Pee Wee's Saloon

Pee Wee's Saloon, at 317 Beale Street, was the favorite gathering place of Memphis musicians in the early 1900s, and the legend attached to it is the birth of the blues. An Italian immigrant named Maffei, known as Pee Wee, ran it with his son-in-law Lorenzo Pacini. W.C. Handy, based in Memphis by 1909, wrote in his autobiography that in the fall of that year he often used its cigar stand to write out copies of the Mr. Crump lyric for visiting bands. A historical marker says that one of those Beale Street blues, written for the 1909 mayoral campaign of Edward H. Crump, was first called Mr. Crump and later became The Memphis Blues. Popular retellings go further and say Handy composed the song at the counter. His memoir does not say that. His word is copying, a smaller claim and a more believable one, though he also said he orchestrated the St. Louis Blues on the same stand. Even the song's authorship is argued over: Memphis musicians credited clarinetist Paul Wyer with Mr. Crump, and musicologists have doubted how much that tune shares with The Memphis Blues. What followed is better documented. Publishers turned Handy down, so he issued the sheet music himself in 1912 and then sold the song outright to the publisher Theron Bennett for fifty dollars and the unsold copies. The new owner added words, and more than fifty thousand copies had sold by 1913, with no royalties to Handy. The copyright came back to him in 1940. By his own account Pee Wee's started at Hernando and Beale and moved later. The saloon's building was demolished in 1956, and a marker now notes the site.