For blues pilgrims, driving across the Hernando De Soto Bridge over the Mississippi River, catching the first site of Memphis, Tennessee marks the half-way point on a journey from Chicago, the 'Blues Capital of the World' down to New Orleans, a place which for African Americans, Chuck Berry once referred to as 'the gateway from freedom'. In the film Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch’s two blues pilgrims debate whether their first port of call on arrival in Memphis should be Elvis Presley’s Graceland home or Sam Philip’s legendary Sun Studios. Yet for me and everyone I’ve visited Memphis with during the course of researching Highway 61, we are at one in agreement, in that the first stop for blues pilgrims should be the National Civil Rights Museum. The Museum is located at the site of the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was cut down by a snipers’ bullet one early evening in April 1968. Visitors to the museum are greeted with a scene of 1960’s Americana, complete with the restored symmetry of the Lorraine Motel’s utilitarian façade, its electric tubed signage and two perfectly chromed gas guzzlers with rocket tail fins parked on the motel’s forecourt under the balcony where King died. Beyond the motel’s façade, the museum introduces visitors to the tensions inherent within an American society grappling with the legacy of a population whose ancestors arrived either to pursue a dream of freedom or were imported as slaves and traded in the markets of Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, Natchez and New Orleans. A couple of blocks away from the museum one can take a break for a period of reflection over a coffee in another Mystery Train location, the Arcade Restaurant, which claims to be Memphis’s oldest restaurant.
The National Civil Rights Museum provides a historical compass which serves blues pilgrims as an invaluable guide as they travel further south. For me visiting the museum was a foundation upon which I was able to make sense of the civil rights history that unfolded on my journey in search of the blues. Today this is further aided by a growing acknowledgment of the civil rights struggle through State funded tourist initiatives. For instance, at the beginning of 2014, the fifteenth of twenty five Mississippi Freedom Trail markers was officially unveiled in Jackson, the State Capital, commemorating the life of Civil Rights activist C.C. Bryant.
For anyone contemplating a blues pilgrimage I strongly recommend two recent films, both of which reinforced for me the strength of America’s civil rights story. The first was Lee Daniel’s The Butler, released in 2013, which cleverly juxtaposes the reactive delivery of legislative reforms at Congressional level with the upward pressure for civil rights from ordinary Americans, in spite of unremitting intimidation and violence directed against those that sought change. The second film, Steve McQueen’s Twelve Year’s A Slave, based on Solomon’s Northup own story, for me powerfully depicts what Chuck Berry meant when he referred to the 'gateway from freedom'.
Derek Bright is the author of Highway 61 – Crossroads on the Blues Highway. He is interviewed about his new book at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBjjoXDxvOQ.