City in Tennessee, USA. In the south-west corner of the state, on the Mississippi river, it was founded in 1819 and incorporated in 1826. It has been influential as a centre of popular music in the 20th century.
Founded as a river trading outpost, Memphis had grown large and prosperous enough by the 1850s to stage concerts by travelling soloists and opera companies at the New Memphis Theatre. Local operatic and orchestral groups performed at the Greenlaw Opera House from its opening in 1866 until it was destroyed by fire in 1884. German immigrants were prominent in the musical life of Memphis from the 1850s to the 1870s, but many of them perished or left the city as a result of yellow fever epidemics in 1878 and 1879. The Beethoven Club, founded in 1888, has continued to sponsor appearances by leading classical musicians. It was also responsible for the founding in 1909 of the first Memphis SO, which lasted into the 1920s. The composer Burnet C. Tuthill founded and directed a second Memphis SO in the 1940s and 50s. In 1952 Vincent de Frank founded the Memphis Sinfonietta, later renamed the Memphis SO, which he directed until his retirement in 1984. In that year Alan Balter became director, and the orchestra became a full-time organization. Balter remained as director until 1998. The Memphis Opera Theatre was founded in 1956 and is now known as Opera Memphis. With the Metropolitan Opera Guild in 1996 it jointly commisioned Mike Reed’s Different Fields, and in 1997 it staged the world première of Buoso’s Ghost by Michael Ching, who has been its general director since 1992.
The music programme at Rhodes College (formerly Southwestern College) achieved prominence during the Tuthill years. The largest music programme in the city is at the University of Memphis (formerly Memphis State University), which offers a full range of BM and MM degrees as well as the DMA degree in various subjects and a PhD in musicology and ethnomusicology. The music department has produced the New Music Festival (now known as the Imagine Festival) since 1972 as a forum for contemporary composers and has been the home since 1979 of High Water Recording Company, which produces recordings of regional vernacular music such as blues and gospel.
The population of Memphis grew rapidly after the yellow fever epidemics, mostly by settlement of blacks and whites from the surrounding rural territory. Many were poor, but some brought wealth acquired in agriculture and the timber industry. The population was also enriched by Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants. The dichotomies of black and white, rich and poor, rural and urban, as well as Memphis's status as a transport centre for Mid-America, are responsible for the special character of much of the city's culture and music. Throughout the 20th century these forces have converged in various ways, leading to important developments in blues, gospel, jazz, country music, rock and soul music.
There is little documentation of traditional music in Memphis in the 19th century, but its richness can be assumed from 20th-century recoveries of solo and group work songs, spirituals, instrumental dance music, ballads and ragtime and blues songs. Ragtime by local composers was published for about the first 15 years of the century. Compositions by Joseph H. Denck, Geraldine Dobyns, Elma Ney McClure, Saul Bluestein, Wheatley Davis and W.C. Handy often contain folk and blues elements and reveal ragtime to have been a vehicle for musical expression by women and members of immigrant groups. Italian and Irish Americans were also prominent at this time as owners of theatres and saloons attracting black customers. In 1910 Fred Barrasso founded the Tri-State Circuit of theatres presenting black entertainment, including some of the first performances of blues by professional singers.
W.C. Handy had settled in Memphis by 1907 as the leader of a black American band that performed for both white and black social functions. He had already encountered traditional blues music in the Mississippi Delta and begun arranging these tunes for his band. Handy continued to exploit blues material as a bandleader in Memphis and in 1912 published the Memphis Blues, one of the first published tunes to have the word ‘blues’ in its title. He followed this with St Louis Blues in 1914 and a series of other blues hits, establishing Pace and Handy (later Handy Brothers) as the leading publishing house for blues in the 1910s. Handy soon gained a reputation for himself as ‘father of the blues’ and for his publishing house and later the city of Memphis as ‘home of the blues’. The city has displayed an ambivalent attitude towards this reputation ever since. Handy relocated his business to Chicago and then New York in 1918, but other Memphis composers emulated his success into the 1920s. The most successful were the bandleaders Charles H. Booker and Bob Miller.
Between 1927 and 1930 five record companies set up studios in Memphis for brief periods and recorded a range of local talent. Blues by resident Memphis performers were heavily represented, ranging from solo singer-guitarists (Robert Wilkins, Furry Lewis, Jim Jackson), to duos (the Beale Street Sheiks, Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe) and larger ensembles (Cannon's Jug Stompers, the Memphis Jug Band). The latter groups combined traditional instruments of African derivation with harmonica and various stringed instruments. The country music performers who recorded during this period were mostly from outside Memphis. The city thus fulfilled its role as a major distribution centre for music. Black American religious music was represented by the preaching and spiritual singing of Rev. E.D. Campbell and Rev. Sutton E. Griggs, vocal harmony by the I.C. Glee Quartet, and especially the music of the Church of God in Christ, America's largest predominantly black American Pentecostal denomination. Artists representing this church, such as Elder Richard Bryant's Sanctified Singers, Elder Lonnie McIntorsh, Bessie Johnson and A.C. and Blind Mamie Forehand, introduced a rough-voiced singing style and the use of musical instruments, including even jug bands, into black religious music. Many of the jazz artists recorded in Memphis had served in bands under the direction of W.C. Handy in the 1910s and displayed the influence of his formalism and emphasis on arrangement, in contrast to the more improvisational styles prevailing elsewhere. Among the leaders whose bands were recorded were Douglas Williams, Charles Williamson and Jimmie Lunceford, along with white jazz groups under the leadership of Slim Lamar and Blue Steele. Other artists such as the trumpeter Johnny Dunn, the drummer Jasper Taylor and the arranger Gene Gifford left Memphis and achieved success through recordings made in the north.
