Goin’ Down to Memphis : The Mississipi River Town Known for Blues ‘n’ Barbecue Lights Up With New Civic Enticements

Five o’clock on a Tuesday, and the river creeps south along the city’s western edge. Graceland expels its masses and closes its ornate gates for the night. Along Front Street, where Tom Cruise’s on-screen law office stands in “The Firm,” the cotton brokers have finished the day’s faxes. The aroma of barbecue rises. In the clubs on Beale Street, the music will soon begin.

But here in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, it’s already show time.

A 50-foot red carpet is unrolled. A Gray Line tour guide arrives with his clients. Murmurs ripple through the crowd. Flashbulbs pop. Children jostle for position. A Sousa march swells on the sound system. This is not a speech or a ribbon-cutting. This is one of those southern eccentricities William Faulkner used to write about 60 years ago, when he wasn’t getting lubricated in this very lobby.

Amid the giddy chatter of the crowd, five domesticated ducks halt their snoozing and splashing around the lobby fountain and array themselves in single file. Then the mallards waddle from the fountain to the elevator. The elevator door closes, and up they ride to their coop on the roof. Then everyone goes home.

The best explanation Memphians can offer for this is that one day in the late 1930s, the hotel’s general manager had too much to drink on a hunting expedition to Arkansas and brought back a few of his live decoys to enliven the fountain. The idea was well received, and grew into a daily tradition (along with the 11 a.m. opening of the ducks’ workday) in the city’s most prominent hotel. Now here we all stand in 1993, paying strange homage.

There is no moral to this anecdote, and there is no understanding Memphis without a little effort. Here is an awkward underdog of a town that gleams with new civic projects, a lively city where two of America’s most famous deaths are reconsidered daily. Memphis groans beneath heaps of barbecue, resounds with blues, overflows with confounding details, and all but demands further study.

This is the capital of Mid-Southern culture. The city tends to heat and stickiness in summer, a discomfort to the legions who visit to observe the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death on Aug. 16, 1977. But in fall, the high temperatures pass and leaves of red, orange and yellow accumulate on tree-lined streets.

The cotton business grew up here, and bales once accumulated in tall stacks on Front Street. When you whispered “he’s been to Memphis” about someone in Arkansas or Mississippi, you were hinting at a certain sophistication. In 1935, Southern historian David Cohn wrote that “the Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg.”

Memphis and its 610,000 residents sit on the Mississippi on Tennessee’s southwest corner, safely south of the recent flooding that troubled Iowa, Illinois and other river states. If you’re riding the train from New Orleans to Chicago, as thousands did during the post-slavery transition from rural to city life, it’s a crucial milepost.

In a documentary that is screened regularly at the Center for Southern Folklore on Beale Street, gray-headed singer Rufus Thomas reminisces about the 1920s and ‘30s, when poor men and women, just up from the country and struggling to get by, put their troubles aside on Saturday evenings. “If you were black for one night on Beale Street,” says Thomas, “never would you want to be white again.”

But in 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated here, and a deep pall was cast over the place. Flight to the suburbs crippled the downtown business district. From 1975 to 1981, the Peabody’s doors were locked, its fountain dry. Much of the cotton business had already begun to drift elsewhere.

The headquarters of Federal Express and the business of distribution grew in its place, and Graceland, the memorial to Memphis’ second famous death, opened in 1982. About the same time, the city opened the Mud Island Mississippi River Museum and Park--another key location in the film version of “The Firm”--and rebuilt Beale Street as a tourist attraction. Even then, amid the growing flood of Presley pilgrims, the doldrums remained.

Memphis kept pressing. And in the last three years, the city has flung itself, boldly and at great expense, into a new identity. At the core of that identity are a museum, an arena, a trolley line, and a remarkably flush, city-sponsored cultural program.

The National Civil Rights Museum, which took over the old Lorraine Motel where King was shot, opened in September, 1991.

The $8.8-million museum, filled with multimedia exhibits, participatory displays and a recreation of King’s room on the morning of the killing, has its critics. Time magazine’s Walter Shapiro called it “a classic American jumble of laudable intentions, questionable aesthetic judgment, outside experts and civic boosterism.” Jacqueline Smith, former resident manager of the motel, has camped across the street for five years, complaining that the museum is a Disneyfied spectacle that trivializes King and needlessly alarms children with its interactive displays.

