We started the day by visiting Ashley's church:
She attends Evans Hill Missionary Baptist Church, a predominantly black church not far from her house. When we got there, the only other white face was the drummer, although a few more showed up later. As you would expect from a black Baptist church - especially one in the South - the service was quite energetic. And the music, of course, was wonderful.
I was a little disconcerted when one of the men came up to me and told me that he would "be coming for me" in a few minutes. It turned out that I was being invited to join the men for a brief prayer meeting before the service.
After church, we had lunch with Ashley, and then hit the road for Memphis (w). It was an uneventful drive, except we did pass a town with the colorful name of Bucksnort.
We got to Memphis and found our AirBnB:
Actually, the house itself isn't the BnB - it's a guest house in the back yard:
It wasn't bad - clean and comfortable. But strange. The whole house seemed to be built on a slant. Check out these three pictures of the interior, and notice the areas highlighted in red:
It's not trick photography, and it's not an optical illusion - the room is really built that way. Don't ask me why. Terry says it was like living in a funhouse at a carnival.
There was also quite a bit of animal life on the premises. The yard was full of chickens, and there were at least four dogs in residence. We saw three of them... and we HEARD the fourth! It appeared to live under the back porch - at least, that's where the sound apppeared to come from. And every time we passed by, the dog would erupt in a frenzy of barking and growling. Terry said it reminded her of the Three Billy Goats Gruff's troll. Poor Kettle gave that porch a wide berth, pulling way over every time we went by.
One other interesting touch. On a table in one corner were a stack of LP's, next to a vintage radio, topped with a small blue case:
...which, when opened up, turned out to be a vintage record player:
We never played any of the records, though.
After dinner at Pearls' Oyster House, an excellent seafood restaurant (recommended by our BnB hostess, Beth), we set off for some nightclubbing on Beale Street. Memphis is, of course, as much of a musical city as Nashville - Memphis is to the blues as Nashville is to country and western. And Beale Street (w) is the heart of the city, musically - a lot like Bourbon Street in New Orleans. When we got there, I took a picture of the street scene:
I asked a policeman, "Is it always like this?" He said it was more than usually crowded for a Sunday night - it was the day before Labor Day, after all - but that on Friday or Saturday night, it would be much more crowded.
Our first stop was at B. B. King's Blues Club - appropriate, since it was Beale Street that gave Mr. King his name. His real name was Riley B. King, but in his early days as a disc jockey, he was known as the Beale Street Blues Boy, which eventually got shortened to B. B. At the club, Terry had a glass of bad wine, while we listened to a very good blues band:
...headed by a man named Jonathan Ellison (that's him at the left). In keeping with my tradition of coming home from vacations with new music, I bought his CD.
We then wandered up the street a ways, and dropped into another club, with the impressive name of King Jerry Lawler's Hall of Fame Bar & Grille. Mr. Lawler, I later found out, was a pro wrestler. There was another blues band playing here:
When I took this picture, the band was playing the Bon Jovi song "Dead or Alive" - the one that goes:
I'm a cowboy
On a steel horse I ride
And I'm wanted
Dead or alive
...which explains the hat. He also at one point straddled the mike stand and "rode" it.
We left Lawler's and wandered up the street some more, stopping at a candy store where we bought some excellent fudge (Terry likes to buy fudge like I like to buy music). Then, as were making our way along the crowded sidewalk, we heard someone say "Get your hands out of her pocket! That's not nice!" Apparently, someone had her hand in Terry's "bait bag" - the pouch that she wears around her waist to carry kibble to use as food rewards for Kettle. That woman would have gotten quite a surprise if the other woman hadn't warned her off - just imagine trying to pick someone's pocket and coming up with a handful of dog food!
Another restaurant, Kings Palace Cafe, had an outdoor patio where a band was playing. We stopped to listen for a while, but they weren't very impressive. And then we decided we'd had enough for the night, so we went back to the BnB.
Here's a map showing the drive from Nashville to Memphis:
