Tennessee has a population of 7 million people out of the 330 million living in the United States (2022). The state’s capital since 1843 and largest city is Nashville with 690,000 inhabitants. Memphis, with a population of 633,000 ranks second in Tennessee, followed by four cities with fewer than 200,000 residents.
- Once in a Lifetime
- Traveling to, from and within Memphis
- Downtown Memphis
- Beale Street – Home of the Blues
- B.B. King – The King of the Blues
- Elvis Presley – The King of Rock’n’Roll
- Graceland
- Sun Studio
Once in a Lifetime
We came to Memphis after visiting Dallas to experience a total solar eclipse, The Great North American Eclipse, which would pass over Dallas on April 8, 2024. Nothing else on the trip was originally planned, but while we were in Dallas, we also wanted to visit the Southfork Ranch, which is famous from the 1980s TV series Dallas. Afterwards we chose to visit Memphis and here we enjoyed the music bars along Beale Street and of course we also had a visit to Elvis Presley’s Graceland and Sun Studio. From here we continued to Nashville and listened to country music and and discovered a lovely city and especially Broadway, Nashville’s party-crazy main street. Our journey of music, as it turned out to be, continued to the historical New Orleans where we enjoyed jazz along Bourbon Street in colonial-era houses and a paddle steamer ride on the Mississippi River as well as an alligator hovercraft ride in the swamp. Before we went back home to Sweden, we visited the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto and ended up with the mighty beauty of Niagara Falls. It was definitely 17 intense days and a ”Once in a Lifetime” trip 😎
Traveling to, from and within Memphis
Memphis International Airport, which also has domestic flights, is located roughly one mile southeast of downtown Memphis. We arrived here in April 2024 with Southwest Airlines from our first destination, Dallas. The airport is also the hub for FedEx, within the US and internationally, and after Hong Kong the second largest airport in the world for cargo flights. At the south end of the airport is the 164th Airlift Wing, part of the Tennessee Air National Guard and United States Air Force.
If you travel north to Chicago or south to New Orleans, you can take an Amtrak train, but there are no tracks from Memphis that run in an east-west direction. As always in the USA, there are several highways in all directions and from Memphis we continued eastward to Nashville with a Greyhound bus. We had imagined a classic Greyhound bus like what we’ve seen in pictures, but it was a simple road bus, so it was apparently better before😉 Our trip went well, but it was worse for another one we saw on the way there, hope there was a good end to that journey…
If you book a hotel within walking distance of Beale Street, Home of the Blues, you’ll be fine with a good pair of walking shoes to see the main attractions in Downtown Memphis. MATA is the public transport in Memphis and in the Memphis´s area there are three trolley routes with charming old renovated carriages and they also have bus service. The usual taxis have almost completely disappeared from the cityscape. For slightly longer distances, you can instead order an Uber, which we did when we went to visit Elvis Presley’s Graceland.
Downtown Memphis
As far southwest as you can go in Tennessee next to the Mississippi River, Memphis was founded in 1819 and named after the ancient city with the same name on the banks of river Nile in Egypt. Memphis has spread out on the southernmost of four hills, called the Chickasaw Bluffs (Chickasaw hills), named after the indigenous people who lived here before the arrival of Europeans. From 1959, the airport of Memphis was located on the oblong Mud Island located in the river next to Memphis before it was closed 11 years later.
When walking towards the northern part of Downtown, you’ll come to the Memphis Pyramid. Inside there are hotels, restaurants, shopping, an artificial wilderness with live animals, and at the top a view of Memphis and the Mississippi River. We were only in Memphis for one full day and prioritized visiting Beale Street, Graceland and Sun Studio. We didn’t make it to the Memphis Pyramid this time, but have a reason to make a return visit 😉
We stayed at a La Quinta hotel near AutoZone Park, which is home to the baseball team Memphis Redbirds, a farm team of the MLB team St Louis Cardinals. The hotel is only a few blocks from Main Street and Beale Street as well as the FedExForum, where you can watch the Memphis Grizzlies play NBA basketball or enjoy concerts and other events.
The main street in Downtown Memphis is of course called Main Street, divided into North and South depending on which side of Madison Avenue you stand on. One of the trolley routes runs on Main Street and several attractions in Memphis are located along or nearby this street.
On the south side of Main Street is the Orpheum Theater, a listed building since 1977, with a music stage for an audience of 2,300. The building was completed in 1928, on the same site where the Grand Opera House had stood since 1890, but which already burned to the ground in 1923. In the early 1900s, people went to the Majestic to see a movie, but it was important to know where to meet. For a while there were up to eight different Majestic cinemas and even though they were numbered it didn’t help as two of them were called No1 and two were called No2. The Majestic that remains on South Main Street is now a grill restaurant, Majestic Grille, in a preserved grand old movie theater with a movie screen that shows old black and white movies while you eat.
