Saturday, April 15, 2006

Hold On, I'm Comin'

Today I report to you from the epicenter of the musical South, Memphis, Tennessee.

It's the town that spawned B.B. King, Elvis Presley, Rufus Taylor and Otis Redding. It's the place where a white man named Steve Cropper helped invent Memphis soul at Stax Records. It's also the place Martin Luther King Jr. breathed his dying breaths.

It's a town with a checkered past of racial harmony and some of the most unloving acts and words in American history.

Today I've walked in the halls of the revered (Stax, Sun) and the infamous (Graceland, Jungle Room), and, as a music lover, they both hold equal importance to me.

I've listened to Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited driving north up that famous highway. A stranger has also touched my hair and I've been propositioned by a hooker.

We came here seeking music, and we've found it at almost every corner. We've also found the incongruencies in how we view people, and how the world really is. It's a lot more violent than its Texas counterpart, Austin, but there's also a lot of history.

So there it is, my first written document of a trip that started when I decided, "I'm goin' to Graceland."

1 Comments:

Blogger Steve said...

Graceland... Went there with a youth group in the late 80s, and a friend and I spent the whole time pointing excitedly at upstairs windows, yelling, "There he is! There's Elvis!" This was during the time when that book about Elvis being alive came out, so the tour guides were none too happy with us... They took us aside and warned us to calm down. So we went over to the grave and re-enacted the Spinal Tap "Heartbreak Hotel" scene...

1:43 PM  

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