ever had. Man they rocked. There was a sweet girl waiting on us, but we were giving her a hard time because she knew absolutely noth- ing about music. Craig asked her what song was playing and who it was by. It was Rufus with Chaka Khan. She had no idea. We kept quizzing her with no luck. Then The Beatles came on and we asked her who it was. She just shrugged and said she had no idea. Well. She may well be the only person alive who has not heard of The Beatles. Even still, she was a good waitress! With a belly full of oysters I took off back to
seum. In hind sight I wish we had taken that tour, but I was approaching burnout, so I shelved Gibson for this trip. Next time though! The Rock and Soul Museum is under the
umbrella of the Smithsonian Institute. They have a great device for self-guided tours. Headphones and an MP3 player that you key in the display number to hear the history be- hind it as well as the music. It’s a great little museum (I say little be-
cause all of them are small compared to Graceland! Whew!) The self-guided tour took us all the way from the roots of blues and country to the start of rock and roll with nice displays on a couple of pivotal Memphis radio stations, 1020 WDIA and 1430 WHER, and features all sorts of relics, including the small Fender amp Bruce Springsteen used when he recorded his solo album Nebraska back in the ‘80s and one of Whitney Houston’s stage dresses. Joe Perry of Aerosmith has a BC Rich guitar on display, and I got a kick out of Bette Midler’s Halloween stage outfit. Perhaps the best part of the tour for me was
when Craig and I were talking for a while with the museum’s executive director, John Doyle. What a guy! And I learned a lot about the op- eration of such a big endeavor. Hitting the pavement again, we did lunch
at Silky O’Sullivans on Beale Street for some of the finest oysters on the half shell I have
the hotel with Craig where we got the valet to bring the car around and headed off to the home of The Blues Hall of Fame. It was their first day open, and our original and primary reason for doing Memphis.
Johnny Winter exhibit at the Blues Museum.
THE BLUES HALL OF FAME Visitors to the brand new Blues
Museum(
www.blues.org) are greeted by a life size statue of Little Milton Campbell sitting on a bench out front. Once inside, we enjoyed the display of professionally shot blues photo- graphs, and then took the self-guided tour. The museum is full of interactive displays, music and video, as well as ample amounts of awesome memorabilia on everyone from BB King to Buddy Guy, from Big Mama Thornton to my favorite, Johnny Winter. The museum
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