Memphis, the Birthplace of Rock n' Roll

After doing some looking Meg "Mega-planner" Muhle found us a reasonably priced campsite just across the road from Graceland (Elvis' home up until his death), out back of Heartbreak Hotel. We rolled into town an hour or so after dark and set up our tent across the alley from row after row of extremely nice RVs. It seems being a bit older, having alot of money and being an Elvis fan are heavily correlated.

Our tent is a tad pathetic in this world

Our first night in the campsite was a little unnerving. It was a little windy, not alot windy, but enough that, combined with the gigantic tree laying torn from the ground beside us (Memphis was somewhat hit by the tornadoes down south), I decided to move the tent away from a big cottonwood beside us sometime around midnight. The tree didn't collapse in the end, nor did I sleep any better, so my efforts were for nought, though I did manage to irritate Meg a bit. The next morning we awoke to a pleasant surprise...we headed over to the shelter area to have breakfast to find that we had a 24 hour Elvis radio station playing in overhead speakers. With a little "Suspicious Minds" and "Hound Dog" to get us in the mood we were stoked to head straight over to do the Graceland tour.

It was amazing how big the trees were that got knocked over

The house ended up being sort of a weird place. Definitely different from what you would expect a rich and famous person to own nowadays. To start, the house wasn't very big, maybe a bit bigger than the house I grew up in. Also, if a person were to buy and move into the house it would probably be viewed as a fixer upper. The first thing to go would probably be the long green shag carpet in the living room, off the floor and the ceiling. Maybe next would be the mirrors that lined many of the hallways and staircases. The racket ball court could stay. I don't know, maybe Elvis' house represents a 60s decorating sense combined with no financial limitations, or maybe it was tacky even back then. Other highlights include his weird wood carved "African" room furniture, entertainment room with three televisions and a giant white couch. A nice thing was the room he had for his parents to live in. Actually, as we got to reading and learning more about Elvis he seemed like a nicer and nicer guy: one of his first big purchases when he started making money was a new house for his parents, at the age of 22 he bought his parents old house and property in Tupelo, Mississippi on the condition that it be turned into a park (his parents had had to give up the house because they couldn't make payments after his dad, Vernon, changed the value of a cheque from $4 to $14 in order to make ends meet), and throughout his life he donated to charities. Maybe he did a bunch of bad things as well, but they aren't heavily advertised at the Presley fan sites. Aside from the mansion, we also checked out a bunch of Elvis' cars , clothes, jewelery and his two airplanes.

The famous Graceland

Living room...ridiculously over the top everything, though it's hard to capture

TV room, including 3 mega-sized TVs...and no, they are not flat screen

Lisa Marie plane...this is only one of many rooms

Thank you, thank you very much

Getting up to speed with Elvis took the better part of the morning and early afternoon. After a quick lunch we hopped on a free shuttle (another bonus of our campsite location) downtown to Sun Studios to do a tour. Sun Studios is where Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Louis and Carl Perkins and a bunch of other artists got their start. The tour was great and was led by a really energetic guide who, along with telling us the history of the studio and stories of the artists, also played a bunch of firsts for us: First Rock n' Roll song "Rocket '88", first Elvis recording (some gospel music), and a bit of the "Million Dollar Quartet" session. After the tour we figured we had had about enough music history for one day and made our way home. We also wanted to try out a restaurant that Jaci and Larry had recommended. They watched a show called "Diners, Drive-ins,and Dives" and it had a restaurant from Memphis on it that was famous for it's Barbeque. We figured it was a must do and programmed the GPS to lead us to Tom's BBQ. It was a worthwhile adventure, the ribs really were the best we had ever had, and the owner Tom was a really nice guy and popped by and talked with us for a few minutes and gave us a free dessert. We didn't really need the dessert as we were already overfull from dinner, but it was a nice gesture.

Thanks Jaci and Larry for the awesome recommendation!

We awoke the next morning and went for a nice run to work off all the calories we had eaten the night before. The next morning, after a bit of a run to work off a bit of the food from the night before, we were on the road again. To eat more Barbeque. In fact the whole reason we took a bit of a zig-zag route route through Tennessee (if we had hit Nashville first we would have saved a few hours of driving) was to hit the World Championship BBQ Competition. We spent the whole day wandering through the dozens, if not hundreds, of tents. Some of the tents were for vendors selling BBQ related paraphernalia, some for food stalls, but the bulk of the tents were for competitors. The competition categories ranged from pork shoulders to pork ribs to Whole pigs. The event was very pig cooking centric. They did have awards for cooking chickens, sauces, coleslaw and baked beans, but they really seemed to be side events. Something funny about the pig theme was that the team names were all had pig in them, all the team logos had smiling pigs in them, and there was a transvestite Miss Piggy dress up competition. But, as the pictures below can attest to, there were no actually happy pigs at the event. Only dead ones. Aside from walking around aimlessly Meg and I got to be part of the peoples choice judging for pork shoulders. This was a fairly disorganized affair: it is a little hard to describe how it was set up and how it went wrong, but suffice it to say in the end we were supposed to have five samples and both Meg and I had about eight and in the end I never voted. That was our only taste of theBBQ'd food unfortunately, we didn't really catch on till too late the politics of the tents. The idea was that each tent had a finite number of passes to let people in, most went to family and friends of the cookers and then at the cookers discretion the rest of the tickets were given out. We had a few chances to get in with some of the teams but didn't really catch on until too late that if we didn't accept offers we would be stuck with nowhere to go at the end of the day. A few places were sort of little clubs that you could pay to go into, but we weren't really in the mood to ramp it up that much (and we had to drive home). So we watched the winners of the chicken category get their award and go ballistic (I think the teams were already into the drink pretty heavy by that point), caught a bit of live music and headed home, crossing paths with alot of well dressed folks just heading in to start a big night of partying.

