Off the Beaten Page by Peterson Smith Terri

Author:Peterson Smith, Terri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2013-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

11

Memphis

ROLLIN’ ON THE RIVER

No city has had more of an impact on modern culture.

—Robert Gordon, It Came from Memphis

It’s hard to stand still in Memphis. Even the most reserved person will look down and find her feet tapping and fingers seemingly snapping by their own volition. Soon a little shimmy sneaks in, but as Elvis sang, “That’s all right, mama,” because in Memphis they encourage a whole lot of free-spirited enthusiasm. The melody of Memphis is as complex as its history—sometimes happy and harmonious, sometimes discordant and mournful—a blend of river, race, and rhythm. But by the time you hit the dance floor at the Stax Museum, surrounded by life-size videos of performers including Sly and the Family Stone and the Jackson Five, you will, indeed, “dance to the music.”

Memphis and Memphis music owe their existence to the Mississippi River. Like its ancient Egyptian namesake on the Nile, Memphis is perched at the top of a river delta, where the land is flooded and fertilized seasonally by the river. Its location made Memphis both the gateway to bountiful farmland and the perfect port from which to ship the crops, most notably cotton. Because the cotton trade depended on slave labor, Memphis became the site of one of the South’s biggest slave markets. Here in the delta, enslaved Africans cultivated not just cotton but also a unique form of music based on spirituals and the call-and-repeat chanting that made their work bearable, planting the seeds of music that would someday rock the world.

America’s beloved author Mark Twain owes his existence to the river, too. It was on the Mississippi that the cub riverboat pilot Samuel Clemens heard the riverboat leadsman call out, “mark twain” (indicating a depth of two fathoms or twelve feet) and adopted that call as his pen name. Because of Twain, when you stand on the levee in Memphis for the first time, it may seem strangely familiar. People around the world have some notion of the Mighty Mississippi, even though they’ve never seen it. For them, it’s a river of the imagination, a ship’s locker full of tall tales and the place where Huckleberry Finn and the slave Jim launched their adventures. It’s the ultimate symbol of hope and freedom. Just get on your raft and go.

Growing up in the river town of Hannibal, Missouri, Twain felt the same pull and yearned to be a riverboat pilot. In his autobiography-cum-travelogue, Life on the Mississippi, Twain peppers the first and, in my view, most entertaining part of the book with hair-raising and hilarious stories about learning to navigate the river’s ever-changing waters as a cub pilot. Over his lifetime, Twain traveled every portion of the Mississippi’s journey between St. Paul and New Orleans, so there’s no better guide than Twain to connect you to the river’s dangerous meanderings or to the quirks of the people along its banks. University of Memphis professor Eric Carl Link says in his introduction to Life on the Mississippi, “Twain viewed the Mississippi River as a defining feature of his life, culture and country.

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