But after I spoke with Smith, I stepped inside and found the place compelling. It seems quite trite to read that museum visitors can sit on a segregated bus next to a model of Rosa Parks, the black commuter who refused to yield her seat in a section designated for whites in 1955. But take the seat among a tour group of schoolchildren, hear the menace in the bus driver’s recorded voice, and feel the unexpected clack! of a cane or shoe against your seat, and you remember the place. Take a look around the dirt-poor black neighborhood that begins across the street, and you are reminded of the urgency of the lessons inside.

On the other edge of downtown Memphis, the Pyramid opened in November, 1991. It stands 32 stories tall, holds 22,500 seats and is sheathed in stainless steel. This is the city’s new multipurpose arena, designed as a tribute to the original Memphis in Egypt, and used as the home court of the Memphis State University Tigers basketball team. The structure has dramatically reshaped and updated the city skyline. But since before its opening in November, 1991, the conspicuous structure has threatened to emerge as a symbol of Memphian bad luck. One company went under while building the $65-million project, and had to be replaced by another. A Hard Rock Cafe deal was deferred. The building’s materials and unusual shape were found to produce sound delays of up to nine seconds between the stage and some seats. Then, on the evening of the Pyramid’s debut as a concert venue, a performance of country music by The Judds was, ah, marred, by the simultaneous liquid eruption of toilets throughout the facility.

The plumbing has been redesigned. Acoustic pads have beenhung to reduce the echo. And for the $3.75 price of an adult ticket, an MSU student tour guide will lead a visitor through the structure and recount its brief, eventful history.

From the Pyramid, it’s just a few blocks to the convention center and Napoleon’s cradle.

The cradle, on loan from France, stands in the first exhibit room of “Napoleon,” a massive gathering of art and artifacts tracing the life and wide influence of the French warrior and emperor. Six years ago, the city created the Wonders organization to stage an ongoing “international cultural series” that would bring blockbuster exhibits to town and raise Memphis’ cultural profile.

The first show was “Ramesses The Great,” which brought ancient Egyptian artifacts--and 675,000 admission-paying visitors from around the United States--to a temporary gallery space in theMemphis Cook Convention Center. Subsequent shows, including “Catherine the Great: Treasures of Imperial Russia,” have traveled to major U.S. museums.

“Napoleon” is going nowhere but Memphis. Once the exhibit closes Sept. 22, the 170-odd elements will be returned to 50-some collectors and institutions worldwide. The only way to see it is to visit Memphis and hand over $11 for an adult ticket. It’s a fascinating and well-staged exhibit, from the cradle to the death mask that lies in the show’s final room, not forgetting the explanation of the Louisiana Purchase in-between: It was Napoleon, acting as real estate agent for France, who in 1803 sold the United States the Louisiana territories, including the land that is now Memphis.

One more civic improvement: If you want the Pyramid tour or a look at the Napoleon exhibit, you can probably get there by trolley. Not quite four months ago, the city began running six Memphis Main Street Trolley cars on a four-mile track that runs through the heart of old downtown and essentially connects the civil rights museum and the pyramid.

As the title suggests, the route runs along Main Street (which was earlier, and unsuccessfully, redeveloped as an outdoor pedestrian mall) and is envisioned as a solution to that area’s idleness. After walking two blocks from the Peabody to Main, I ride first to the civil rights museum, then to the Pyramid at the other end of the line. Transportation expenses: $1.

Along the trolley route, it must be said, Memphis offers up more than a few secondhand shops, wig stores and boarded-up brick buildings. The city has its share of poverty and crime. The good news is that the government isn’t the only one spending money around here.

In May, 1991, after several years of struggle, the Beale Street entertainment strip got an enormousboost when B.B. King’s Blues Club & Restaurant opened at Beale and Second streets. The club seats 400 upstairs and another 250 downstairs, and peddles a broad inventory of blues and B.B. King merchandise. (The Hard Rock Cafe may not be here, but its retail strategies are.) The marquee attraction drops in to play five or six times a year.

