How one city helped give America the blues, rock and roll, soul, and a sound that continues to travel around the world.
Published by Norm Levy
There are cities famous for music.
And then there is Memphis.
Few places can claim such an extraordinary role in shaping the soundtrack of America. Blues, gospel, rock and roll, soul, rhythm and blues, country, and eventually hip-hop all found a home in Memphis, often borrowing from one another, colliding with one another, and becoming something entirely new in the process.
The story stretches back more than a century.
And much of it runs through one street.
Beale Street and the Blues
By the early twentieth century, Beale Street had become one of the most important centers of Black commerce, culture, and entertainment in the South. Musicians performed in its clubs, theaters, restaurants, and on its street corners, bringing with them sounds that had traveled north from the Mississippi Delta and across the American South.
One of them was W.C. Handy.
Handy arrived in Memphis in the early 1900s and began translating the music he had heard throughout the South into compositions that could travel far beyond it. In 1912, he published “The Memphis Blues,” one of the earliest commercially successful published blues compositions. Two years later came “St. Louis Blues,” which became an international phenomenon.
The blues existed before W.C. Handy, of course. It grew from African American musical traditions across the South. But Handy helped give the music a form that publishers, performers, and eventually record companies could carry across the country.
Memphis became one of its great crossroads.
Over the following decades, Beale Street attracted or helped shape artists including Memphis Minnie, Howlin’ Wolf, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Albert King, and B.B. King, whose early Memphis radio nickname “Beale Street Blues Boy” was eventually shortened to B.B. King.
By the middle of the twentieth century, Memphis had become inseparable from the blues.
But the city was just getting started.
The Birth of Rock and Roll
In 1950, Sam Phillips opened the Memphis Recording Service at 706 Union Avenue.
Phillips was fascinated by the music being created throughout the South, particularly by Black blues musicians who had few opportunities to record.
Then, in 1951, Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats, featuring Ike Turner, recorded “Rocket 88” with Phillips in Memphis. The recording is frequently cited as one of the first rock and roll records.
A few years later, that same small Memphis studio would change popular culture.
In 1954, a young truck driver named Elvis Presley recorded at what had become Sun Records.
The combination was explosive.
Country.
Blues.
Gospel.
Rhythm and blues.
Elvis became the most famous product of Sun, but he was hardly alone. Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison all became part of the extraordinary musical story surrounding Sam Phillips and Sun.
For a remarkable period in the 1950s, some of the artists who would define American popular music were walking through the same little studio in Memphis.
Rock and roll wasn’t created from nothing.
It emerged from musical traditions that had been interacting throughout the South for generations.
Memphis happened to be one of the places where those traditions collided.
And where somebody pressed Record.
Soulsville, U.S.A.
Then Memphis did it again.
Across town, in an old movie theater at 926 East McLemore Avenue, another musical revolution was taking shape.
Jim Stewart founded Satellite Records in 1957. With the support of his sister Estelle Axton, the operation moved to Memphis in 1959 and eventually became Stax Records, its name formed from the first letters of Stewart and Axton.
If Sun helped define rock and roll, Stax helped define soul.
Carla Thomas.
Rufus Thomas.
Otis Redding.
Sam & Dave.
Isaac Hayes.
The Staple Singers.
William Bell.
Eddie Floyd.
The Bar-Kays.
And behind many of those recordings stood Booker T. & the M.G.’s, the extraordinary Stax house band whose grooves became part of what the world came to recognize as the Memphis Sound. The group itself was notable in the segregated South as one of the region’s early integrated bands.
Stax wasn’t simply producing records.
It was producing a sound.
Raw.
Rhythmic.
Human.
Sometimes imperfect in exactly the right ways.
Otis Redding arrived at Stax almost by accident in 1962, driving guitarist Johnny Jenkins to a recording session. With a little studio time left over, Redding was allowed to sing one of his own songs, “These Arms of Mine.” He left Memphis with the beginnings of a recording career that would make him one of soul music’s defining voices.
By the end of its original run, Stax had placed more than 167 songs in the pop Top 100 and 243 in the R&B Top 100.