A little further down South Main Street is the unassuming Green Beetle, which is the oldest bar in Memphis. The music street in Memphis is called Beale Street, but a statue of blues legend Bobby ”Blue” Bland stands at the intersection of South Main Street and Dr Martin Luther King Jr Avenue.
If you make your way to the southern end of South Main Street, you’ll come to a darker part of Memphis history. At the intersection to E Butler Avenue was the Lorraine Motel, which in the 1960s accommodated non-white guests. Therefore, Martin Luther King Jr was staying here when, on April 4, 1968, he was shot to death in the motel’s attic by an assassin from an adjacent building. The motel is nowadays a listed building and since 1991 also part of the Memphis Civil Rights Museum. We didn’t make it here on our short visit to Memphis, but it’s on our bucket list.
A block away is a memorial to the Memphis Massacre, a race riot in early May 1866. A white mob murdered 46 African-Americans, even more were injured and robbed, 5 women were raped and about 100 of their houses, schools and churches were burned down. When the federal army arrived in Memphis, things calmed down, but no one was ever prosecuted for the bloody riot.
From the Orpheum Theater and north on Main Street, the city takes on more of a big city feel than in the southern part. Therefore the architecture is slightly different with multi-storey buildings and other taller buildings. The Lincoln America Tower was completed in 1924 and the Falls Building from 1910, which is a little closer to the Mississippi River, are both listed and adjacent to these buildings is Court Square Park. The Hotel Napoleon is next to the Sterick Building, which was completed in 1930 but abandoned only 50 years later. After now being abandoned for more than 40 years, the building is supposed to be renovated, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed for that.
Beale Street – Home of the Blues
Beale Street came into being in the early 1840s and was named a few years later after Edward Fitzgerald Beale, a hero in the 1846-48 war with Mexico. He was also the one who in 1857 laid out a settler’s route from Arkansas west to California and which would later become the legendary US Route 66. Since the early 20th century, Memphis and Beale Street have meant a lot to a large number of musicians and music has meant a lot to the city. Musicians who were born in or lived in the Memphis area at the time of their death include names such as Aretha Franklin, Bobby ”Blue” Bland, Elvis Presley, Isaac Hayes and Justin Timberlake. Along Beale Street, the music bars are close together and you can walk on the outside and listen. Soon you will find the music and the sound level you want to enjoy and there’s everything from loud blues rock to piano bars.
B.B. King – The King of the Blues
BB King was born in 1925 on a cotton plantation in Mississippi where his parents worked and as a teenager he himself came to work with ginning cotton. He had sung and played gospel in the church and in 1946 came to Memphis as a 20-year-old to become a blues guitarist. He co-founded a band called the Beale Streeters in the late 1940s and soon after they broke through. Throughout his career, BB King loved to tour and he performed approximately 300 concerts a year, with a peak of 342 gigs in 1956. When BB King passed away in 2015, Memphis immortalized him for all he had meant to the city and the blues music, by renaming a street in Downtown to BB King Boulevard.
At a gig in Twist, Arkansas, two men had started fighting and they also accidentally knocked over a barrel that was on fire to heat the venue. A fire broke out and everyone had to flee, but BB King ran back into the flames to save his guitar, which he had forgotten in the commotion. It is said that the two men in his audience had started arguing over a woman. When BB King heard that, he subsequently named his guitar Lucille, which was the name of the woman in question. One of his most beloved songs has the same name and the lyrics tell about his love for his guitar and about the incident that night.
Elvis Presley – The King of Rock’n’Roll
Elvis Presley’s parents had financial difficulties and had also been forced to give up their small house in Tupelo, which Elvis’ father Vernon had built just before Elvis was to be born in 1935, and then they had lived in different places. Finally, they came to Memphis in 1948 hoping to get a fresh start in life and to find work and a place to live. Not even in their wildest imaginations could they have dreamed that only 9 years later their son would buy a mansion with room for the whole family and his grandparents. Since 1972, US Route 51 from Memphis to Graceland and on to the Mississippi state border has been named after the King of Rock’n’Roll, Elvis Presley Boulevard. On Beale Street there’s a statue of Elvis Presley that gives a sense of how he sang and played in one of the bars on Beale Street in the 1950s until someone said: The King has left the building.
