Local Stories in Shelby County
Tennessee·27 places·Page 1 of 2
Music History
Aretha Franklin's Birthplace
Aretha Franklin was born at 406 Lucy Avenue in South Memphis on March 25, 1942, in a small frame house built around 1930. Her father, C.L. Franklin, was pastor of New Salem Baptist Church, and her mother, Barbara Siggers Franklin, was a singer. The family left when she was two, for Buffalo in 1944 and then Detroit, where her father's New Bethel church made her name.
History
Church's Park
Church's Park opened on Beale Street in 1899, six acres built by Robert R. Church Sr. because Memphis had no municipal park for Black residents. Church, born enslaved and often described as the South's first Black millionaire, had bought Memphis property cheaply after the yellow fever epidemics.
Industry & Science
Cotton Row
Cotton Row is the run of brokerage buildings along South Front Street, on the bluff above the Mississippi, where Memphis priced the crop of the Delta. Cotton firms worked this street from before the Civil War, within reach of the steamboat landing below. In 1826, 300 bales came to town by wagon.
Music History
Dewey Phillips At The Chisca
The Hotel Chisca, nine stories of red brick at South Main and Linden, now Dr. M.L. King Jr. Avenue, housed the radio studio where Memphis first heard Elvis Presley. Station WHBQ moved to the hotel's mezzanine in 1953, bringing Dewey Phillips and his show Red, Hot and Blue, on the air since late 1949.
Music History
East Trigg Baptist Church
East Trigg Baptist Church, at 1189 East Trigg Avenue in South Memphis, was for half a century the pulpit of Rev. W. Herbert Brewster, one of the great American gospel songwriters. Born to sharecroppers near Somerville, Tennessee, in 1897, Brewster led the church for more than fifty years and published over two hundred songs.
History
Echol Cole And Robert Walker
Echol Cole, 36, and Robert Walker, 30, were city sanitation workers killed on the rainy afternoon of February 1, 1968, at Colonial and Verne roads in East Memphis. A city rule kept crews from taking shelter in residential neighborhoods, and the state marker says they had no raincoats, so they climbed into the barrel of their truck.
Music History
Elvis At 827 Thomas
American Sound Studio stood at 827 Thomas Street, a windowless one-story building in North Memphis where Elvis Presley made what many count as the best records of his later career. Chips Moman, who had worked at Stax, founded it with Don Crews in 1964, and his house band, the Memphis Boys, cut more than a hundred hits there.
Entertainment
Elvis On The Zippin Pippin
In the small hours of August 8, 1977, Elvis Presley rented Libertyland, the amusement park on the Mid-South Fairgrounds, and rode the Zippin Pippin over and over with Lisa Marie and a small group of friends. It was eight days before his death.
Music History
Full Gospel Tabernacle
The Full Gospel Tabernacle, at 787 Hale Road in Whitehaven, about two miles from Graceland, is the church Al Green bought in 1976, while he was still a working soul star. A white building with a green roof and a central steeple, it holds a twelve-foot mural of the Rapture that shows the Memphis skyline.
History
Grace Toof's Farm
Graceland was family land long before anyone in Memphis had heard of Elvis Presley. The name came from Grace Toof Ward, daughter of the Memphis printer Stephen C. Toof, who bought 323 acres in Whitehaven in 1894. At its widest the family holding ran to about 500 acres of rolling pasture. In 1939 Ruth Brown Moore, who inherited the property through her aunt Grace, and her husband, Dr. Thomas D.
Music History
Home Equipment Company
The Home Equipment Company, an appliance store at 2529 Summer Avenue, gave Johnny Cash a job he was bad at and a patron who helped keep him in music. Cash came to Memphis in 1954 out of the Air Force, married, with a child on the way, and studying on the GI Bill to be a radio announcer.
History
Larry Payne
Larry Payne was sixteen when a Memphis police officer shot and killed him at the Fowler Homes public housing project on March 28, 1968, the day the sanitation workers' march led by Martin Luther King Jr. broke apart on Main Street. The march had set out from Clayborn Temple that morning and ended in broken windows, tear gas and nightsticks, with some 280 people arrested and about 60 hurt.
