State of the states: Memphis blues

Sometimes it is timely to remember that America is not all beautiful: and that the oft-touted American Dream is not always accessible to everyone. Going south in the states was such a reminder.

We headed into warmer, dryer places: soybeans, corn, rice, and cotton grew in scraggy fields to the road edges. Hot dry climes, for some reason, tend to look more impoverished, even tho' as the song goes: it ain't necessarily so.

Houses became more shack-like, roads increasingly pot-holed, sections of town more obviously impoverished. And, in deeply-desperate parts, signs on community billboards advertised free food drops for those in dire need. This is not America, the beautiful.

After dropping our bags at our funny little Arkansas cottage with its rickety deck rattling out over a lovely oxbow offshoot of the Mississippi, called Horseshoe Lake, we headed on into Memphis town. First stop was #306 Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was assassinated by James Earl Ray an escapee from a jail in Missouri, whose dream was to kill the King. Number 306 is now part of a larger civil rights museum and exhibition and as we arrived there were crowds and a stage in the parking lot of the Lorraine set up for the finale of a Memphis Diversity walk and concert supporting diversity and tolerance in the community.

Dr King would no doubt have approved. Tho' he may well have been dismayed by the state of many of the local buildings around the Lorraine.

Much of Memphis is fairly grim. I am sure there are nice bits: we just didn't seem to come across them. Much money evidently goes missing in Memphis. Unaccounted for. Somewhere between lobbyist and politician, between the collection of funds and receipt, there is a strange little custom -- a little shake, rattle and roll that goes on locally-- nicknamed the Tennessee Waltz. As a result, many elected politicians in Tennessee reputedly end up in the clink, for corruption.

Gracelands is set in one of the Memphis-grim sections. It is nowhere near as tasteless and tacky as most reviews quote. Elvis loved purple and he splashed a little gold with his purple. The era was the 60s-70s, and it could all have been so much worse. Such a small house. Most people live in larger. But the grounds are lovely and the boy-toys numerous, and in multiples: buggies, bikes, cars, airplanes. Some he used so little before he bought another they have less than a thousand miles on them. It is easy to see how the dream palled, and so easily became destruction.

We traipsed up and down Beale Street, spent time listening to some fine Memphis Blues musos at different venues, ate catfish and hickory ribs at Blues City, then made a special trip to visit the Peabody Ducks -- a tourist attraction in their own right.

At five on the dot a clutch of small ducks shimmy-shake their tail feathers as they exit their daytime pond in the marble lobby of the exclusive Peabody Hotel. They do a charming little Peabody March down a special red carpet past their adoring fans, waddle up a carpeted elevator to their penthouse palace on the rooftop for the evening, where five star greens are laid out for their dinner. Accompanied by their own personal impeccably groomed red and gilt suited Duckmaster.

If ducks have a dream it is possible that a gig on a rooftop in a Peabody Penthouse might just be it. Though, they, too, may well be singing the blues up there in their starry Memphis nights.