One of the great thrills of my life was getting a note on Beale Street in 1999. Memphis had always meant so much to me, long before I ever arrived there thirty years earlier, and Beale Street, of course, was the very emblem of the music and culture I had come to love. Not as much as Sam Phillips perhaps, who had first landed on Beale on his way to a religious revival in Dallas as a sixteen-year-old in 1939. It was four o’clock in the morning and pouring-down rain when Sam and his brother Jud and three friends from Coffee High School in Florence, Alabama, all members of Highland Baptist Church, drove up and down the fabled avenue in a 1937 Dodge coupé. To Sam Broadway at its most bustling could never have been as busy.

It was not the same for his friends, he realized – to them it was mostly just a place to gawk – but to Sam, drawn not just by the stories he had heard from an old blind sharecropper named Silas Payne but by the true facts and life of a fellow Florentine, W.C. Handy, who had himself arrived in Memphis some thirty-five years earlier (“I had seen pictures of him, I had read about him – look at the courage that man showed when he came to Memphis, a black man trying to make a name for himself in the white man’s world”), Beale Street represented the sum total of everything he had ever imagined. For a boy who had never even been as far as Birmingham, Beale Street and the Mississippi River were nothing less than the spelling-out of his dreams and his destiny.

It was like a beehive, a microcosm of humanity – you had old black men from the Delta and young cats dressed fit to kill. But the most impressive thing to me about Beale Street was that nobody got in anybody’s way – because every damn one of them wanted to be right there. Beale Street represented for me, even at that age, something that I hoped to see for all people. That sense of absolute freedom, that sense of no direction but the greatest direction in the world, of being able to feel, I’m a part of this somehow. I may only be here a day or two, but I can tell everybody when I get back home what a wonderful time I had.

It was at that point that he determined that Memphis would one day be his home.

Well, I can’t match that, obviously – but it meant an awful lot to me. And, however secondary any kind of public recognition may be to the work itself, it meant even more to be recognized by the very city to which I had always aspired to some kind of honorary citizenship.

Frank Stokes was one of the other recipients of the award that day, and although he was not there to accept it (he died in 1955, in his mid-to-late sixties, and in fact made no records after 1929), it was genuinely exciting not only to meet his surviving family but simply to be part of a ceremony honoring one of the greatest proponents of the Memphis blues, past, present, and future. His driving, propulsive beat, frequently complemented by the second guitar of Dan Sane (they were billed as the Beale Street Sheiks), was a forerunner not only to much of the blues that Sam Phillips recorded at his little studio at 706 Union Avenue from 1950 on but to the rock ‘n’ roll that would follow pell-mell in its wake and soon engulf the world. There are many songs that epitomize that ebullient but hauntingly melodic, not to mention unrelentingly rocking (in the best Memphis tradition), sense of style and grace that Frank Stokes exemplified but “Downtown Blues” to me was always the one that captured it best. Even with that old-timey wobble in the voice (and the scratchy sound of an old 78), there is nothing antiquarian about it in the least.

It’s a source that has never ceased to replenish musical inspiration and imagination, but the first time I think I actually heard this particular song was on a compilation album called The Blues Project (it was Blues Project group founder Danny Kalb’s participation on this same 1964 Elektra album that suggested his yet-to-be-born band’s name). To me Geoff Muldaur, possessor of one of the great voices of the blues revival (he may well have been the great blues-revival voice, a torch he picked up again with his transcendent 1998 return to recording, The Secret Handshake) didn’t just capture the spirit of the Memphis blues with his version of “Downtown Blues” - he actually took it a step further in the company of his own brand of latter–day Sheiks, an acoustic ensemble that included John Sebastian (soon to found the Lovin’ Spoonful) and an anagrammatically pseudonymous Bob Dylan (as Bob “Landy”) on treble piano. Well, take a listen for yourself, and see if it doesn’t presage the popular ascendance of the Rolling Stones and the electric Dylan - at least that’s how it sounded to me at the time, and it still does.

Well, I’ve come quite a ways from my Beale Street note. As I tell my students (and as Tristram Shandy never fails to underscore): Prize the digression. But, you know, the funny thing was, I never saw it. My note, I mean. It wasn’t that I wasn’t down on Beale from time to time – but I mean, what kind of egomaniac (or in Sam Phillips’ terms, what kind of ignorant sonofabitch) walks down Beale Street with his eyes cast down in continual search of his own name? I was beginning to suspect the whole thing might have been a sham, maybe my note had simply never been cast – which would have been okay, I mean, I had shared a stage with Frank Stokes’ granddaughter. But then one hot summer day in 2002 I went down to interview the great Memphis photographer Ernest Withers, whose documentation of the music and the Movement are unsurpassed, when what to my surprise, as I reached the threshold of his studio at 333 Beale, I saw my name.

