Follow along on a musical pilgrimage tracing the tangled roots of American blues, jazz, and rock—from Memphis to New Orleans.
Treme Brass Band in New Orleans.
Photo by Marc Pagani
It’s Sunday night in Memphis, and Paul, an old friend from my high school days, is sitting in on bass at Wild Bill’s Juke Joint. Tony C is singing, and lead guitarist Harold Otis punctuates each line with B.B. King-inspired licks. “I believe my woman’s got a black-cat bone,” Tony C sings. “’Cause everything I do just turns out wrong.”
Wild Bill’s is in a run-down residential neighborhood strip mall, next to Marilyn’s Hair Gallery and a convenience store that stays open until 3 a.m. The surroundings are shabby, and the bar and grill has not been spoiled by modernization, but that’s as it should be. We’re eight miles from the commercialized chaos of Beale Street in search of the real blues, and we’ve hit pay dirt.
Paul jams with the regulars for an hour before returning the bass to its owner, who calls himself Mac Truck, and for a full week he’s still coming down from the thrill of it all. We’re on a musical pilgrimage—a road trip that takes us from Memphis down through the Mississippi Delta to New Orleans.
Almost 500 miles separate Beale Street from Bourbon Street, but, as we discover, the world of American blues, jazz, and rock musicians is smaller than we had imagined. The roots of American music go deep but are entangled. Everybody who has contributed to making these great sounds seems to have known each other, or close to it.
Consider this: We’re staying at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. This is where Sam Philips, a DJ and sound engineer, broadcast for WREC radio. The Peabody is also where Phillips came to love the blues he heard musicieans playing and decided to open his own recording studio, later named Sun Studio. About a mile from both the hotel and Beale Street, Sun Studio is now a museum well worth visiting.
The Crossroads in Clarksdale.
Photo courtesy of Visit Mississippi / Mississippi Development Authority
It was at Sun in the early 1950s that Phillips recorded B.B. King’s “Three O’Clock Blues.”
Phillips also waxed “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, which is considered the world’s first rock ‘n’ roll recording. Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Roy Orbison also recorded here, as did Howlin’ Wolf.
Anyone who could pay a nominal fee could cut a record in this modest operation, though distribution was up to you—or, if you were fortunate, to a record company that might buy your contract. A 19-year-old dropped by one day, paid $4, and cut a record. Phillips was not impressed. He gave Elvis Presley a second chance, however, and the world knows the rest of that story. A microphone used by B.B. King, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and others is still here, and tour guides encourage you to get your picture taken with it, channeling your inner Jerry Lee.
While you’re in Memphis, you have to go to Graceland, which 20 million people have toured Elvis’ mansion since it opened to the public in 1982. The tasteful Greek revival house was built in 1939 for a physician; Elvis bought it in 1957, just after his debut album was released. While the interior has been doubled in size and now reflects what even admirers call his “often eclectic tastes,” the house, grounds, and complex are nonetheless an impressive museum of the man’s musical accomplishments and legacy. An exhibition, ICON: The Influence of Elvis Presley, explores how his work affected that of other musicians, from Sam Cooke to Bruce Springsteen and beyond.
Memphis is famous for its barbecue, and you don’t have to break the bank to eat well here. The second time we ate at Blues City Café on Beale Street—$25.95 for a full rack of ribs—we spotted at a nearby table Isaiah Williams, the brilliant young trombone player for Richmond’s own Ham Biscuits, in town for a wedding.
Sun Studio.
Elvis Presley’s tomb at Graceland.
Photo courtesy of Graceland
B.B. King
After Memphis, Paul and I roll down Highway 61, made famous by Bob Dylan, and into the Delta which, as B.B. King said, “goes on forever.” About an hour south of Memphis, we stop at the Gateway to the Blues Museum in Tunica, Mississippi. Exhibits include artifacts associated with such great bluesmen as Son House and Robert Johnson. The museum also displays the first cornet owned by W.C. Handy, who is more closely associated with the development of jazz than of blues. You can record your own song at the museum and play a diddley bow, a primitive instrument predating the better-known Bo Diddley.
