Road Trip Through History: Memphis and Music
Two days in Memphis. Two visits to iconic recording studios.* Two very different experiences.
Just to remind anyone who doesn't have the history of rock music in their heads: Sun Records, which bills itself as the place where rock and roll was born, was the label that launched Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison--I don't need to go on do I? Stax Records, founded only seven years later, was home to Otis Redding and other stars of soul, funk, and blues. Between them, these two labels provided a big chunk of the sound track of your life if you are an American baby-boomer, plus or minus a few years. As far as My Own True Love and I were concerned, both were a must-see.
Sun Studio
A visit to Sun Studio is a low-budget, low-tech, highly satisfying experience. A passionate, knowledgeable (and in our experience at least, very funny) docent led our tour group upstairs into an exhibition space (once an informal flophouse for impoverished musicians) where he told the story of how Sam Phillips founded the label in 1952, stopping to play relevant musical clips that had the multinational, multi generation wiggling to the music. The exhibits had the "run up by loving hands at home" feel of a small town historical society museum. We moved down into the recording studio itself, where the story and the music continued: Elvis winning a contract with a last-minute save,** the night the Million-Dollar Quartet jammed at the studio, the closing of the studio and its subsequent re-use for a string of non-music businesses, and the re-opening of the original studio as a recording space where music notables such as U2 and Bonnie Raitt come to record as an act of pilgrimage. The tour ends with the opportunity to ham it up with a vintage mike. Over the course of an hour and a bit I shared an excellent vanilla malt with My Own True Love, got choked up, laughed, and wriggled to the music. I think it's fair to say that I was not the only happy human walking out the door at the end of the tour.
Stax Museum
On the surface there was every reason to believe that a visit to the home of Stax Records would be just as satisfying. Like Sun Records, Stax has great music to draw on, an engaging built-from-the-bootstraps story with founders*** who were passionate about what developed into soul music, artists whose own rags-to-riches stories are as appealing as the story of the company, and a history of cooperation across racial lines. Like Sun Records, Stax has a feel-good second act. The Soulsville Foundation, which owns and operates the museum in the old movie theater where Stax produced its iconic records, also runs the Stax Music Academy and the Soulsville Charter School, both of which provide music education to kids. From my perspective, the Stax Museum was a missed opportunity.
Unlike Sun Studio, the Stax Museum is highly produced, using all the tricks of modern museum technology. It could have been spectacular. At the purely visual level, it was spectacular. But they lost the thread of their story. Instead of using their artists and the music to illustrate the central story, they tried to squeeze all the individual stories into a single exhibit. Worse, from my perspective, they had music and interviews running continuously so that they ran together into a muddy background of sound. It was a shame.
When I left Sun Studio, I was bouncing in my bop-around shoes. When I left Stax Records, I felt like I'd been bludgeoned with a recording mike. Luckily, if you are interested in the history of rock, the Stax Museum website does exactly what I had hoped the museum would do and does it really well. It tells the Stax story clearly, gives you opportunities to listen to the music and butt-dance in your chair,**** and makes an appeal for support for music and education program in a depressed neighborhood that produced an astonishing number of major musical talents in the mid-20th centuries.
And speaking of dancing around the room…..
* Not mention the Cotton Museum, the Ornamental Metal Museum, a few strolls along Beale Street, and some fabulous BBQ.
**Phillips turned him down twice.
***Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton. St + Ax= Stax. A minor revelation. I had always assumed that Stax referred to a stack of 45 singles waiting to drop onto the turntable of a small record player like this one:
[If you're reading this in your email, you may not be able to see the record player. Click the post title and it will take you to the browser, where all will be revealed.]
****Or get up and dance around the room. Always a good idea in my opinion.
"Sun Studio, Memphis" by David Jones - Sun Studio, Memphis. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
"Staxmuseum2005" by No machine-readable author provided. Wisekwai assumed (based on copyright claims). - No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims).. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.