Music History
Lauderdale Courts
Lauderdale Courts is the federal housing project where Elvis Presley spent his teenage years. Built in the 1930s under the Public Works Administration program, with Georgian Revival buildings by architect J. Frazer Smith, it was one of the first federal housing projects in the country and, under segregation, whites only.
Music History
Marion Keisker's Front Desk
Marion Keisker kept the front room of the Memphis Recording Service at 706 Union Avenue, the small studio Sam Phillips opened in January 1950. She was his only assistant at the start, and already a known Memphis radio voice, first on WREC as a child and back there from about 1946. In the summer of 1953 an eighteen-year-old just out of Humes High School came in and paid $3.
Military
Mud Island's Gunboat Story
Mud Island, the long strip of land across Wolf River Harbor from downtown Memphis, is not an island and, by the favorite local story, owes its existence to a stranded warship. The story goes that the Navy monitor Amphitrite grounded in the harbor around 1910 and sat there for up to two years waiting on high water, and that the current slowed around her hull and dropped the sand that became the…
Music History
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.
History
People's Grocery
People's Grocery stood at the southeast corner of today's Mississippi Boulevard and Walker Avenue, a neighborhood called the Curve for the streetcar turn, and what happened to it in 1892 set Ida B. Wells on the campaign of her life. It was a Black-owned cooperative store, just outside the city limits, run at night by Thomas Moss, a letter carrier.
Music History
Royal Studios
Royal Studios has made records since 1957 in a converted South Memphis movie theatre, and it never got rid of the floor. The building went up in 1915 as the Shamrock Theater, became the Rex and then the Royal, and closed in 1955. Joe Cuoghi rented it for $60 a month and, with John Novarese and Quinton Claunch, turned it into the home of Hi Records. The seats came out but the slope stayed.
Music History
Satellite Record Shop
The Satellite Record Shop took shape in the candy counter of the Capitol Theatre at 926 East McLemore, and it taught Stax Records what to make. Estelle Axton, a bank clerk, had mortgaged her home in the late 1950s so that her brother Jim Stewart, a fiddle player and bond salesman, could buy an Ampex recorder for his small label.
History
The 1866 Memphis Massacre
For three days beginning May 1, 1866, white mobs attacked the Black neighborhoods of South Memphis, in one of the worst episodes of racial violence of Reconstruction. The Third U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery had just been mustered out at Fort Pickering, on the bluff south of the city, and its men were waiting for their discharge pay near families who had settled nearby.
Music History
The Automobile Sales Company
The Automobile Sales Company stood at 309 Union Avenue, on the stretch of Union that Memphis called Automobile Row, and the first members of Johnny Cash's band met there. Marshall Grant, who had settled in Memphis in 1947, took a job there as a mechanic. Luther Perkins worked beside him, specializing in electrical systems and radios.
History
The Cossitt Library Sit-In
Cossitt Library, on Front Street overlooking the Mississippi, was the oldest public library in Memphis, and until 1960 Black residents could not use it. On Saturday, March 19, 1960, the day after sit-ins reached the city at a downtown lunch counter, 36 students from LeMoyne and Owen colleges left a rally and sat down in the Cossitt and Peabody libraries.
History
The Freeway That Stopped
Sam Cooper Boulevard comes in from the east and stops at East Parkway, because a citizens' lawsuit halted Interstate 40 at the edge of Overton Park. The road was meant to continue straight through the park, a 342-acre Memphis landmark with its zoo, golf course and forest of 170 acres.
History
The Lorraine Before 1968
The Lorraine Motel at 450 Mulberry Street was a Black family's business for more than twenty years before April 1968. Built in the 1920s as a small hotel, it was bought in 1945 by Walter Bailey, who named it for his wife, Loree, and for the song Sweet Lorraine.
Entertainment
The Palace Theatre
The Palace Theatre stood at 324 Beale Street and its amateur-night audiences were considered among the most demanding anywhere. Opened about 1919 with 1,080 seats by Anselmo Barrasso and the Pacini brothers, part of a family business in vaudeville and movie houses for Black audiences, it became on Tuesday evenings the place where Memphis decided who could sing. Nat D.
Elsewhere in Tennessee
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