Graceland
Graceland got its name in the late 1800s, named after landowner Stephen C Toof’s daughter Grace and he called his farm Graceland Farms. Grace inherited the farm in 1894 and after her death it was her sister and then her niece, both named Ruth, who inherited the farm. It was the niece who in 1939 built the mansion, as we see it today, and she let it keep the name Graceland. In 1952 Ruth divorced her husband and five years later she sold Graceland to a 22-year-old youngling. After previously lived east of Memphis the youngling had to move away as the neighbors thought it was so awkward with all the fans and journalists flocking to his house. Ruth took over his home as part payment for Graceland and the youngling, of course, was Elvis Presley.
Elvis bought Graceland in March 1957 and built out the back of the mansion as well as the wall around the property. He lived here until his death on August 16, 1977, and father Vernon managed Graceland until his death in 1979. Then Elvis’s ex-wife Priscilla took over before daughter Lisa Marie could inherit Graceland. Priscilla soon realized that the annual operating costs including taxes would soon force a sale of Graceland. Therefore, she began to do research on other famous houses that have been converted into museums in order to generate income. In June 1982, Graceland could be opened to show off the mansion and some of what Elvis had collected. It was an immediate success and nowadays Graceland and the museum Elvis Presley’s Memphis on the other side of the highway have over half a million visitors annually.
We had no idea we would be visiting Graceland when we booked our trip to Dallas, Texas. We googled on what to see in the middle parts of the southern US and we realized that Memphis with Graceland and the City of Country, Nashville, were within reasonable distance. It was an amazing feeling to suddenly stand there outside the entrance to Graceland and we had to pinch our arm several times, is it true 😮😮??
We chosed to do our own tour through Graceland and the museums, without either a guide or headphones with an audio guide, and we were completely satisfied with that. The entrance to Graceland is at Elvis Presley’s Memphis on the west side of Elvis Presley Boulevard. From there you have to be shuttled over to the east side of the highway where the Graceland property is located. We visited in April and waited almost an hour even though we had booked an appointment. One can only wonder how long the waiting time can be during high season 😱??
The lower floor of the mansion with the kitchen, dining room and living room among other things can be seen as well as the basement and buildings at the back of the house. The upper floor is not accessible for tourists and up there is the bathroom where Elvis was found when he died. Growing up, Elvis had heard famous artists play at the white piano at Ellis Auditorium and when it came up for sale, just as he had bought Graceland, it was obvious to buy it. The piano was sold on in 1976 and the current owner, who has a piano shop, has chosen to display the piano at Graceland. We had expected the main building to be bigger and more mighty than it was in reality, but we were definitely starstruck.
One step down from the kitchen there’s a green-gloomy room, which was originally a garage. As Hawaii was a favorite place for Elvis he wanted to recreate some of the tropical feel in that room. The Den, as Elvis called the room after remodeling it, is better known as the Jungle Room and would probably be called a ”man cave” today. A built-in waterfall by one wall has been closed off for a long time as it had created some problems with water leaks. During Christmas 1971, a short circuit also occurred behind that wall and started a fire that threatened the entire building. It was the best thing that happened during Christmas, Elvis is said to have said, and three months later he and Priscilla Presley divorced. In 1976, the year before Elvis died, he had the room converted into a recording studio and most of his last two albums were recorded here.
When you continue to the real basement floor, you go down a mirrored staircase 👀 that leads down to the Yellow Room. President Lyndon Johnson had three TVs next to each other, which inspired Elvis to do the same to watch three American football games at the same time. Here they sat on yellow sofas with navy blue cushions and got something to drink from a yellow bar. The room next door has a much more flamboyant interior and there’s a pool table. It’s said that one person always got to win pool games at that table, guess who the bad loser was?
At the back of the mansion there’s a white building, the Smokehouse, which Elvis converted into a shooting range in the 1960s and it has also been used as storage. Elvis’ father Vernon used it as an office, from which he managed the finances for Elvis, but here he also could rhyme and smoke meat. Further away there are horse stables and you can actually book a horse ride at Graceland.
In a part of the mansion, Graceland Archives, there’s an incredible number of paintings and pictures from Elvis’ family history, both from the time before and at Graceland. Elvis was interested in firearms and a great admirer of the police profession, so here are also fabric police badges that he received from various police districts around the USA as well as weapons that he owned. He also redecorated the mansion a number of times and here’s a red sofa he bought in 1974 when he had the living room and dining room go in red.
From the early 1970s, Elvis was such a devoted racketball player that he had his own racket hall built. In the building there was also a relaxation area with leather sofas where you could enjoy music and play pinball. If you wanted to relax outdoors, there was a kidney-shaped pool with sunbeds a short walk away.