Half an hour south of Tunica is Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Sam Cooke was born and where Bessie Smith died. That’s not why we’ve stopped here, however. It was at the intersection of Highways 61 and 49 in Clarksdale that—according to the legend—Robert Johnson, desperate to improve his skills as a guitarist, sold his soul to the devil. This transaction he supposedly celebrated in the song “Crossroads,” made popular decades later by Eric Clapton and Cream. A garish assemblage of three stylized guitars marks the spot, which has become a kind of shrine for later generations of aspiring bluesmen.
From Clarksdale, we head down to Indianola, Mississippi, about an hour south. Riley B. King—known to the world as B.B. King—was born on a plantation outside Itta Bena, Mississippi, 10 miles away, but considered Indianola his hometown. He labored in the cotton fields by day and played his guitar on the streets of this small town until he was confident enough to head for Memphis and the big time. “Three O’Clock Blues,” recorded at Sun Studio and released in 1952, was his first hit.
When King died in Las Vegas in 2015, his body was flown to Memphis, where a brass band playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” led a funeral procession down Beale Street. From there, King’s remains were driven down Highway 61, closed for the occasion, to Indianola. He is buried at the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, near a brick cotton gin where he once worked. We pay our respects.
Gateway to the Blues in Tunica.
Photo courtesy of Visit Mississippi / Mississippi Development Authority
A local band plays at d.b.a.
Photo by Rebecca Todd
John McCusker’s “Cradle of Jazz” tour in front of the Eagle Saloon, where jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden played around 1900.
Photo courtesy of John McCusker
Our final stop, 280 miles south of Indianola, is New Orleans. “It’s a big destination, but a small town,” says Diane Riche, who grew up here and is now the marketing director for the Cambria Hotel. The hotel opened in late 2017 in the city’s Arts District, a 15-minute walk to the French Quarter. Riche is right, at least for the city’s storied music scene. The musicians know each other, and most have connections to the greatest names in early jazz.
During a break in Big Al Carson’s show at the Funky Pirate, I ask Harry Sterling, who has backed Big Al for a quarter of a century, about the late Danny Barker, a guitarist, six-string banjo player, and vocalist who worked with Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. Sterling has taken us into the quiet courtyard behind the Funky Pirate, which is one of the few places on Bourbon Street where you can still expect to hear good music. These days, the better bands play on Frenchmen Street, where, the night before, we heard the Treme Brass Band, which has been performing, with personnel changes, for 30 years. Kermit Ruffins, now famous in his own right, was once a member.
“Danny Barker,” Sterling says with evident pride, “was my first guitar teacher.” Barker was a neighbor of one of Sterling’s cousins, and one day, when he was visiting, he heard Barker practicing. Sterling, who was about 12 years old at the time, was transfixed. Mustering his courage, Sterling knocked on the door and told Barker he wanted to learn to play the guitar. Barker asked if Sterling owned a guitar. “I said I didn’t, my parents couldn’t afford one,” says Sterling. So Barker gave him one of his own, as well as an instruction book. Before long, Sterling was going to Barker’s house every day for lessons.
A lot of the younger musicians around town owe a great deal to Barker. In the early 1970s, when Barker saw that the New Orleans brass band tradition was dying, he formed the Fairview Baptist Church Marching Band, determined to reverse the trend. Sterling played tuba in the band, which also included, among others, Wynton Marsalis on trumpet and Dr. Michael White on clarinet. The same year that Barker formed the band, he also helped organize the first New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
Barker, who died in 1994, also wrote “Save the Bones for Henry Jones,” which is appropriate because New Orleans is as famous for its cuisine as its music. They say you can’t get a bad meal in the Crescent City, and Paul and I get great ones at Brennan’s on Royal Street, the flagship restaurant of the Brennan family and where bananas Foster was invented, and at the historic Napoleon House on Chartres Street, which serves warm muffaletta sandwiches and cold Pimm’s Cups. Both are located in the French Quarter.
Bananas Foster at Brennan’s.
