Memphis
If Nashville is the capital of country music, Memphis is the home of Gospel, blues and rhythm and blues. The clubs in Beale Street were for decades the objective of all the singers, mainly black, who hoped for the big chance that would lead to their "discovery". One of them was
Elvis Presley, whose grave on his Graceland estate is now the chief tourist attraction of Memphis.
The city, situated at the junction of the Wolf River with the Mississippi, ranks as the greatest market for cotton and hardwoods in the world. These and other products of the surrounding area (alfalfa, soya, rice) are shipped from the second largest inland port in the United States. Industry, with over 1100 firms, also plays an important part in the city's economy.
History Andrew Jackson, later seventh President of the United States, along with two partners established a settlement here on a site suitable for a harbor, and is therefore regarded as the founder of Memphis. The town was named Memphis because of the similarity of its situation on the high river bank to that of the Egyptian city of Memphis on the Nile. Capital of the Confederation in the early days of the Civil War, the town was taken by Union troops in 1862. In the 1920s, thanks mainly to W.C. Handy ("father of the blues"); Memphis became the great centre of black music. It gained an unhappy place in history when Martin Luther King Jr was shot here on April 4th 1968.
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