For nearly two decades from 1931 there was only one recording session in Memphis, held in 1939. Recordings by black groups led by James De Berry and Charlie Burse present a synthesis of elements from jug bands and small jazz combos, pointing to the sounds of later blues ensembles. A similar synthesis of string band and jazz elements is heard in the recordings of the white Swift Jewel Cowboys, a group performing in the ‘western swing’ style. Other artists such as the blues pianist Memphis Slim (Peter Chatman) and the blues guitarist Memphis Minnie (Lizzie Douglas) had to relocate to Chicago in order to maintain recording careers during this period.
A permanent recording industry was launched in Memphis in 1950 with the opening of the Memphis Recording Service headed by Sam Phillips. By 1952 this had become Sun Records, a company that would record an extraordinary range of musical talent for the next decade. Another important factor affecting the development of Memphis music in this period was the radio station WDIA's change in 1949 to an all-black on-air format. Its steady diet of live and recorded blues and gospel music, along with increased black music programming at other local stations, drew not only many black listeners but whites as well. Among the Memphis artists in the blues and rhythm and blues fields to achieve fame through recordings in the early 1950s were Howlin' Wolf (Chester Burnett), B.B. King, Bobby Bland, Junior Parker, Rosco Gordon, Doctor Ross, Joe Hill Louis, Rufus Thomas and Johnny Ace. Strong instrumental music programmes in the public high schools nurtured jazz talent, but the city's prevailing tastes in blues and other vocal forms did not allow a prominent jazz scene to develop. Gospel recording was dominated by the sound of quartets, such as the Spirit of Memphis, which featured lead switching and a ‘pumping’ bass singer. The gospel compositions of Lucie Campbell and Rev. W. Herbert Brewster of Memphis were also widely recorded during the 1940s and 50s. In the field of country music a number of groups were recorded in a ‘honky tonk’ style, while the most distinctive country artist to appear in the 1950s was Johnny Cash. The most significant new style to emerge from Memphis at this time was ‘rockabilly’, an important component of rock and roll that featured a small combo blues instrumentation dominated by electric guitar and/or piano, musical structures based in the blues and lyrics appealing to adolescent sensibilities. Most rockabilly performers were from the region around Memphis and had direct contact with black music and musicians. The chief exponent of the style was Elvis Presley, who began recording in 1954. Other important rockabilly performers were Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Billy Riley, Warren Smith, Johnny Burnette, Charlie Feathers, Johnny Bond and Charlie Rich.
Popular music in Memphis during the 1960s and first half of the 1970s was dominated by soul music. In its most characteristic Memphis variety it featured highly emotional gospel-influenced vocals with a backing of electric guitar and bass, organ and drums, usually supplemented with trumpet and saxophone and sometimes additional wind instruments. The leading record companies associated with this music were Stax and Hi, with other significant contributions made by Goldwax and Home of the Blues. The backing musicians and some of the vocalists were from Memphis, but many of the latter were recruited from other parts of the country. Some of the backing musicians, particularly at Stax, were white, marking the first period of sustained racial integration in Memphis recording studios. Among the leading Memphis soul recording artists of this era were Booker T. and the MGs, Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas, Otis Redding, William Bell, Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd, Isaac Hayes, Willie Mitchell, Ann Peebles, Al Green, James Carr, O.V. Wright, Johnny Taylor and the Staples Singers. While a number of the soul music performers, such as Rufus Thomas, drew heavily on blues sources, those who recorded strictly blues were fewer in number. Among the most prominent of these were Albert King, Little Milton and Big Lucky Carter. Meanwhile, the efforts of blues researchers stimulated a revival of older blues styles and the rediscovery of performers such as Furry Lewis, who often appeared at local clubs and festivals and inspired musicians of a younger generation.
Since the decline of soul music in the mid-1970s, Memphis has fostered individual successes in a variety of popular musical styles, but no distinctive new genre. The last quarter of the 20th century saw a wave of appreciation of the city's musical past, symbolized by the opening of Elvis Presley's home Graceland as a tourist destination following his death in 1977, the redevelopment of Beale Street as a centre of blues activity and a number of festivals highlighting the musical heritage of Memphis and the surrounding region.
G. Lee: Beale Street: Where the Blues Began (New York, 1934/R)
W. Miller: Memphis during the Progressive Era, 1910–1917 (Memphis, 1957)
G. Capers: The Biography of a River Town; Memphis: its Heroic Age (New Orleans, 1966)
B. Olsson: Memphis Blues and Jug Bands (London, 1970)
K. Myracle: Music in Memphis, 1880–1900 (thesis., Memphis State U., 1975)
C. Crawford: Yesterday's Memphis (Miami, 1976)
D. Tucker: Memphis since Crump: Bossism, Blacks, and Civic Reformers, 1948–1968 (Knoxville, TN, 1980)
M. McKee and F. Chisenhall: Beale Black and Blue (Baton Rouge, LA, 1981)
R. Biles: Memphis in the Great Depression (Knoxville, TN, 1986)
K. Lornell: ‘Happy in the Service of the Lord’: Afro-American Gospel Quartets in Memphis (Urbana, IL, 1988, 2/1995)
L. Cantor: Wheelin' on Beale (New York, 1992)
B. Reagon, ed.: We'll Understand It Better By and By: Pioneering African American Gospel Composers (Washington DC, 1992)
R. Gordon: It Came from Memphis (Boston, 1995)
R. Brewer: Professional Musicians in Memphis (1900–1950): a Tradition of Compromise (diss., U. of Memphis, 1996)
R. Bowman: Soulsville U.S.A.: the Story of Stax Records (New York, 1997)
P. Zimmerman: Tennessee Music: its People and Places (San Francisco, 1998)
DAVID EVANS