MEMPHIS
SHIRTS & GIFTS

A local's guide to Memphis

Memphis is a river town first and a music town second, except nobody here would ever put it that way, because the two are the same thing. You grow up knowing the sound of the Mississippi barges at night, the smell of barbecue smoke drifting from a basement on Second Street, and the fact that strangers from every corner of the world fly in just to stand where Elvis stood at Sun Studio. It gives you a weird kind of pride, like you're guarding something.

People here don't do pretense. We eat dry ribs at the counter, argue about the best fried chicken, and know Beale Street is for visitors on a Friday night. Locals have their own stretch of Broad Avenue or Cooper-Young where you actually run into your neighbors.

This is a city that got knocked down more than once, by yellow fever, by a lost city charter, by the loss of Dr. King, and kept building anyway. That grit is baked into how Memphians talk about home. If you grew up here, you know the feeling, and that's what we try to put on a t-shirt.

Things to do in Memphis

Get outside

Memphis neighborhoods

Events through the year

Where locals eat

A little Memphis history

Memphis sits on the Fourth Chickasaw Bluff, a spot high enough above the Mississippi to stay dry at flood stage, which is why people kept settling here for centuries. Spain built Fort San Fernando on the bluff in 1795, and soldiers, traders and squatters lived around it before the city was ever official. John Overton, James Winchester and Andrew Jackson partnered to found the city in 1819, naming it after the ancient Egyptian capital on the Nile.

Growth was slow at first, slowed by economic depression, a river sandbar, yellow fever outbreaks and a losing battle over the county seat. By the 1840s things turned around as Memphis became a stagecoach and rail terminus and northern Mississippi opened to settlement, and the city built out its cotton trade, wharves, and a fire department. Tennessee actually canceled the city's charter in 1879 after repeated yellow fever epidemics gutted the population, and Memphis didn't get a new charter until 1893.

The 20th century brought the birth of the blues through W.C. Handy and later rock and roll and soul through Sun Studio and Stax Records. On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel, a loss the city carries and now honors at the National Civil Rights Museum on that same site.

Memphis FAQ

Sources: memphistravel.com · en.wikipedia.org · tennesseeencyclopedia.net · tnhistoryforkids.org · wearememphis.com · memphisrocknsoul.org · mrpp.squarespace.com · shelbyfarmspark.org · civilrightsmuseum.org