The most famous street in Memphis and one of the most significant in American music history. W.C. Handy lived and worked here in the early twentieth century, codifying the blues into a written form that spread the genre worldwide. Today the strip is a tourist-facing entertainment district — live music spills out of every bar most nights of the week, and you can walk from venue to venue with an open container — but the musical heritage is genuine. The W.C. Handy Park at the western end has a bronze statue of the man himself.
Beale Street
Memphis's legendary blues strip with live music nightly
A story
W.C. Handy arrived on Beale Street around 1905, a trained musician struggling to make a living. One night at a performance in Cleveland, Mississippi, three local men with a guitar, mandolin, and bass took the stage and played a raw, repetitive tune that drove the crowd wild. Handy realised there was something in this unpolished Delta sound that his formal training had missed. He began transcribing what he heard into sheet music, publishing "Memphis Blues" in 1912 and "St. Louis Blues" in 1914. The blues went from an oral tradition to a worldwide phenomenon, and Beale Street was where it happened.