Street became the center of all this vice.
P. Wee’s
This notorious saloon was grittier than most, often filled with drunks sleeping off the night before. Always open, it became the place traveling musicians came to see what was happening. Combos and orchestras toured the South, always stopping in Memphis when they could to find out who’s playing where, who’s hiring, have I got any mail, gossip, and all the concerns of contract laborers.
Then the Great Depression stripped Beale Street bare.
It would be deserted for years, windows boarded up, with one exception. A. Schwab’s was the only business that never left the street.
Schwab’s was a Beale Street dry goods store.
It is now online, too, selling the usual vulgarisms alongside souvenirs, novelties, clothing, and toys. Recently I read that they’ve moved the Mojo Department downstairs. It’s the place where people get their Moon Pies and spiritual supplies, featuring counters and shelves full of all manner of jinx removers, hex makers, Lucky Number Dream Books, aerosol cans of Lucky Gambler’s Spray, and lots of voodoo. For years I did my Christmas shopping in the Mojo Department.
In the 1950s, Beale Street became known as the place that gave birth to a new kind of music.
It was built from pieces of African chants, gospel music as sung by slaves, a bit of county music, and a dash of rockabilly. It was invented by blacks but they called it the blues.
Remember there were two black musicians who put Beale Street on the musical map?
The second one was a young boy from Itta Bena, Mississippi. A self-taught guitarist, Riley hitchhiked north to Memphis in 1946, when he turned 21. He caught a break when he performed on a live radio show using his real name, Riley King. His reputation rose and he played steady gigs after that, becoming known by all as the “Beale Street Blues Boy.” He changed his name to Riley Blues Boy King before ending up with the name we know – B.B. King.
King toured the country on the Chitlin Circuit, black-owned dance halls and theaters.
This informal network of got its name from chitterlings, the small intestine of pigs, boiled, then fried. After 20 years of playing to black-only audiences, King began to play for white crowds. His biggest hit, The Thrill Is Gone, is the blues masterpiece that made him world-famous. Ironically, some say, black listeners left the music of their heritage for blues for soul and disco.
True to the roots of his fame, King returned to Beale Street to play in the first Beale Street Music Festival in 1977. He also opened BB King’s Blues Club on the new Beale Street.
When King left town, he took the blues with him to Chicago, where it took on an edge. Beale Street fell into disrepair in the early 1960s and much of it was bulldozed for a never-implemented urban renewal project. And well, you know the rest.
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* Sharp-eyed music veterans saw M.G.s Duck Dunn and Steve Cropper playing behind Sam and Dave.
Bonus
The Memphis city limits border on Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi.
All three were slave states (cotton, cotton, and cotton), thus Memphis was the center of the slave trade. The biggest slave trader of them all was Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. As of a few years ago, the founding of Memphis as a center for the slave trade is no longer included in Memphis public school Social Studies classes.
