Delta Blues
Here is a tune that I’ve heard more times that I can count. The somber lyric speaks to me each time that the tune is played over the car radio. The story teller invites us to walk with him around the Southern town renowned as the hometown of Elvis Presley. Elvis was born in 1935 in Tupelo, Mississippi. As far as I can tell he shared a hard scrabble way of life, the destiny of the majority of Americans living at that time. Elvis had a voice. He sang at church. He sang in public at the Mississippi–Alabama Fair and Dairy Show in 1945. How much of the South can you hear as subtext in Elvis’ music? That is life along the Mississippi delta, slavery, the Civil War, reconstruction, southern Christianity?
Elvis became a shooting star, tracing the ascent of American society in song. Elvis had that “it”. His smile, body language, the quality of his voice positively sizzled. He is buried at Graceland. Graceland arguably for American’s is holy ground.
Marc Cohn does justice to Elvis and to Memphis.
I’ve not visited Graceland, but I hope to.
