Beale Street in Memphis

11 November 2020 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  11 minutes

© Andreas Faessler/cc-by-sa-3.0

© Andreas Faessler/cc-by-sa-3.0

Beale Street is a street in Downtown Memphis, Tennessee, which runs from the Mississippi River to East Street, a distance of approximately 1.8 miles (2.9 km). It is a significant location in the city’s history, as well as in the history of blues music. Today, the blues clubs and restaurants that line Beale Street are major tourist attractions in Memphis. Festivals and outdoor concerts frequently bring large crowds to the street and its surrounding areas. Beale Street was created in 1841 by entrepreneur and developer Robertson Topp (1807–1876), who named it for a forgotten military hero. (The original name was Beale Avenue.) Its western end primarily housed shops of trade merchants, who traded goods with ships along the Mississippi River, while the eastern part developed as an affluent suburb. In the 1860s, many black traveling musicians began performing on Beale. The first of these to call Beale Street home were the Young Men’s Brass Band, who were formed by Sam Thomas in 1867.   read more…

Memphis in Tennessee

23 March 2018 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  14 minutes

© Christopher Boyd Jr/cc-by-sa-3.0

© Christopher Boyd Jr/cc-by-sa-3.0

Memphis is a city in the southwestern corner of Tennessee and the county seat of Shelby County. The city is located on the fourth Chickasaw Bluff, south of the confluence of the Wolf and Mississippi rivers. Memphis had a population of 653,000, making it the second largest city in the state of Tennessee. The greater Memphis metropolitan area, including adjacent counties in Mississippi and Arkansas, has a population of 1.4 million. This makes Memphis the second-largest metropolitan area in Tennessee, surpassed by metropolitan Nashville. Memphis is the youngest of Tennessee’s major cities, founded in 1819 as a planned city by a group of wealthy Americans including judge John Overton and future president Andrew Jackson. A resident of Memphis is referred to as a Memphian, and the Memphis region is known, particularly to media outlets, as Memphis and the Mid-South.   read more…

Return to TopReturn to Top