No Sour Notes Are Heard in Memphis, Where W. C. Handy Gave Birth to the Beale Street Blues

I’ve seen the lights of gay Broadway,

Old Market Street down by Frisco Bay,

I’ve strolled the Prado,

I’ve gambled on the Bourse,

The seven wonders of the world I’ve seen,

And many are the places I have been,

Take my advice folks,

And see Beale Street first.

W. C. Handy wrote those words in 1916, immortalizing this city’s most famous thoroughfare in the “Beale Street Blues.”

The lyrics sang the praises of Handy’s lively hometown neighborhood.

Beale Street was where the jazz man created the blues while working its honky tonks as a young man with a trumpet and an ear for the melancholy music of the Mississippi Delta cotton fields just to the south.

Handy shaped and nurtured the sound and put it on paper--and America had its first original music.

In more modern times, the famous street went through a bad case of economic blues, along with the rest of downtown Memphis. Businesses and people moved to the suburbs, and the ornate buildings that were Beale’s nightspots, cafes, pawn shops and gambling parlors nearly fell before the wrecking ball.

Even The Peabody Hotel, a legendary Mid-South institution standing just a block off Beale (149 Union Ave., toll-free 800-732-2639 or 901-529-4000), shut down in the 1970s.

But the bad times are all behind the area now. It has been born again, thanks to almost $1 billion sunk into downtown development during the past decade.

The seven blocks of Beale are thriving as a National Historic District, and The Peabody, replete with its famous lobby fountain full of cavorting ducks, once again lives up to author/historian David Cohn’s 1935 description:

“The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of The Peabody and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg. The Peabody is the Paris Ritz, the Cairo Shepheard’s, the London Savoy.”

The hotel’s ducks began as a joke more than a half-century ago, but were such an instant hit with guests and passers-by that now a 50-foot red carpet is rolled out for them while a band plays John Philip Sousa’s “King Cotton March” each day as they waddle toward the fountain.

They live on the hotel’s rooftop in the “Royal Duck Palace,” described by its architects as “a fairy tale bird cage with banners flying.”

A short stroll from The Peabody is the personification of Memphis’ renaissance--Mud Island, an island that’s an all-Mississippi River learning experience, an elaborate complex of family attractions rising on mud salvaged from the river where visitors learn a good deal about “The Big Muddy”--the river’s history, its disasters, its folklore and about Memphis.

As for Memphis, the city boasts of being “The Home of America’s Music. Handy wrote his first “blues notes” for a local politician’s campaign in 1909. Forty-five years later, a young delivery truck driver wandered into an unpretentious little building on Union Avenue to pay money and record a song for his mother.

His name was Elvis Presley.

Presley’s was an altogether new sound, blending blues, gospel, and country and rhythm into what Sun Studios owner-operator Sam Phillips recognized as being “something mighty special--mighty sellable.”

The presence, the mystique, of Elvis is everywhere in his adopted hometown. The kid from Tupelo, Miss., made a down-and-out, pay-as-you-record studio a hallowed place where throngs stand in line to take daily tours.

They’re primarily conducted in the peeling, cracking soundproof room where Presley and such subsequent rockers as Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash and Charlie Rich produced 45 hit records during a nine-year span.

January, Elvis’ birth month (he was born Jan. 8), and August, the month he died (Aug. 16), particularly lure both the adoring and the curious to Memphis. Their pilgrimages take them to Sun Studios, Presley’s larger-than-life statue on Beale Street, not far from Handy Park, where the blues king has his own statue, and even to Presley’s old high school, Humes.

The annual Elvis Presley International Tribute Week takes place next year from Aug. 12-18. There’s a full schedule of daily events for the faithful at Presley’s beloved home, Graceland (3717 Elvis Presley Blvd., 800-238-2000 or 901-332-3322).

Elvis imitators are among the potpourri of entertainers in mid-town Memphis, at popular Overton Square. There’s an upscaled array of music halls, shops and restaurants there, plus a professional theater.

But the queen of theaters in Memphis is the Orpheum Theatre, at the corner of Main and Beale streets. That grand old vaudeville house has been lovingly restored and transformed into a glittering center for the performing arts, regularly offering Broadway shows, concerts and operas.

