How Memphis rap charted a passage from Delta blues
The "most known unknown" rap city found its voice by embracing the dark and light sides of its history equally: the horror stories and church hymns, the field hollers and Stax stacks.
As it celebrates its 50th birthday, we are mapping hip-hop's story on a local level, with more than a dozen city-specific histories of the music and culture. Click here to see the entire list.
In the beginning
To get to Memphis' global influence on hip-hop, you have to reach up and stretch far back, way back, waaaay back on this continent, across people and places and styles and innovations: back beyond the turntables, keep going past Cedar and Sedgwick, turn left at bebop, make a right at Stagger Lee and keep going all the way back to just south of the place — to the fertile
