Walking in Memphis

Probably everybody already knows this story, and I’m just hopelessly out of the loop. But, I happened to hear the song “Walking in Memphis” on the radio the other day. Most likely, I’d heard it somewhere before, but this time it struck a chord, so to speak, and I now wanted to find out who the artist was. Well, it turns out that what I was listening to was a recent cover of an older song written by Marc Cohn back in the early 90’s.

Cohn wrote “Walking in Memphis” after traveling to Memphis in 1986 to check out Graceland. Cohn was a young 20-something Jewish aspiring singer-songwriter from Cleveland, Ohio. He’d never been to Memphis before; in fact, he'd never traveled, really. While in Memphis, he also made sure that he saw an Al Green sermon, mentioned in the song.

But the weighty part of his trip took place out of Memphis along Highway 61 in the Mississippi Delta. He saw a sign that said "Hollywood," and discovered the Hollywood Cafe, a small diner and music joint in Tunica County, Mississippi. This is where Cohn smelled the catfish and encountered a black woman in her 70s named Muriel. Muriel was a gospel singer who played piano and sang at the Hollywood every Friday night. After watching Muriel play a variety of spirituals and Hoagy Carmichael songs for about 90 minutes, Cohn spoke with her during a break.

Cohn's mother had died when he was just 2 years old, and he lost his father at age 12. He spent a lot of time trying to get over his childhood grief and sense of loss, which often came out in his songs. Muriel, however, was one of those people who enter our lives unlooked-for yet have such profound effect that we wonder if, perhaps, they were sent. Cohn described his conversation with her in his 1992 interview with Q magazine, saying: “She was real curious, she seemed to have some kind of intuition about me, and I ended up telling her about my family, my parents, how I was a musician looking for a record deal, the whole thing. Then, it must have been about two in the morning, she asks me up to sing with her and we do about an hour, me and this lady I'd never met before, hardly a song I knew so she's yelling the words at me. Then at the end, as the applause is rising up, she leans over and whispers in my ear, she's whispering, ‘You've got to let go of your mother, child, she didn't mean to die, she's where she's got to be and you're where you have to be, child, it's time to move on.’”

The Hollywood Cafe is still there – you drive right past it to go to several of the casinos now located in Tunica. Muriel and Cohn kept in touch, and she attended his wedding in New York. Cohn saw her again when he took another trip down south and played her some of his new songs. Muriel died in 1990. Finally released in 1991, "Walking in Memphis" was a massive success and Cohn won the 1991 Grammy for Best New Artist Award.

Cohn has explained that this song is his journey to being baptized into the world of Blues music. He called it a “spiritual awakening.” Perhaps the song’s most memorable line is when Muriel asks Cohn whether he's a Christian and, caught up in the moment, he exclaims, "Ma'am, I am tonight."

A few additional points of interest: The lyric, "Walking with my feet ten feet off of Beale" refers to Beale Street, an actual street in Memphis. Riley B. King became known as the "Beale Street Blues Boy" shortly after he first arrived in Memphis. Later, the nickname was shortened to B.B., and the rest is history.

The lyric, "Security didn't see him" is probably a comment on the story that Bruce Springsteen once successfully scaled the wall at Graceland, trying to deliver a song he wrote. Apparently, Elvis wasn't there.

The Hollywood Cafe

Marc and Muriel