Now I had known Mr. Withers a little before this, not much – but for some reason, contrary to all my natural inclinations, I just couldn’t help but gush out my excitement over my discovery. Yes, nodded Mr. Withers, who was unfailingly kind to me and so many others but was not without his acerbic moments. He was well aware of my note, he said, and I’d like to think he winked at me then, but I really have no evidence to support that conclusion. “You know,” he said without a hint of a smile, “I walk on you every day.” Well, what the hell, it was an honor just to be recognized by Mr. Withers, wasn’t it?

But nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell –Bob Dylan

Dapper, articulate, sophisticated in his presentation of material ranging from blues to ragtime to spirituals to a breezy form of recitatif that could pass for the rap of its day, Blind Willie McTell would be the stuff of legend even if his own improbable tale of artistic and commercial survival did not warrant a romantic myth of its own.

I first encountered his music among the very earliest of my blues discoveries around 1959, at age fifteen, thanks entirely to the great good taste of writer/producer/ethnomusicologist Sam Charters, who included McTell’s 1928 masterpiece, “Statesboro Blues,” on the Folkways/RBF anthology, The Country Blues, which accompanied the book he had just written of the same name.

Propelled by McTell’s ringing, delicately accented twelve-string guitar, “Statesboro Blues” is an epic tale of dislocation and commonality (“Brother got ‘em, friends got ‘em/I got ‘em/ Woke up this morning, we had them Statesboro blues/I looked over in the corner/Grandma and grandpa had ‘em, too”) familiar to most contemporary listeners in the Allman Brothers’ inexorably anthemic version. Here, though, it is presented with such charm, such casual beauty, such utter lack of predictability that it surprises every time. There’s a plaintiveness, too, not normally associated with the blues, not just in the high, slightly nasal voice that delivers the lyrics with uncommon precision but in the lilting, melodic approach to a number that possesses inarguable authenticity as “deep blues”

“Statesboro Blues” was recorded at McTell’s second recording session for the Victor Recording Company, in October of 1928. He returned to the studio on October 30 the following year for a new label, with a brisk new ragtime focus, and with a new name as well, Blind Sammie, intended among other things to hide his recording activities from his previous label. This session came one week to the day after the first of the seismic shifts that marked the beginning of the Great Depression, and for many of the downhome blues singers who had benefited from the broad-based prosperity that fueled the blues craze of the 1920s, it marked the end of any commercial recording career. Blind Willie McTell, however, continued to record for the next quarter of a century, cutting records as Georgia Bill, Barrelhouse Sammy (The Country Boy), and Hot Shot Willie, among others. In 1940 he recorded a tantalizing session for the Library of Congress, that came about only because folklorist John Lomax’s wife spotted “a Negro man with a guitar” at a Pig ‘n’ Whistle stand (another of Blind Willie’s latter-day sobriquets was Pig ‘n’ Whistle Red) and Blind Willie agreed to record some numbers, since business at the drive-in stand was slow that night. The result was a mélange of folk songs, rags, spirituals, pop, and pre-blues material, interspersed with monologues revealing not just a photographic memory but an analytic approach to the “history of the blues, life as a maker of records,” his own extensive education in blind schools in Georgia and Michigan, and exactly where and for whom (and under what names) he had previously recorded.

By the time this session was finally released on LP,it had been firmly established that Blind Willie McTell was dead. In fact he had died at almost the same time that Sam Charters’ book and record, The Country Blues, were released. For my friend and me, who had discovered the blues initially through Charters’ work, mundane reality was not so easy to accept, particularly in the face of Blind Willie’s persistent refusal to disappear. Indeed his voice had surfaced once again just as his death became widely known, with a 1961 album, understandably entitled Last Session, recorded five years earlier for an Atlanta record collector. The record was not without its disappointments, revealing some degree of deterioration due to age and drink, but it included characteristic moments of brashness and beauty delivered with all of McTell’s familiar insouciance and wit. Since then, nothing – at least nothing bearing any resemblance to resurrection – so that might very well be the end of the story. But then again, who knows? Blind Willie McTell may yet reemerge, exhibiting that same winning combination of invention and self-delight, that same ability to put across the deepest of blues, the wittiest of social satires, with an enthusiasm that can transport the listener, like the best of Charles Dickens, like all great art, to a world of the artist’s own creation.