Elvis Presley was born on January 8, 1935 and half an hour before him his twin brother Jesse Garon Presley had been born, but he was stillborn. Parents Gladys and Vernon didn’t know they were expecting twins. Therefore, it must have been a complete shock after first experiencing a terrible sadness and then the miracle of Elvis. The Presley family was poor and lived in Tupelo in the state of Mississippi where Vernon had built a small house, a so-called Shotgun House, the year before Elvis was born. They were forced to move out when they couldn’t pay back the $180 loan to build the house. After 13 years of living in various places in the state of Mississippi, the family finally moved to Memphis.
Jesse was named after Elvis’ grandfather, who was known as a violent drinker, and from whom the Presley family distanced themselves after grandmother Minnie Mae divorced from him. Jesse Garon is buried in Tupelo, but Elvis made sure his twin brother at least has a memorial stone in the Meditation Garden at Graceland. Elvis had designed a meditative place where he could sit and think about life’s big and small questions. One of these questions he’s said to have pondered was why he had survived birth and not Jesse.
Elvis’ mother Gladys died in August 1958 while he was doing military service in what then was West Germany. She was buried at Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis and a marble cross with Jesus and two angels watched over her grave. When Elvis died, he was buried in the same burial ground, but in a mausoleum, and Gladys’ body was also moved there. A short time after the funeral, three men tried to steal Elvis’ body, presumably to pressure the family for money in exchange for returning the body.
The theft attempt failed and after that both bodies and the marble cross were moved to the Meditation Garden at Graceland. Elvis is now buried there with his immediate family, mother Gladys, father Vernon, grandmother Minnie Mae, daughter Lisa Marie and her son Benjamin Keough. Even Priscilla Presley has requested that, when that day comes, to be buried next to Lisa Marie.
On the west side of Elvis Presley Boulevard, there was a shopping center since the 1960s, whose stores were filled with unofficial Elvis gadgets after his death. After the success of Graceland in 1982, it was decided that the following year to buy the entire shopping center. In 1984, Elvis’ jet ”Lisa Marie” was moved to the place where it stands today, and the millionth visitor was welcomed to Graceland. In 1985, shops selling official Elvis gadgets, hotels and restaurants were opened and three years later the car museum was opened.
In 2017, the entertainment and exhibit complex Elvis Presley’s Memphis opened with the Presley Motors Museum, Elvis: The Entertainer Career Museum, gift shop, restaurants and much more. Elvis: The Entertainer Career Museum displays a great deal of all the stage clothes, record awards, jewelry and other accessories that made Elvis to a unique music artist.
Colonel Tom Parker was Elvis’ manager since 1956 and had a significant role in Elvis being able to break through and become the musical artist he became. Two years later it was time for military service in what was then West Germany and so that Elvis would not be forgotten, they recorded five singles that could be released while he was away. By the time he returned home in 1960, Tom Parker had decided that Elvis would make movies and earn Hollywood dollars on the big screen. Therefore, he made sure that Elvis would record an average of three films until 1967, which gave great incomes in the first years, but increasingly bad film scripts and the longing for the concert audience was suffocating Elvis in the last years.
In 1968, he returned to the music scene in a TV show that became the then most watched in TV history and was seen by 42% of the TV audience in the USA. This was followed by a large number of concerts until 1972 before the decline began, mainly through bad eating habits and drug abuse, which led to his death in 1977.
Elvis had a great interest in cars and bought hundreds of them during his lifetime and many he gave away to family, friends and other people who were close to him. Therefore, it’s completely understandable that they have made a car museum, Presley Motors, and although it’s said that he gave away 200 Cadillacs, there were some left at home.
Sun Studio
We ended our trip in Memphis with a visit where Elvis Presley’s and rock’n’roll history began: Sun Studio or Memphis Recording Service as it was called then. If you walk from Memphis along Union Avenue toward Sun Studio, you’ll pass a pretty shabby industrial area. Even so, you can have a look at the imaginative murals on a number of facades before arriving at Sun Studio. The one called ”With Love from Memphis” is designed like a postcard and is located in a parking lot towards the end of Monroe Avenue.
In January 1950, Sam Phillips opened his music studio, here at 706 Union Avenue, under the name Memphis Recording Service. What is said to be the first recorded rock’n’roll song, ”Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston, was recorded in this music studio. The song became a real hit and contributed to Sam being able to open his own record company, Sun Records, in the same building in February 1952. He kept the music studio in the premises until his success demanded a more modern and larger music studio. Therefore, he started Sam Phillips Recordings Service a few blocks away in 1960 and in the late 1960s his sons took over the music studio, which is still owned by the family. Sun Records remained in his ownership until 1969 when it was bought by Mercury Records.
