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. Williams, a history teacher at Booker T. Washington High School and a columnist, began hosting in the 1930s, and his pupil Rufus Thomas took over in the 1940s. Thomas said the Apollo crowd in Harlem would boo their mama off the stage, but they weren't as tough as Memphis. The house had a hook of its own: a figure known as the Lord High Executioner of Beale Street, who fired blanks from a pearl-handled revolver when the boos got loud. The theatre's nickname was the Graveyard of Champions. Jug bands, glass eaters and snake charmers competed for small cash prizes beside singers. A young guitar player from Mississippi named Riley King started entering in 1946, and historian Louis Cantor, who worked at WDIA, says he competed frequently. A state marker credits those shows with launching him and Bobby Blue Bland. White patrons were seated in the balcony for Thursday midnight shows until the war. The Palace stopped showing films in the 1950s or a little later, and it was demolished in 1972 during the urban renewal that took 474 buildings around Beale Street. Markers to Williams and Thomas stand on the block.
Getting there
35.1395, -90.0504
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