Memphis, Tennessee, November 2015

From Nashville, on to Memphis, Tennessee. Memphis is famous for the blues and the home of the blues is Beale Street. We visited Beale Street on a quiet Monday .. but the music in each of the several Honky Tonk bars we went to was just too loud. Does music in a bar with 10 people have to be so loud that you could hear it in Nashville? Interesting to visit but not to listen to music, unless you have earplugs -- or are aged under 30.

We ended up at the Withers photography collection, which is right on Beale Street. Ernest Withers was a black news photographer who  photographed current events in Memphis over 60 years. The photographs are both interesting and challenging. Some of the photographs were taken in Beale Street right outside the collection at a time that it was often used for civil rights demonstrations in the 1950s and 1960s.

Beale Street on a quiet evening