After spending a week dissecting Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis album a few weeks back, let’s kick off a week of songs with the word “Memphis” in the title or lyrics. We’ll start with the most obvious one, Chuck Berry’s classic “Memphis, Tennessee.” Mr. Berry recorded this one in September 1958 but never released it as a single in the U.S. It was released as a single the UK, however, where it rose to #6 on their charts.
“Memphis, Tennessee” seems to tell the story of a man asking a long-distance operator (because that’s the way telephony used to work) to connect him to his former lover, Marie. Marie’s mother, it seems, separated the two and now he’s wherever he is but she’s back home in Memphis, Tennessee. It’s only at the end of the song that we learn that Marie isn’t his lover but rather his six year-old daughter, and it’s his ex-wife who forced them apart. It’s clever writing, which is what we learned to expect from Mr. Berry.
Chuck Berry, unlike other songwriters in the early days of rock ‘n’ roll, wrote with a keen intelligence and humor. He didn’t just sing about love and heartbreak with moon-June rhymes, as was typical of other songs of the time, he observed, described, and commented on the human condition with surprising sophistication.
Berry did something else with his lyrics; he made them acceptable to middle-class white America. Unlike the blues and R&B tunes of his youth, Berry’s songs excised the slang and questionable grammar of the rural south. His lyrics were clean, precise, and, in the their own way, literate. Berry’s words weren’t necessarily formal—he wrote with an easy colloquial voice—but they certainly didn’t sound foreign or offensive to better-educated ears.
Take these lyrics from the end of “Memphis.” The bulk of the song gives the the impression of the narrator as a jilted lover, but that’s belied by the closing lyrics that reveal the Marie in the song is the narrator’s six year-old daughter:
Last time I saw Marie she’s waving me good-bye
With hurry home drops on her cheek that trickled from her eye
Marie is only six years old, information please
Try to put me through to her in Memphis Tennessee
I love that phrase, “hurry home drops on her cheek.” It’s both poetic and descriptive, evocative and efficient; it’s as sharp as any phrase coming from the pens of the Porters and Harts of the era before.
Musically, “Memphis, Tennessee” is a simple song, as were most songs of the time. There isn’t even a chorus, just a verse repeated (with different words each time) repeated multiple times. (That’s an AAA form, if you understand these things.)
On this particular track Chuck Berry recorded all the instruments except the drums—multiple electric guitars and an electric bass. (The only other musician on the track was drummer Jasper Thomas.) He recorded it at his home in St. Louis, Missouri, which gave it that wonderful lo-fi sound.
As noted, “Memphis, Tennessee” wasn’t released as a single in the U.S., but that didn’t stop other artists from covering it. The Beatles used to perform it live; Lonnie Mack had a #5 hit with it in 1963; and, most famously, Johnny Rivers recorded it (retitled as just “Memphis”) in 1964 in a rollicking version that went all the way to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. According to Wikipedia, “Memphis, Tennessee” has been covered by more than 200 different artists. That’s the sign of a great song, which “Memphis, Tennessee” truly is.
