The
Memphis Commercial Appeal has an article about how the Memphis Convention and Tourism board has invited a few hundred journalist from across the globe to encourage people to come to Memphis home of the blues. So people from around the world come to Memphis thinking they are stepping on hallowed ground. In fact, most people in the US think that they are walking on the actual Beale Street made famous by WC Handy in Beale Street Blues, the home of Blues, Soul, and Rock and Roll. However, the Beale Street populated by the Memphis Jug Band, WC Handy, BB King, RufusThomas, Elvis, and Otis Redding is long gone. Much like Center Street, Beale Street was an area of African American businesses and clubs. Yet, unlike Center where whites could go to the clubs to listen to blues, and Jazz. Beale Street was a segregated area, that especially by the 1950s whites were not allowed, or strongly encouraged to leave. A great example of what Beale was like in the 50s can be found in Alan Lomax's
Land Where the Blues Began. Lomax barely avoids trouble at least twice while searching out the blues on Beale in the 50s.
So how did the Beale of the past become the Beale of today? It all starts in the 1960s with the urban renewal movement. Many large cities were faced with crumbling infrastructure. Cities starting loosing there tax bases as whites fled to the suburbs. The federal government provided large sums of grants and loans to cities to rebuild and repair their inner cities, plus provided funding to create freeway systems that could connect to the interstate highway systems being built in the 1950s. So Memphis unlike Kansas City, which tore down its historic 12th street, decided to remake Beale Street into a tourist trap. amazingly an architect of the day wanted to remake Beale into a musical Disneyland. As friends of mine have told me, Beale was remade, old building tore down, new building with false facades were put in there place. African Americans who had built Beale were pushed out into new low income housing. This went on not only in Memphis but all over the US.
So, when I read about Memphis touting Beale Street as home of the blues, on one hand I am happy that African American music and culture are being promoted, but saddened because the real Beale is long gone.