The Rendezvous, best-known barbecue shop in town despite its subterranean location on South Second Street between a Ramada and a Days Inn, has expanded to accommodate 700 diners at once. (The waiters in their white shirts and black bow ties, however, still bark orders, insults and challenges at each other like family in a neighborhood dive.) The Memphis Zoo is in the middle of a campaign to double its size. The Memphis Pink Palace Museum, a former private home now dedicated to describing the area’s natural and cultural history, is mid-renovation. So is the Peabody Hotel.

Even some locals, after decades of waiting for a resurgence, seem to be harboring a share of optimism lately. At a party one day atop the Peabody Hotel, waitress Rhonda Noriega, 32, surveys the city skyline.

“When I left Memphis, there was nothing here,” she says, recalling her departure in 1984.

She returned last year, and even while running drinks still seems a little bedazzled. Tonight’s party is a sunset gathering of up-and-coming Memphians--suited young lions, male and female. While they shout, laugh and flirt, the sky darkens, downtown Memphis lights up at their feet, and the band launches into something bluesy.

But then there always seems to be a band here, and it always seems to be launching into something bluesy.

Blues was born in the cotton fields south of here, and the music acquired its urban edge in Chicago to the north. But Memphis was afertile middle ground, where W.C. Handy wrote “Memphis Blues” in 1909; where Riley (Blues Boy) King of Indianola, Miss., came at age 22 and got his first radio show; where Elvis Presley started his climb to fame in the 1950s. Jerry Lee Lewis and Muddy Waters put in time here, too, and reformed soul singer Al Green settled here. He can be found on Sundays preaching at the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church.

Conversely, Memphis is in music almost as much as music is in Memphis. One night in 1982, author Bruce Schoenfeld sat down with a few friends in Tennessee and came up with some 120 songs that name Memphis in their lyrics. From this, Schoenfeld concluded that Memphis must be the most-mentioned city in American pop music. (Since 1982, composers Marc Cohn, John Hiatt and Lyle Lovett, probably among others, have added to Schoenfeld’s list.)

One result of this musical saturation is that a traveler, in one day, can see Graceland (which draws an estimated 650,000 visitors annually), W.C. Handy’s former home (a shotgun shack at 352 Beale), and the original Sun Studio, where Sam Phillips in 1950 began making the first rock ‘n’ roll recordings. And that’s only the beginning. There may be no other city on this planet with more institutions dedicated to 20th-Century pop music.

The Center for Southern Folklore on Beale, in addition to its documentary history of the neighborhood, regularly stages exhibits and performances. And a local lawyer named John Montague has spent a fortune--no one seems to know exactly how much, but people shake their heads--gathering musical artifacts and giving them to the Memphis Music & Blues Museum. In fact, he has spent so much since the museum’s opening in March, 1990, that the organization recently divided the booty and split into two different operations.

In the Old Daisy Theatre building on Beale Street, there is the Beale Street Blues Museum, which focuses on blues before 1945 and includes audio accompaniment to its displays. A few blocks away on South Second Street, the Memphis Music Hall of Fame is now in business, concentrating on developments since World War II.

When I stick my head into Hall of Fame’s door one May morning, I find the place closed for reorganization, but curator Willie Pittman leaps forward to lead me through the crowded aisles. Here is Elvis’ karate suit (there’s a little bit of Elvis, it seems, in every Memphis museum). A red jacket worn by Bobby (Blue) Bland. An acoustic guitar played by Howlin’ Wolf.

After all these museums and artifacts, a stranger may need reminding that Memphis does have plenty of unhaunted and uncontrived corners.

At a formerly perilous corner a couple of miles from Overton Square, for instance, a bohemian neighborhood is growing. First there were antique stores, taking advantage of cheap rents around the intersection of Cooper and Young streets. Later came a coffeehouse, two retro clothing stores, a trendy restaurant called Midtown, and a couple of galleries--including that rare prize, a contemporary art space with a sense of humor. Hanging alongside the cutting-edge artworks at the Delta Axis Gallery on South Cooper Street, an appeal notes that donors of $100 become “buddies” of the gallery. Donors of $500 become “good buddies.”

Down at the Mississippi, on the deck of a restaurant called The Barge, a foursome of locals is chatting. That’s America’s River running beneath them, and the lights of the city twinkling on its surface, and a sky full of stars hangs above. This could be a tourist bureau moment. But the Mississippi is a working river, and these are working locals. Plumbing locals, to be precise.