Memphis music was no longer simply influencing America.
It was traveling around the world.
Music Across a Divided City
There is another reason the Memphis story matters.
Much of this music emerged during segregation and the civil rights era.
The city around these musicians could be deeply divided by race. Inside some of its studios, however, Black and white musicians were creating music together.
Booker T. & the M.G.’s embodied that contradiction particularly powerfully. Otis Redding crossed musical and cultural boundaries as his audience expanded from R&B listeners to white rock audiences in America and Europe.
None of that meant music somehow erased the inequalities outside the studio.
It didn’t.
Memphis itself became one of the central cities of the civil rights struggle, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination there in 1968 profoundly affected the city and Stax.
But music created connections that the society surrounding it often struggled to make.
That is part of what makes the history so powerful.
From Soul to Something New
Memphis didn’t stop evolving when the golden eras of Sun and Stax ended.
Royal Studios helped carry the Memphis soul tradition forward through producer Willie Mitchell and artists such as Al Green and Ann Peebles.
Other Memphis artists pushed in completely different directions. Big Star became enormously influential despite limited commercial success during its original run. Memphis musicians, producers, and songwriters continued moving between blues, rock, soul, gospel, country, and pop.
Then another generation found another sound.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, an underground hip-hop scene was emerging in Memphis with a darker, hypnotic production style that sounded very different from rap coming out of New York or Los Angeles.
8Ball & MJG’s 1993 debut Comin’ Out Hard became a landmark in Southern hip-hop and opened doors for Memphis artists nationally.
Three 6 Mafia emerged from that same Memphis underground, developing a sound whose influence would eventually stretch far beyond Tennessee. Their 1995 album Mystic Stylez became a touchstone of the Memphis rap sound. In 2006, the group made history by winning the Academy Award for Best Original Song for “It’s Hard out Here for a Pimp” from Hustle & Flow.
Nearly a century after W.C. Handy helped carry the blues from Memphis to the world, another generation of Memphis musicians was doing essentially the same thing.
Different technology.
Different rhythms.
Different generation.
Same city.
Why Memphis?
Maybe that is the most fascinating question.
Why Memphis?
Geography certainly mattered.
Memphis sits on the Mississippi River, connected to the Delta and positioned at a crossroads of Southern culture and migration.
But geography alone doesn’t explain it.
Memphis became a place where musical traditions continually encountered one another.
Blues met country.
Gospel met rhythm and blues.
Black musicians and white musicians heard one another’s records, borrowed ideas, played together, and sometimes walked into the same studios.
The Smithsonian’s exploration of American music ultimately focused on Memphis for precisely this reason: it was a place where the paths of Black and white musicians intertwined, and where Delta blues, country, gospel, and Beale Street music combined to help create new forms.
Perhaps that is Memphis’s greatest musical contribution.
It didn’t simply create one sound.
It became a place where sounds could meet.
Why Band on the Run Begins in Memphis
When I began imagining Jenny Brown and the young musicians at the heart of Band on the Run, Memphis felt like more than a setting.
It felt like part of the story’s DNA.
This is a city where music has always crossed boundaries.
Blues. Gospel. Soul. Rock and roll. Country. Hip-hop.
Different generations and different communities found ways to turn struggle, hope, anger, faith, heartbreak, and joy into sound.
And again and again, that sound traveled far beyond Memphis.
That mattered to me because music in Band on the Run eventually has to do something similar.
It has to travel.
It has to cross boundaries.
It has to bring people together who might otherwise have very little in common.
And ultimately, it becomes something even more powerful.
A signal.
A voice.
A universal language capable of traveling farther than Jenny ever imagined when she first picked up a guitar on the streets of Memphis.
There is something wonderfully fitting about that journey beginning in a city that has been sending its music out into the world for more than a century.
Memphis gave America some of its most enduring sounds.
In Band on the Run, I wanted to imagine what might happen if the next great sound to leave Memphis traveled farther still.
Beyond the city.
Beyond Earth.
And into humanity’s future.