Sam would send the recordings to a company to be pressed onto vinyl, which ended his involvement. In 1952 he started his own label - Sun Studio to have control and copyright from beginning to end.
Elvis had been hanging around the studio and even paid $4 to record a demo. Sam wasn't too impressed with it. But on July 8, 1954, Elvis and the studio musicians were playing around and Elvis was singing "That's All Right" in a way Sam had never heard before. He turned on the recorder, a DJ in Memphis started playing it on the radio and Elvis, the star, was born. We listened to that recording, too. Later that same year, a young man came to the studio, asked for Sam and said, "I'm John Cash and I want you to hear me play." Sun Studio was a mecca for musicians.
The tour started on the second floor which was filled with pictures, records, recording machines and the sound booth of the famous Memphis DJ who first played an Elvis song - Dewey Phillips. We then went downstairs into the actual recording studio. The acoustical tiles on the walls and ceiling are original, as is all the equipment and instruments. The studio is still used for recording in the evenings. We were invited to stand on the spot where Elvis stood when he sang "That's All Right" (it was marked with an X) and pose in front of a microphone from the 50's. We aren't that big of Elvis fans, so we declined.
There was a large picture of Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins. They were called The Million Dollar Quartet. On December 4, 1956, Carl was in the studio recording and Jerry Lee was also there. Johnny came by to pick up his paycheck and Elvis, a big star now under the RCA label, stopped in to say hi. A jam session broke out and Sam called the Memphis paper who sent a reporter over to take the picture.
The Peabody in Memphis is one of those old, opulent, grand, downtown hotels that most big cities have. But what sets The Peabody apart are the ducks. Every morning, ducks are brought down from their roof-top home on the elevator and paraded to a large fountain in the lobby/lounge area where they spend their day swimming and posing for pictures. Every night at 5 pm, they are paraded back to their Duck Palace, all under the watchful eye of the Peabody's Duck Master. We didn't get down to Beale street Tuesday night until 6:30, so we missed the ducks. And someone, who shall remain nameless, didn't want to pay for downtown parking just to watch a parade of ducks, so he let me off at the front door of the hotel where I could go in, see the ducks, take a picture, all while he drove around the block.
Our next stop was the National Civil Rights Museum which connects to the Lorraine Motel. It was on the balcony outside of rooms 306 and 307 that Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed on April 4, 1968. We didn't pay to go in the Museum as there was enough for us to see outside. There were about 5 kiosks outside with small screens that showed narrated footage of the sanitation strike that brought King to Memphis, an overview of the civil rights movement, the creation of the museum, and the history of the Lorraine. (In the segregated South, most hotels were white-only so the Lorraine was a popular place for black musicians to stay when in Memphis)
A block over from the Lorraine, Mike noticed a guy at a smoker, cooking meat on a back porch. We drove around to the front and it was the Double J Smokehouse and Saloon. We stopped for lunch and had the smoked pork. It wasn't served on a bun, just piled on the plate. I chose turnip greens for my side. We liked it enough that we bought a bottle of their homemade BBQ sauce. If it were the evening, I don't know that we would have stopped, being a little leery of the neighborhood, but it was a great place for lunch in the middle of the day. (as in most cities, you feel safer on a main street with lots of other people and traffic than venturing down side streets).
I had seen a sign for The Mississippi Blues Trail and learned that the visitor center for it was just over the state line about 20 minutes away. So off we went into Mississippi. It wasn't quite what we envisioned as it was like a state welcome center with brochures on all the attraction in the state. In this case, it was brochure after brochure of the towns in Mississippi that host blues festivals. And there are a lot of them! There is an actual blues trail, but it is about 100 towns in western Mississippi that have a marker designating a specific blues personality. The markers are usually in their hometown or at significant locale in the person's career.
We left Memphis on Thursday for Tupelo, Mississippi. This may seem like an odd choice after we said we aren't huge Elvis fans. But we need to head back east to get to Talladega, Alabama by next Tuesday as we are going to the NASCAR race the following weekend. So, with nothing else that jumped out at us as "must see", we picked Tupelo to spend a few days, give my foot a rest, stock up on groceries and just take a break.
Driving out of Memphis we passed the airport where Fed Ex planes were lined up on the runways. The corporation is based in Memphis.
We also passed a sign for a restaurant that advertised "Catfish, Chicken and Chinese." Some things just strike me as funny. That is quite a range of cuisine!
I don't know what it is back in Michigan, but we saw gas in Memphis for $2.91 a gallon.
Our weather has been great - low 80's. (when we checked in at the campground in Tupelo, the guy at the desk warned us of possible storms in the next few days, even telling us what local TV station to watch for the best weather reports)
Driving to Tupelo, we commented that we were on roads we had never traveled before. I think we said that as we saw a sign that said we were crossing the Tallahatchie River. That brought a chorus of that haunting song by Bobbie Gentry "Ode to Bille Joe". " . . . the day that Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge. . . "
What can I say? We have been in the land of music since arriving in Nashville, so everything reminds us of a song.
All the way to Tupelo, Mike fretted that the one and only campground in town looked hilly and wooded. Hilly is bad for us. We have had to leave campgrounds because we couldn't get the RV level. Wooded isn't so great either as we need room for our slide outs and clear line of sight for our rooftop satellite to work. The campground is a little gem. It is hilly, but all the sites are built up when needed and are level. Water pressure is great. Our site has trees on one side, but the slide outs fit and the other side is clear, which is where the satellite aims. We feel like we are out in the country, but are only a mile off the main road. The only drawback for Mike is they don't allow RV washing. For me, that is a hip-hip-hooray! Why he feels the need to have the RV clean, only to spend a week in a field outside a racetrack, with no water, sewer or electrical hookup, is beyond me. It is NASCAR, not the Ritz! But he washes it top to bottom every year when he goes to the race in Michigan, too.
Tupelo seems much bigger than we thought so there may be more to do than we think!
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