Photo courtesy of Brennan’s
New Orleans boasts plenty of other excellent restaurants that specialize in traditional Louisiana cuisine—Commander’s Palace, Galatoire’s, Antoine’s, and Dooky Chase’s come to mind—in a casual, convivial atmosphere. No one would call Café Du Monde fine dining, but it serves its beloved beignets 24 hours a day.
One place you can’t get food or drink is Preservation Hall, but you have to go there all the same. Founded in 1961, Preservation Hall takes seriously its mission of keeping traditional New Orleans jazz alive, offering five no-frills shows a day. There are always lines outside, but it’s worth the wait. Such jazz legends as Sweet Emma Barrett, George Lewis, and Punch Miller played at Preservation Hall. A member of the family whose patriarch played cornet in the notorious Storyville brothels, trombonist Lucien Barbarin still performs there.
If you want the real scoop on the early days of this uniquely American musical form, take John McCusker’s “Cradle of Jazz” tour, which offers a bracing take on a mythologized past. The first operas in America were performed in New Orleans, McCusker says, and several opera companies operated simultaneously. Brass band funerals predated jazz itself, and New Orleans musicians had no word for “improvisation.” The generation of Satchmo and Jelly Roll called their music “hot,” McCusker says; the word “jazz” came later. Black and white musicians grew up in the same neighborhoods, influencing each other. The richest musical traditions of the West—Western Europe, West Africa, and the West Indies—all came together to create the sound.
There were other ingredients in this spicy etouffee, too. In his writings, Armstrong said he learned “to sing from the heart” by listening as the matriarch of the Karnofskys sang lullabies to her children. The Karnofskys were Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants who looked after Armstrong in his childhood, showing “human kindness” to the little street kid, including him in family meals he would remember as “deelicious.” They not only taught him to sing with feeling; they also helped him buy his first cornet.
The tradition that Armstrong and others created is kept alive at Preservation Hall, but also in the street. At a card table at the corner of Frenchmen and Chartres, Aaron Blanks takes donations to buy musical instruments for young people, “to keep them from committing crimes and getting into all kinds of trouble,” he says. Blanks, who was the Grand Marshall for parades that “buried” Danny Barker, Fat Domino, and other New Orleans greats, now encourages the next generation of street musicians. As Blanks asks passersby for donations, members of the Young Fellahz Brass Band, high school kids by every indication, assemble across the street. They start to play, adding a hip-hop emphasis to a musical form that started in these same streets more than a century ago and continues to evolve. A crowd forms, then gets bigger, louder, and more enthusiastic. The tradition lives on.
Go, See, Do
Where to Stay
Peabody Hotel, Memphis, TN, 1-800-PEABODY, PeabodyMemphis.com
Cambria Hotel, New Orleans, LA, 504-524-7770, CambriaNewOrleans.com
Where to Eat
Blues City Café, Memphis, TN, 901-526-3637, BluesCityCafe.com
Brennan’s, New Orleans, LA, 504-525-9711, BrennansNewOrleans.com
Napoleon House, New Orleans, LA, 504-524-9752, NapoleonHouse.com
Places to See
Graceland/Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc., Memphis, TN, 901-332-3322, Graceland.com
Sun Studio, Memphis, TN, SunStudio.com
Wild Bill’s Juke Joint, Memphis, TN, 901-409-0081
Delta Blues Museum, Clarksdale, MS, 662-627-6820, DeltaBluesMuseum.org
B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, Indianola, MS, 662-887-9539, BBKingMuseum.org
Preservation Hall, New Orleans, LA, 504-522-2841, PreservationHall.com
The Funky Pirate, New Orleans, LA, 504-523-1960, TheFunkyPirate.com
d.b.a., New Orleans, LA, 504-942-3731, DBANewOrleans.com
Tours
Historic New Orleans Tours , New Orleans, LA , 504-947-2120, TourNewOrleans.com
Cradle of Jazz Tour, John McCusker, 504-487-7666, CradleOfJazzTour.com
This article originally appeared in our October 2019 issue.
