Memphis may be only 200 miles from Nashville, but the musical sounds identified with these two cities are worlds apart. Nashville is apple pie and fried chicken, pickup trucks, starched jeans, straight spines, and Sunday school recitals. Memphis is barbecue sauce and bacon grease, pink Cadillacs, sharkskin suits, swiveling hips, and ecstatic shouts of amen. Nashville plays it slick, sweet, and a little ahead of the beat; Memphis plays it loose, sexy, and a little behind the beat.
It’s not just the difference between country music and rhythm and blues, or the difference between contemporary Christian and rockabilly, that separates the cities. It’s the way each town does business, the way it treats music as a cultural commodity. In Nashville, music is driven by commerce and back-room deals; in Memphis, it’s driven by street-level expression and pure feel.
But the cities are fundamentally linked, and not just by location and state government. Each stands as one of America’s most important and most historic music centers—indeed, an argument can be made that they are the two most important popular-music capitals in the world. Nearly everything good and bad about America can be found in what these cities have created and how they’ve created it.
And no man can better explain what links these two cities than Sam Phillips, the 76-year-old founder of Sun Records and the man responsible for discovering and recording Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Charlie Rich, and Roy Orbison, not to mention B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner, and other blues and R&B legends.
“What will always make Tennessee the center of the whole damn universe for the 20th century—that is, when we’re speaking about popular music—is that it’s where poor people got their voice within the American system,” Phillips says, sitting on a long leather couch in the Memphis home that he’s owned for more than 40 years.
Speaking with the emphatic rhythms of a Baptist preacher, Phillips continues: “You had fiddlers coming down out of the most impoverished regions of the Appalachian mountains, and you had mandolin players coming out of the hills and hollers and coal mines of Kentucky, all coming to Nashville to sing and play and tell their stories. And Memphis had poor musicians coming because it had Beale Street. You had blues players coming out of the Mississippi Delta and piano players coming out of Louisiana. You had all these poor people—so poor they didn’t have a warm pot to shit in. You had these black men and white men, and women too...they were beaten down, they had lives that were damn near hopeless, but they came to Nashville and they came to Memphis, and man, they got the feeling!
“They brought whatever musical skills they had learned at home, and they just let out all the emotion that they’d kept inside themselves, all the suffering and all the anger, and all the dignity and passion that had been beaten down in them, they brought it all to the music.”
As Phillips explains, that expression—from Roy Acuff and Bill Monroe in Nashville to Elvis and Otis Redding in Memphis—had an enormous impact on America. Not just on entertainment, but on society at large. “I’ll tell you, by God, it changed the whole damn world,” Phillips says, slapping his flat palm into the couch.
“All of a sudden, these people from the poorest places in America were on the radio, and eventually on the television too, and they sang their songs and they told their stories, and ain’t nothin’ been the same since. It’s hard today to comprehend how important this change was. It unequivocally changed American society!”
At the same time, each city followed a markedly different course from the other. In Nashville, the recording and song-publishing industries took hold and spurred the consolidated growth of the country music industry. Largely, that was because Nashville’s music industry formed around national corporations like RCA, Decca/MCA, Columbia, and Capitol. Memphis music, on the other hand, was spawned by maverick independents like Stax, Hi, and Sun.
Just as importantly, Memphis merged the sounds of black and white America: The success of companies like Stax and Hi depended on the collaboration of black and white artists and businesspeople. But when Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, race relations across the city fractured and halted the progress being made by the city’s recording infrastructure. The racial tensions at the time made moving forward as a unified music industry all but impossible.
The Nashville music industry might have flourished as Memphis’ faded, but even local business insiders say that Music City has lost the grass-roots feel and unadulterated feeling that once fired the best music made here in the ’50s, ’60s, and even ’70s. The gap between Nashville commercialism and Memphis soul need not be as distinct as it is today—if only Nashville could find a way to embrace independence and feeling with the same vigor that it embraces recording formulas and radio formats.
Marty Stuart, for one, represents a living, breathing connection between these two cities, and his own body of work suggests that the differences are hardly irreconcilable. A Mississippi native drawn to play music after hearing Johnny Cash’s Memphis recordings and Flatt & Scruggs’ fiery bluegrass tunes, Stuart evolved from a gifted young prodigy to a well-regarded sideman to a country music star, thanks to his ability to work within the Nashville system.
But when Stuart went looking for inspiration for his upcoming album, The Pilgrim, he traveled to Memphis and to the original Sun Studio, where the vision for the new collection came to him. “Memphis, to me, is just an extension of the Delta,” he says. “There’s a freedom to Memphis. In Nashville, there are corporate rules we live by. I suppose that’s why we’re so successful. We have structure here. Memphis hasn’t had a hit in a while, but I get the feeling that it really doesn’t care. You walk down Beale Street in the daytime, and out of the buildings you hear Bessie Smith and Elvis and Ma Rainey and Rufus Thomas and Sam & Dave.”
The city capitalizes on its history, Stuart suggests, by putting the music on the street and by continually promoting the best aspects of its legacy. That’s something, he says, Nashville could learn from. “When you walk around Memphis, down Beale Street or into the park there, there are [musicians] just letting it go with so much soul and feeling. That’s the very thing we should be serving up in this town; there should be music everywhere you turn in Nashville—and it should have so much feeling to it too. But it doesn’t quite work that way here. Sometimes I have to go to Memphis just to get my feet back on the ground and remind myself that, wait a minute, it’s all about feeling.”
Today, it’s no secret that young musicians, both poor and comfortably set-up, are more likely to travel to Nashville than to Memphis. But it’s not like when Sam Phillips was young, when people flooded both cities and “got the feeling.” That feeling has been sublimated in Nashville by a need to conform to the city’s glossy professionalism: It’s the only way a singer, songwriter, or musician will ever get the chance to succeed here.
But that feeling does exist in Nashville— in the music of such iconoclasts as Steve Earle and Tom House and Lucinda Williams—and it will rise to the surface if given the chance. As history suggests, Tennessee’s two major cities will continue to play a role in American culture. As time progresses, it would do Nashville good to look to Memphis for some of the inspiration that it seems to have lost along the way.