Porkfiction...why not?

Another BBQ team...there were many different theme tents

Whole hog prep...hogs, hogs, everywhere

Rib time...a minute fraction of the meat that was cooking!

Meg is a cultural chameleon.

The next day, we were back to being serious. Our first stop was the Civil Rights Museum. The museum included the actual hotel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Much of the museum focused on MLKs life, fair enough considering his huge impact on the movement, though it also included a history starting all the way from slavery. The exhibits were all interesting and helped Meg and I gain some more insight into the civil rights movement, but the section focusing on Martin Luther King Jr. was really moving. He was such a great orator and he was so brave in the face of the threats against him that we were saddened at his loss even 40 years on. There was a final section of the museum that was a little unfortunate. An entire wing is dedicated to a conspiracy theory questioning the official theory on who killed MLK and why it was done. In the end you just get the feeling that people can be very unreliable when questioned several years apart.

After that we headed off for some more music history in the Rock n' Soul museum. The museum was great! It followed the progression of southern music from the cotton fields all the way through to the Beatles to contemporary bands that have recorded music in Memphis to capture the feeling of the city. The museum included tonnes of recordings that could be listened to along the way to demonstrate people and milestones in the history of the Memphis music scene. One of our big take aways from the experience was how many artists in the south who are big names started off dirt poor and often as children of sharecroppers on cotton fields. Elvis, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, B.B. King.

We closed down that museum and wandered the streets of Memphis for a bit. The city was a little flooded, though not badly in the downtown area and around many of the tourist attractions, so we were able to see everything we wanted to. It seemed like much of the town shut down early so we made our way to Beale Street. Beale street was at one point a big party place for local blacks in Memphis and has overtime changed to a touristy party street. There are no cars allowed down a few blocks of the street, alot of live music, and even more beer joints. We grabbed a beer, sat on the street corner listening to music for a few minutes, and then checked out a few gift shoppes before calling it another full day in Memphis.

Flooding along the river

Beale Street at night...party central, at least for tourists

The next day was Sunday, so naturally first things first we headed to church. No, really we did. We attended a service of the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church, the church of Al Green. At some point during his music career Al Green left soul music to become a preacher and we were keen to see him. Upon arriving at the church and seeing that all of the regular attendees were dressed up extremely nicely, we realized that our cargo pants and t-shirts were not going to cut it. After Meg informed me that, no, we could not change in the church parking lot, we zoomed around the corner to an empty lot, changed and were still back by 11:30. It turns out that church started at 11. This wasn't really our fault as the website indicated 11:30. I am not too sure what we missed, but Al Green was not yet present and the folks up front were still talking about Sunday school so I can't imagine too much. The start of the service ended up being the best part actually. We got to witness a couple young fellows getting baptized and then a pre-preacher came up and gave a fairly rousing sermon that had alot of folks in the audience yelling "Amens". There was also some great singing from the choir and, as I was secretly hoping, a few people were up in the aisles really getting into it. And then Al Green came out. I have to admit that I was curious about a few things before he came out. For example, how could the famous Al Green only fill about 30% of a pretty small church with regular parishioners (Another 30% of the seats were filled with gawkers like us, you could tell because they were white). That question was soon answered when Bishop Reverend Al Green came out and after some incomprehensible garble started asking all the visitors in the room where they were from., ALL of them. I can imagine that as a local I would rather not spend the better part of my morning hearing that some joker from Vancouver was visiting my church. Then Al Green proceeded to talk about how nobody believed that Al Green would last even 43 seconds, let alone 43 years. As I sat there a little bored I got to imaging whether he had this same shtick every Sunday, right from the beginning.

"Nobody believes Al Green would last even 42 seconds, let alone 42 years"

"Nobody believes Al Green would last even 4 seconds, let alone 4 years"

...

"Nobody believes Al Green would last even 30 seconds, well it just happened!"

I was starting to see why he had such a small congregation. He then told a baby to shut up, "Shut Up Baby!", talked a bit more about himself, sang a little bit, complained about teenage boys with low pants (the girl in front us approved of this comment, "Mmmm Hmmmm that's right") and then had the congregation read a section of the bible. All in all I was pretty happy to get out of there.

We had packed our bags and tent before going to church, but had one last stop in Memphis before we headed out. After hearing all about these musicians coming from cotton backgrounds we decided to visit the Cotton Museum. The museum was setup in what was once the equivalent of the stock market of cotton; prices were written up on a blackboard, deals were made, cotton was graded, all in this little street in Memphis. We learned a bit about the cotton grading process as well as the evolution of cotton picking, from hand picking and the manual removal of seeds, through the cotton gin (we finally figured out why the cotton enGINe was so important. It basically made the removal of seeds from cotton significantly faster, making the bottleneck in cotton the picking process, where alot of slave labor could be used), up to modern genetic modification of cotton which is Round-Up ready. It was all pretty high-level but about right for us. We also got to see a little of the King Cotton culture of Memphis, with kings and princesses of cotton at the annual fair in their fancy garb.

With that done, we were back on the road. This time to Nashville for a bit of country.