Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis

by Preston Lauterbach

Overview

"All aspects of [Beale Street's] complex, fascinating history are told…with verve and vivid erudition." —Wall Street Journal

Between Reconstruction and Prohibition, Beale Street in Memphis thrived as a strip with a unique soul that reshaped American culture. Preston Lauterbach recounts the rise and fall of Beale Street through the life of the South’s first black millionaire, an ex-slave who built an underworld dynasty in the booming river town and created a space for black culture to flourish. A thrilling narrative history, Beale Street Dynasty tells an intriguing, previously unknown story about race in an American city.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393352139
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/07/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	453,547
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Preston Lauterbach is the author of Bluff City, Beale Street Dynasty, The Chitlin’ Circuit, a Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe book of the year, and co-author of Brother Johnson: Growing Up with Robert Johnson. He is a former visiting scholar at Rhodes College and a Virginia Humanities Fellow. He lives in Virginia.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Part I Birth of a Kingpin, 1866-1885

Chapter 1 There is no Yankee Doodle In Memphis 7

Chapter 2 A Promiscuous Running Fight 15

Chapter 3 A Frightful State of moral Darkness 31

Chapter 4 Birth of a Kingpin 41

Part II Birth of Beale, 1885-1892

Chapter 5 Dividing the Wages of Sin 55

Chapter 6 Contributions from Malefactors 75

Chapter 7 Free Speech, High Revelry, and Low Song 85

Chapter 8 The True Spark of Manhood 95

Part III Birth of the Blues, 1901-1918

Chapter 9 Red, Gray, and Blue 111

Chapter 10 Doctor Said It'd Kill Me, But He Didn't Say When 125

Chapter 11 Purifying the Moral Atmosphere 137

Chapter 12 The Gig 153

Chapter 13 We Gonna Barrelhouse Anyhow 169

Chapter 14 Like a Stone Cast into the Sea 179

Chapter 15 I'd Rather Be There Than Any Place I Know 197

Part IV The Lid, 1918-1940

Chapter 16 All the Pretty Girls Lived Good 215

Chapter 17 In a Class by Himself 233

Chapter 18 The Frolic 241

Chapter 19 The Unholy Combination 249

Chapter 20 Snitchin' Gambler Blues 261

Chapter 21 God's Chillun 271

Chapter 22 Within the Gates of Memphis 279

Chapter 23 A Boyle Festers 285

Chapter 24 This Is A White Man's Country 293

Epilogue 307

Acknowledgments 311

Notes 315

Index 337

Editorial Reviews

"Engaging, surprising…A Southern answer to Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York or HBO’s similarly titled Boardwalk Empire."

Memphis Commercial Appeal - Chris Herrington

"Could an African-American political dynasty, against all odds, have managed real power in a Southern city a century ago? Preston Lauterbach tells the tale authoritatively and with flair."

Luc Sante

"[Lauterbach’s] reporting is fact-based, layered and detailed. His skill as a writer is to interweave historical facts with the stories of the characters that populated Beale Street and its surrounds."

Seattle Times - Charles R. Cross

"Masterful."

David Kirby

"Adds a fascinating chapter to civil rights history. But for all the hatred it depicts, this gracefully written book never loses sight of the fun that made Handy exalt that stretch of dirt road."

James Gavin

"Lauterbach has become one of my favorite people to read on 20th-century popular music."

John Jeremiah Sullivan

"Preston Lauterbach has conjured a fascinating demimonde that’s dead and gone. Here Lauterbach gives us Beale in its heyday…and deftly paints a portrait of the one improbable millionaire who towered over this vibrant world."

Hampton Sides

"Preston Lauterbach takes readers on an uproarious, sometimes shocking jaunt through Memphis history by way of Beale Street, the remarkable thoroughfare that has hosted the likes of W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells, and Richard Wright. Beale Street Dynasty is a compelling, witty, deeply researched, and always enlightening book."

Gary Krist

Beale Street Dynasty adds a fascinating chapter to civil rights history. But for all the hatred it depicts, this gracefully written book never loses sight of the fun that made Handy exalt that stretch of dirt road.