Although nearly 100 years had passed since the end of the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery, USA was still terribly segregated in the 1950s. Some claim, for example, that ”Rocket 88” is rhythm and blues, not the first rock’n’roll song, as it is played by African-Americans. Sam loved rhythm and blues and wanted to reach out with the music to the white population in the USA.
The idea was therefore that anyone could come in and for a small fee record a single disc. For example, Sam Phillips heard on the radio a quintet of African-Americans who called themselves the Prisonaires, when they were in prison in Nashville. He invited them to the studio and, surrounded by armed guards, they recorded ”Just Walkin’ in the Rain”. The song became a record hit that the newspaper Memphis Press-Scimitar wrote about in July 1953 and it’s said that Elvis Presley read that article.
Sam Phillips had hired Ike Turner as a talent scout to find African-American musicians and recorded with Howlin’ Wolf, Bobby ”Blue” Bland, BB King and many others. But Sam Phillips had told his assistant Marion Keisker many times ””If I could find a white man who had the n***** sound and the n***** feel, I could make a billion dollars”.
In August 1953, Elvis walked through the door of Sun Records wanting to record a single for his mother as a birthday present. Sam wasn’t there so it was Marion who received him and who asked the classic questions. Marion: ”What kind of singer are you?” Elvis replied: ”I sing everything possible” Marion again: ”Who do you sound like?” Elvis: ”I sound like no one else”.
Elvis recorded the single for his mother and at the invitation of Sam also another single in January 1954, a total of four ballads, without any success. Sam still felt that Elvis had something special and in July 1954 he invited a guitarist and a double bass player to play with Elvis. They played and sang for several hours without finding their way and it was late at night when they thought of finishing and going home. That’s when Elvis picked up his guitar and started to play Arthur Crudup’s eight-year-old ”That’s All Right” and the other two tune in with their instruments. When Sam heard that sound, he understood that now he had found what he had been looking for and the recording and what followed is rock’n’roll history.
After the success of Elvis Presley, many white artists came to the music studio. For example, Carl Perkins came one evening in December 1956 to play with Jerry Lee Lewis at the piano. That same evening, Elvis and Johnny Cash also came to the venue and they both tuned in to the music. Sam saw the chance for some publicity and called the evening newspaper, which wrote a classic article about the ”Million Dollar Quartet”. The spontaneous jam with 46 songs was also recorded by the music technician, so that evening is immortalized not only on record, it’s nowadays also available on Spotify.
How much Sam wanted to, he couldn’t maintain his stars as he didn’t want to change his relatively small-scale operation into a large distribution channel which the major record labels had. He sold the business in 1969 to Mercury Records, who moved the business to Nashville and sold the house. After that, it was a plumbing company and an auto parts company that housed the building at 706 Union Avenue, which fell into oblivion for almost 20 years.
In 1987, the venue was purchased by Gary Hardy, a local musician, who brought music history to life by creating the Sun Studio, which welcomes music nostalgics at daytime and musicians who, after closingtime, wants to record their music. You aren’t allowed to walk around on your own, but must have a guided tour, and there are a limited number of people who come along during the day. We hadn’t booked in advance, but hung on the lock well before Sun Studio opened. A few booked groups went ahead of us and perhaps we were just lucky to join a guided tour in time before our Greyhound bus was to take us to Nashville.
First you enter the combined café reception with souvenir shop before a guide comes and picks up a group for a 45-minute tour. In the shop, in addition to official Sun Studio souvenirs, there are a lot of memories of music legends who have been here and created music history. Don’t miss the barstools, fake, but still a funny detail.
Although we had to wait almost an hour for our tour with the guide, it was worth every minute. First we got to see some of the equipment that was used to record the music in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as pictures of many of the musicians who did recordings in the studio.
Here you’ll also find the WHBQ’s radio room, which in 2013 was taken from the abandoned Hotel Chisca, from which Dewey ”Daddy-O” Phillips (no relation to Sam) broadcast his popular radio show ”Red, Hot and Blue”. If he didn’t like a record, it was his thing to throw the record on the floor so it broke and couldn’t be played in his studio again. When he played Elvis’ single ”That’s All Right” for the first time, he got so many calls about the song that he had to replay it a dozen times that night. In the end he also called Elvis and asked him to come to the studio for a live interview.
Finally, the guide took us to the music studio, where so many fantastic songs were recorded and which comes alive in the evening with musicians when all the tourists have gone home. The fact that you, as a non-musical music lover, also got to pretend to be Elvis Presley and hold a similar microphone that he had made it an unforgettable day at Sun Studio.
