When it reaches eleven o'clock at night, the singer of the club of the old king of wrestling King Jerry Lawler begins to say goodbye, a celebrity from the city of Memphis who four years ago, after 65, tried his luck on the street where so many people have tried throughout history: Beale Street. There are barely half a dozen people left in the premises that last dark Friday of summer, with the most vibrant street in the city at half mast and the musicians playing with almost no audience, absent as is that human mass that used to take the road. This 2020 of the pandemic there are only a handful of souls walking along the blues boulevard, but those who remain are epic, ready to extend the night until the discovery of the vaccine against the virus.
"It's his birthday, it's his birthday ...!", Shouts a young woman, demanding some encores from the band, clinging to the arm of two other girls. The news awakens so much enthusiasm in another couple of friends who are in the place that one would say that it is the first time that they meet someone on their anniversary; and all, quite drunk and without masks, hug, congratulate and kiss with an euphoria at the end already imposed.
It is difficult to know what is real in such a changed place
There is a whole industry of musical nostalgia, which looks a lot like dry nostalgia, in Memphis: Elvis Presley, BB King, Sun Records ... And Beale Street is its nerve center, a hall of fame for black music, a boulevard of traditional venues where in a decade or another someone gave a legendary concert, where absinthe was gambled and sold. "You will meet honest men and crafty pickpockets, you will find that the places do not close until someone dies ... If Beale Street could talk, if Beale Street could talk, married men would take their beds and leave," he wrote about 100 years ago WC Handy, the self-proclaimed father of the blues.
Handy said that in 1903, when he was waiting for a train at the Tutwiler station (Mississippi), he heard a musician playing the guitar with a knife and causing the so-called slide effect , the one that pulls a melancholic sound from the strings. It was, he said, "the weirdest music he had ever heard" and the composer introduced it to the world. His house-museum is one of the most attractive of the new Beale Street, the Beale Street of men in sandals. Today, however, there are hardly any of these. Today it is a tourist mecca without tourists, nostalgia for nostalgia, in which if something has survived it is precisely the razors.
CANADA
Minneapolis
Minnesota
saint Louis
Missouri
Memphis
Tennessee
Winfield
Alabama
Clarksdale
Mississippi
Birmingham
Alabama
Oxford
Mississippi
New Orleans
Louisiana
Gulf of mexico
500 km
MEXICO
THE COUNTRY
CANADA
Minneapolis
Minnesota
saint Louis
Missouri
Memphis
Tennessee
Winfield
Alabama
Clarksdale
Mississippi
Birmingham
Alabama
Oxford
Mississippi
New Orleans
Louisiana
Gulf of mexico
500 km
MEXICO
THE COUNTRY
CANADA
Minneapolis
Minnesota
saint Louis
Missouri
Memphis
Tennessee
Winfield
Alabama
Clarksdale
Mississippi
Birmingham
Alabama
Oxford
Mississippi
New Orleans
Louisiana
Gulf of mexico
500 km
MEXICO
THE COUNTRY
The one that saxophonist Coleman Garrett II carries in his pocket is three inches. It seemed like the time to go when George Michael's Careless Whisper began to play , and as the music's origin neared the silhouette of Garrett playing the saxophone before a trio of women. When she's done, she flirts and asks them for equal parts tips. She wears a holster slung over her shoulder and 20 random years playing on Beale Street.
“Street musicians live on tips, we collect everything in cash and people know it, so we have to protect ourselves. When we leave Beale, we go to our houses: anyone can come and rob us. The police have searched and arrested me for it. If you are white, you can go armed, if you are black… ”, he complains. What he does not take the slightest precaution for is the coronavirus. "I have divine immunity, I don't feel this shit," he exclaims. When the epidemic started and the clubs closed, he lost his job and his girlfriend.
I had gone crazy looking for Beale Street in New Orleans because of James Baldwin. In 1974 the writer titled a novel with Handy's verse, If Beale Street could talk , and a couple of years ago, Barry Jenkins took it to the movies with a quote from Baldwin in the presentation: “ Beale Street is a street in New Orleans, where my father, where Louis Armstrong was born, "he says," every black person in America was born on Beale Street, was born in the black neighborhood of some city, be it Jackson in Mississippi or Harlem. , In New York. Beale Street is our legacy. "
Previous deliveries
- At the wheel of black America | 1. New Orleans
- At the wheel of black America | 2. Birmingham (Alabama)
- At the wheel of black America | 3. From Alabama to Mississippi
- At the wheel of black America | 4. Clarksdale (Mississippi)
However, I did not find any Beale Street in New Orleans, the first stop on this trip, nor is there any reference to any street so called in the last century, much less linked to Armstrong, which came into the world in South Broad, next to the traffic court . Baldwin's reference was probably a poetic license that was taken to talk about that same conceptual black neighborhood that every black kid has grown up in. It made sense to choose a route with so much bittersweet history, also belonging to a city in which just six years before the novel Martin Luther King had been assassinated, also in Memphis. "Beale Street is a noisy street," says Baldwin, "the reader is left to discern the meaning of the noise."
It is difficult to discern the meaning of the crisis, what is real and unreal in such a denatured Beale Street. The closest pawn shop, on Poplar Avenue, paints a more accurate portrait of reality the day after that meta-nostalgic night . A dozen guitars hang on one of the walls, with prices ranging from 70 to almost 200 dollars. The clerk, Alaina Mickens, 22, explains that there are those who cry when they leave their belongings because they know they will not get them back. The most sold and bought are electronic devices, not jewelry. "Not everyone has jewelry to pawn," he clarifies.
This is followed by an appointment with saxophonist Coleman Garrett II to speak more calmly and take photos of him in daylight. The waitress who attends the restaurant knows him and makes a comment in his ear. "I'm not always this guy," he replies.
Some tourists have already arrived on the street, but it doesn't seem like it's going to be a big fundraising night either. As I would see that same day, most that weekend prefer to go to Graceland, which, in some way, is another Beale Street and another nostalgia for another America that, like Beale, does not matter if it is in Tennessee or Louisiana . Next to Elvis's headstone, in the garden of the mansion, lay a bouquet of purple flowers in memory of his grandson, Benjamin Keough, who has just died in an apparent suicide with a shotgun.
In the lobby of Elvis's mansion my cell phone vibrated. It was Patricia McCloskey, attorney and wife of fellow attorney Mark McCloskey. The couple became famous in late June for pointing guns at a demonstration against racism that passed through their property in St. Louis (Missouri). The city was the birthplace of Miles Davis and the hotbed of the Black Lives Matter movement in America. Patricia McCloskey said they were accepting a meeting on Monday at 11.