The New York Times Book Review - James Gavin

01/12/2015
Music journalist Lauterbach (The Chitlin Circuit) brings the history of Memphis to life in this vivid reconstruction of its volatile history from the Civil War up to the 1940s, focusing on the celebrated center of sex, sin, and song: Beale Street. He weaves the development of Beale Street as an area of black cultural and political influence with the rise and fall of Robert Church—the South’s first black millionaire—and his son, Robert Church Jr., both of whom played instrumental roles in vice and civil rights over the decades. Lauterbach also concentrates on the career of E.H. “Boss” Crump, who all but controlled the city’s political machine for years, and touches upon a wide cast of colorful characters, such as W.C. Handy, the “Father of the Blues.” It’s an engaging, entertaining, and thorough history in its coverage of crime and politics, though, this being Beale Street, more attention to the city’s musical history, particularly the blues scene, would have been welcome. Still, Lauterbach superbly handles the city’s race relations and the black struggle for equality; and in addressing greed, violence, decadence, desperation, and change, he paints a wonderful portrait of a city in flux and a neighborhood’s lasting, though oft-overlooked, legacy. Agent: Paul Bresnick, Paul Bresnick Literary Agency. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"[A]n engaging, surprising, at times edifying tour of a civic past… Beale Street Dynasty is both good history and a good yarn. … [A] Southern answer to Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York or HBO’s similarly titled Boardwalk Empire."

Memphis Commercial Appeal

"Lauterbach here provides the exceptional story of a southern city that matches in sheer bravado and outrageousness any rival metropolis, and in so doing he fills in a gap in America’s urban and racial history… [F]ascinating."

Booklist - Mark Levine

"All aspects of this complex, fascinating history are told…with verve and vivid erudition."

Wall Street Journal - Tom Nolan

02/01/2015
Lauterbach (The Chitlin' Circuit) tells the remarkable story of Robert Church (1839–1912), a former slave who would become the South's first African American millionaire, and his son, Robert Jr., who used his fortune and alliances to become one of the most powerful African American political operatives in the country. Their stories are interwoven with many others, who are often equally fascinating, including the influential journalist Ida Wells, political boss E.H. Crump, and W.C. Handy, the band leader and songwriter often hailed as the "father of the blues." All are tied together by connections to Beale Street, which was for decades the main artery of the Memphis African American community. Known first for its brothels and gambling venues and then later as the home of some of the country's best blues musicians, Beale Street and its residents offer a compelling story of life in the rapidly changing South between the Civil War and World War II. VERDICT While sex and song (as promised in the book's subtitle) are present at times, this account is really about politics and power in a major Southern city. Recommended for all readers interested in Memphis or in African American history. [See Prepub Alert, 10/13/14.]—Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Library Journal

2015-02-05
Excellent study of an iconic Southern place and the fraught, violent history behind it.Many Americans have heard of W.C. Handy, but more as a practitioner of the blues than the serious student and entrepreneur that he was. Still more will likely have heard of Beale Street, the Memphis road that has put its mark on musical history—ethnic history, as well. Lauterbach (The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll, 2011) opens with a race riot immediately following the Civil War, when it became directly clear to the African-Americans of the city that nothing had changed. The author locates the center of his tale in the beating heart of a light-skinned black man, Bob Church ("Church had dark, straight hair, bear-greased and parted, intense brown eyes, and beige skin. Nothing about him betrayed African heritage"), who surveyed the scene and organized his own city within a city. Not that Church was, strictly speaking, a philanthropist or altruist: The empire he founded included brothels, music halls that saw "the Memphis debut of the debauched dance known as the can-can," and, in time, places where a man could buy all the cocaine, guns and whiskey he desired. The tightening racial oppression of Jim Crow, coming to full force in the 1890s, "had the somewhat paradoxical effect of strengthening black communities," writes the author, and it was into this thriving milieu that Handy, "moving between worlds," arrived and began to do his musicological work, setting the stage for the emergence of Memphis as a musical crossroads and center of jazz, blues, and, later, soul and R&B. In charting its rise, Lauterbach adds to the rich library devoted to the "old, weird America" established by writers such as Michael Ventura, Peter Guralnick and Greil Marcus. Beale Street is mostly a tourist trap now, but it was a place of "whorehouses, saloons, and bullet holes" not so long ago. By Lauterbach's illuminating account, the past was more fun—or at least more interesting.

Kirkus Reviews