The Eastern Question
In the weeks after 9/11, self-described "scholar-printer" Ted Danforth struggled to understand why the attacks occurred. He found his first clue in Osama bin Laden's statement that the attacks were revenge for the Ottoman Empire's dismemberment after World War I and Islam's subsequent humiliation at the hands of the West. That statement led Danforth to look at 9/11 as a "continuation of patterns woven into the warp of historical time" rather than as an individual event. In The Eastern Question: A Geopolitical History in 108 Maps and Drawings, Danforth traces those patterns from ancient Mesopotamia to the modern day.
The format of the book is deceptively simple: a brief essay opposite a map or illustration drawn in a naive style reminiscent of the maps in fantasy novels. In fact, Danforth's work is neither simple nor naive. In his pursuit of answers to "the eastern question,"* he considers topics as diverse as ancient and modern geopolitical theories, the inherent conflict between nomadic and settled peoples, the differing uses of time and space in churches and mosques, and the nature of empires. There are some errors of fact in the text, but the illustrations are consistently illuminating, whether Danforth is demonstrating the parallel development of Russia and the United States in the nineteenth century or the historical influence of Greek language and literature.
What begins as a history of fourteen hundred years of conflict between Islam and the West broadens into a charming and ambitious history of the world.
*A term initially used by European diplomats, journalists, etc to describe Europe's relationship with the Ottoman empire in the 18th and 19th centuries.
This review previously appeared (sans asterisk) in Shelf Awareness for Readers
Road Trip Through History: Memphis and Cotton
Our first stop on the Great River Road was Memphis--a long day's drive from Chicago.
As we drove into town, My Own True Love and I were still discussing whether we wanted to go to Graceland. Everyone we talked to said it was worth it--even people who weren't rabid Elvis fans. But we planned to spend only two days in Memphis. We had other things we knew we wanted to see.* We continued to weigh the pros and cons as we worked our way through downtown Memphis toward our hotel and Beale Street. Then a sign caught my eye: Cotton Museum. Graceland was toast.
The Cotton Museum is located in the former home of the Memphis cotton exchange, once a center of the global cotton trade.** The museum is set up to reflect the exchange in the 1930s--complete with giant chalk boards listing cotton prices, "markers" who changed the prices on the board as quickly as new info arrived, a Western Union office, a row of telephones, and a cluster of fedora-wearing men making deals. The cotton exchange was an all-male enclave--the first woman to pass its doors was a Farm Security Administration photographer, Marion Post Wolcott. (According to our docent, the men who were there that day grumbled about it for the rest of their lives.) When the exchange officially closed for the day, they settled in to drink bourbon, smoke cigars, and play cut-throat games of dominoes. (Yes, dominoes. I do not make this stuff up.)
The museum was a fascinating combination of the natural history of cotton, the social history of cotton farming from slavery to mechanization (later than you think), the business of cotton, "king cotton" festivals in Memphis, and the relationship of cotton to American music. (When you're in Memphis, music is never far from the discussion. )The physical exhibits are interesting, but the heart of the museum is a series of videos, including a recreation of the operation of the floor in 1939 based on Wolcott's photos and starring current members of the Memphis cotton exchange, which still operates in modern offices upstairs. Some of my takeaways:
- That fluffy white cotton boll is preceded by a short-lived beautiful pink flower, similar to hibiscus, to which cotton is in fact related.
- The gin in cotton gin is short for engine.
- Cotton is "classed" by color, length of the fibers and cleanliness. During the heyday of the exchange, classing was done on the top floor on the buildings on Front Street, known as "Cotton Row", under north facing skylights. It could only be classed in full sunlight.
- Holding a seat on the cotton exchange wasn't cheap: $17,000 in 1939 (roughly $230,000 in today's money). Cotton merchants were Memphis' elite.
This was not our last look at cotton. Stayed tuned.
*Does it tell you everything you need to know about the depths of our nerdiness that we were uncertain about Graceland but determined to go to the Ornamental Metal Museum?
**Surprised? Me, too.