photograph by logan schaal
Editor’s Note: A city is to be shared. Roughly a million people live in what we might call “Greater Memphis,” a hub that stretches east to Germantown and Collierville, and even across state borders (and a mighty river) if we include West Memphis and Southaven. But here’s the charm of a city as distinctive as Memphis, Tennessee: It’s a different home for every one of us. There are residents of Midtown who feel like they need to pack a suitcase if they travel east of Highland. Likewise, some East Memphians schedule trips Downtown like a special event. What makes Memphis home for you? If you had to identify one place or thing that makes the Bluff City singular, what would it be?
We asked eight writers to define “My Memphis” in a single essay. While it’s impossible to answer such a challenge on a single page, it’s a start. And we hope it reminds you of a place (or thing) that makes this amazing city your home too. Feel free to share your version of “My Memphis” with us.
Long ago and not so far away, at the old main branch of the Memphis Public Library, I discovered a trove of LP records, free to check out and carry home. Today, most of the library’s holdings have been digitized, and most library patrons would lack the equipment to play LPs at home anyway; only a handful of vinyl records remain in the library’s catalog. But the spirit of those magical shelves lives on, loud and clear, in the Memphis Listening Lab (MLL), housed within Crosstown Concourse.
What the MLL lacks in portability (you can’t check out anything) it makes up for in eclecticism and expansiveness. Founded in 2021, the massive vault fills several walls of its sleekly designed rooms on the second floor of the Concourse. And it’s not just vinyl records: At its founding the Lab boasted 12,000 LPs, 30,000 45s, 20,000 CDs, and about a thousand music books, not to mention assorted photos, tapes, and ephemera. What’s more, it was launched with the donated collection of one man, John King, who helped create Ardent Studios with friends John Fry and Fred Smith back in 1959. As it turned out, not only did the three lads (especially John Fry) love recording, they loved radio and they loved records.
Prescient enough to create a home for his life’s work, John King, with the help of Sherman Willmott and others, was able to manifest a space where the records could not only be archived, but experienced.
Before John King’s death in 2022, Sherman Willmott knew how deeply King loved music. “He grew up with rock-and-roll, chasing the records,” he says. “Whether it was him taking the bus downtown to the Home of the Blues record shop on Beale, or later with Terry Manning and their buddies getting on the phone to order Beatles records from England, he was very aggressive and determined to get whatever it was he was searching for.”
A career in record promotion and radio fed King’s determination, until he amassed a personal library that dwarfed nearly any public archive. Just don’t call it a collection. “I call it his life’s work,” says Willmott. “But it wasn’t about him. It was about placing that collection into the best situation possible. He was searching for the proper place for it to end up, where it would get the most public use.”
Prescient enough to create a home for his life’s work, King, with the help of Willmott and others, was able to manifest a space where the records could not only be archived, but experienced. Turntables line one wall of windows overlooking the Concourse’s plaza, and locally made EgglestonWorks speakers — some of the world’s finest — fill the MLL’s rooms with sound. Moreover, the lab hosts listening sessions where music fans can experience albums both old and new, and even hear from the artists who made them. And while the records stay put, a computer room facilitates the recording of any music that you simply must take with you.
I used to mourn the elimination of those obscure shelves in the public library as a sure sign of civilization’s decline, but no more. Thanks to John King and the MLL, I have to admit it’s getting better — a little better all time.