“That’s a lot of flushes,” I catch one man saying. His companions nod solemnly, and the river rolls on.

In the tough-and-tumble Greenlaw neighborhood, the locals sit on stoops through the sunset, while across the street at the community center, a snare drum rattles and lanky majorettes rehearse for a parade.

And back in the garden district, Gray Line bus driver and longtime Memphian Bob Patterson wheels his bus and three passengers down a leafy residential street. Making a small detour from his usual route, he slows in front of a handsome brick house. Here, he informs his three passengers, “a princess was raised before she grew up and met her prince.”

It is his in-laws’ old home, and the princess became his wife. Now that’s my kind of tourist attraction.

GUIDEBOOK

Memphis, City of Kings

Getting there: Northwest Airlines flies nonstop from LAX to Memphis International Airport; Northwest, United, American, Delta and TWA offer connecting service. Lowest available restricted fares, with 14-day advance purchase required, are offered by United, American, Delta and TWA for $345. This offer expires 8/31.

Another option is using Amtrak’s daily “City of New Orleans” train route to combine Memphis with New Orleans or Chicago. Leaving New Orleans at 2:35 p.m., the train reaches Memphis at 10:05 p.m. and Chicago at 9:15 a.m. the following day. (The reverse route is a little more trouble: Leave Chicago at 7:10 p.m., arrive Memphis at 5:42 the next morning, reach New Orleans at 1:50 p.m.) Amtrak’s Chicago-Memphis-New Orleans “All Aboard America” round-trip fares--which allow passengers three stopovers, so long as the travel is completed within 45 days--start at $199 for a coach seat. As of Monday, the price falls to $179.

Where to eat: Hotel restaurants are often expensive and forgettable, but Chez Philippe in the Peabody Hotel (149 Union Ave., Memphis; tel. 901-529-4000) probably delivers the most elegant meal in Memphis. Amid marble columns and high ceilings, chef Jose Gutierrez offers nouveau-Southern hybrids such as hush puppies (a traditional concoction involving corn meal and onions) with shrimp in Provencal sauce. Dinner entrees: $19-$24.

Automatic Slim’s Tonga Club (83 S. Second St., Memphis; tel. 901-525-7948) is sleekly decorated and eclectic, with menu influences ranging from the Caribbean to Thailand. Lunch dishes run $4.95-$6.50; dinners, $8.50-$15.50.

I had only a snack there, but Midtown (2146 Young St., Memphis; tel. (901) 726-9644) is a colorful spot that’s popular with a young, hip crowd. (“FOOD DRINK ATTITUDE,” says the menu cover.) Sandwiches run $3.50-$6.25; dinner entrees run $6.95-$10.95.

(For barbecue hot spots, see THE FOOD, L1.)

Where to stay: The Peabody Hotel (149 Union Ave., Memphis, Tenn. 38103; tel. 800-732-2639 or 901-529-4000) is the grandest place in town, and then some. But beware of the current renovation; I was first placed in a room with hammering happening directly overhead. When I complained, they moved me. Double rooms run $135-$195.

In the mid-range, the Ramada Convention Center Hotel (160 Union Ave., Memphis, Tenn. 38103; tel. 901-525-5491) seems clean and reliable, and runs $70 for a double room on weekday nights, $85 on weekends. The Brownestone Hotel (300 N. Second St., Memphis, Tenn. 38105; tel. 901-525-2511) is comparable, and usually charges $70 nightly for doubles.

Cheaper still is the River Place Motor Inn, which offers wide river views from some rooms, but has a manager who can be downright grumpy with potential customers. Also, the elevators seem a little temperamental. Double rooms run $40-$70, depending on location.

For more information: Contact the Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau (47 Union Ave., Memphis, Tenn. 38103; tel. 901-543-5300), which offers various free literature.

Memphis 1. Peabody Hotel 2. Graceland 3. Nat’l Civil Rights Museum 4. The Pyramid 5. Memphis State University 6. Mud Island 7. Mississippi River Museum and Park 8. Memphis Cook Convention Center 9. Sun Studio 10. Overton Square