“I’d rather play the Orpheum than anywhere,” said blues favorite B.B. King, who came out of the Mississippi Delta to get his singing start on Beale in the 1950s.

Still on Beale, the finest blues performers entertain nightly at the Rum Boogie Cafe and Club Royale, and at Lou’s Place, a few blocks from Beale at 94 S. Front St.

On weekends, there’s also Mr. Handy’s Blues Hall, next door to the Rum Boogie, while impromptu performances out along Beale give the area an ongoing street-party atmosphere.

The fun continues in A. Schwab’s Dry Goods Store (163 Beale St.) , a virtually unchanged Beale fixture since 1876. Schwab’s slogan is: “If you can’t find it here, you’re better off without it.”

Bursting with civic pride and never short on claims, Memphis also declares itself to be “The Capital of Southern Cooking” as well as “Pork Barbecue Capital of the World.” Vivian Holley, a writer and food expert from Roswell, Ga., agrees with the barbecue boast: “It is the best I’ve experienced.”

Food is an essential part of the 150 or so special events held throughout the city each year, and especially during the grandest fete of them all--the Memphis in May International Festival.

This monthlong extravaganza, which begins next year on Friday, April 27, honors a different country annually and attracts more than a million visitors, who enjoy such doings as the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest.

Of the 100-plus barbecue outlets in Memphis, the most popular with locals is a rambling museum/beer hall in a restaurant called The Rendezvous (52 S. Second St., 901-523-2746).

Cotton was king long before Presley in Memphis, and huge profits from the crop led to the building of dozens of great mansions throughout the city.

A few are open to the public in Victorian Village, a downtown array of architectural masterpieces. Heritage continues at the Pink Palace Museum (3050 Central Ave.), built and initially stocked after a bequest from the man who started America’s first self-service grocery store in the city.

The famed Kress Collection of Renaissance art is housed in the Brooks Museum of Art (1905 Overton Park Ave.), currently undergoing a space-doubling expansion. There’s rare Impressionist art and porcelain at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens (4339 Park Ave.), and Memphis State University’s Institute of Egyptian Art and Archeology has some of the rarest works this side of Cairo.

Jim Cooper is one of several instructors at the National Ornamental Metal Museum (374 W. California Ave.), a facility high above the Mississippi and dedicated to the preservation of the art and craft of metal-working. Cooper’s after-hours classes in Repair and Creative Ironwork usually are filled to capacity.

Other looks into Memphis’s colorful past are available at the Chucalissa Indian Village (1987 Indian Village Drive), a working reconstruction of an ancient Choctaw community, and at the Magevney House (198 Adams Ave.), home of the city’s first schoolmaster in the 1830s.

The National Civil Rights Center is scheduled to open in 1991 on the site of the Lorraine Motel, 406 Mulberry St., where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. It will have an interpretive education center and memorabilia tracing the nation’s Civil Rights movement.

When you think you’ve seen it all, Memphis offers more. Nature at its Mid-South best can be experienced at the Memphis Botanic Gardens (750 Cherry Road), now undergoing a $20-million expansion, and at the Lichterman Nature Center, a quiet place in the heart of town at 5992 Quince Road.

There’s Libertyland (940 Early Maxwell Blvd.), a patriotic theme park near the Liberty Bowl football stadium. Both structures are adjacent to the sprawling Mid-South Fairgrounds.

In the eastern part of the city, Adventure River Waterpark (6800 Whitten Bend Cove) is one of the largest aquatic parks in the country, and the new Memphis International Motorsports Park (5500 Taylor Forge Road) is the biggest multi-purpose racing complex in the world.

The Overton Park Shell, in 342-acre Overton Park, with its spring-through-fall programs of blues, rock ‘n’ roll and jazz, has the double-distinction of being the Mid-South’s oldest outdoor theater and the site of Presley’s first live performance.

But wherever you go in Memphis, there’s one thing you’ll see for sure--friendly faces. And, perhaps you’ll find yourself telling others what Handy did in “The Memphis Blues”:

Folks, I’ve just been down . . . down to Memphis town. That’s where the people smile ... smile on you all the while. Hos-pi-tal-i-ty, they were good to me.

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For more information on travel to Memphis, contact the Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau, 50 N. Front St., Suite 450, Memphis, Tenn. 38103, (901) 576-8181.