
Near the end of the 20th century, the Smithsonian assigned researchers to uncover the origins of American music. The journey started in the Mississippi Delta, tracing the footsteps of black and white musicians to the place where their paths intertwined. That place was Memphis.
Maybe you didn’t need the Smithsonian to tell you that. Maybe you knew the stories: how the work songs and spirituals of Africans—brought to America as slaves—passed down through generations, carried from the field and country church to the big city. For the slaves, later sharecroppers, of the Mississippi Delta, the big city was Memphis.
Yes, Memphis was the center of the global cotton exchange. But it was also Beale Street, where W.C. Handy sat composing inside Pee Wee’s Saloon, vaudeville troupes circuited The Orpheum Theatre, big bands like the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra drew crowds inside venues (while raucous ensembles like the Memphis Jug Band drew them out)—and Delta dreamers set their sights.
For some artists, Beale paved a way to propel themselves—and their distinct musical styles—beyond the Delta: Lunceford’s orchestra replaced Cab Calloway’s as the house band at New York’s Cotton Club; Memphis Minnie, periodic frontwoman for the Memphis Jug Band, took her country blues to Chicago and helped shape that city’s electric sound. But Beale’s reputation as a swirl of sounds and good times was set, and the dreamers kept on coming. Among them: B.B. King (short for “Beale Street Blues Boy”), Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips, the renegade who recorded them all.
Not unlike many Beale Street musicians, Phillips came from a family of tenant farmers. From a young age, he was struck by the musicality of the black community around him. It gripped him again as a teenager, driving Beale Street on a family visit to Memphis. When he returned to the city as an adult, it was to stay, and to open a recording studio.
Inside Sam’s studio, no tradition was sacred. He was one of the first white Southerners to record black bluesmen. One of the first to make music that teens could call their own. And one of the first to blur the boundaries of pure genres to create an entirely new sound: rock ‘n’ roll. Ethnomusicologists describe it as black rhythm-and-blues meets white country music. Your hips know it as “Rocket 88”: performed by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, engineered by Sam Phillips—inspired by a busted amp. Three years later, Phillips followed his intuition again in a session with 19-year-old Elvis Presley. The result was a culture-quaking overhaul of Arthur Crudup’s blues song “That’s All Right (Mama).”
It was bound to happen, this mash-up of musical styles, in a place where so many genres coexisted. Beale Street created the unique conditions for artists of different genres to hear each other; Sam Phillips’ success at Sun Studio gave artists and producers the guts to experiment with those genres—even create new ones.
When Sun’s glow spread to south Memphis, it set off a soul fusion. Where blues plus country made rock ‘n’ roll, soul was the love child of blues, rock and gospel— raised on emotion. Its global explosion started with a spark in an old moviehouse, where a white fiddler named Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle invited auditions. Beale Street veteran Rufus Thomas walked up with daughter Carla. A backing band assembled on the fly of local high-schoolers and session pros riffed their way into “Green Onions” (in addition to cutting the hit, Booker T. & the MGs became a vanguard for integrated bands). Otis Redding drove in from Georgia as a backup singer. Sam Moore and Dave Prater became Sam & Dave in the care of Stax’s songwriting team, David Porter and Isaac Hayes; the Staple Singers came in singing gospel and folk and left belting black-empowerment anthems.