Memphis is, for many, the absolute summit, a veritable Mount Olympus, of contemporary music. Were it not for the sounds that echoed around the barns, and then the streets and alleys of the city, the songs we download today could all sound so very different.
Yet, way before the blues and Elvis emerged, there were smaller mountains, more akin to mounds, being constructed in what is now Tennessee by the region’s earliest inhabitants.
From 800 to 1600 CE the area now engulfed by Memphis was populated by the Mississippian people, who began the earliest examples of organized husbandry of the land. Gregory Waselkov explains more in a 1977 issue of Agricultural History.
“Mississippian agriculture,” he writes,
was the climax of a developmental process which began three thousand years earlier with the first plant husbandry in the central Mississippi Valley. Corn and several other plants were grown in the highly productive prairie soils and tended with simple stone hoes. This intensive agriculture supported the complex society which built the great platform mounds of the southeast. By the time white traders and farmers entered the area, the culture of the Mississippians had faded, but their descendants, the “Civilized Tribes,” continued to practice the same style of agriculture, with only slight modifications.
The agriculture (the “Old Fields”) of the Chickasaw people was followed by the arrival of French explorers until, in 1796, the region became the westernmost area of the new state of Tennessee. The early decades of the following century saw Memphis establish itself as a city that prospered due to its nascent status as one of the great cotton hubs of the Americas, as Roger Biles explained in a 1988 issue of The Historian.
“The advent of the steamboat and the stimulus it provided for river commerce played a major role in the city’s growth,” he writes,
but most significant was the arrival of the cotton kingdom in the Old Southwest. As the “white gold” spread, Memphis buyers and factors forged transportation links with neighboring planters. Planked roads, the precursors of rails, brought the cotton crops to the Bluff City, where they would be loaded aboard steamboats for other destinations. Those same roads carried food and manufactured goods back to the hinterlands. Memphis became the largest inland cotton market in the United States as well as the major distribution center for a “mid-south” region extending into western Tennessee, eastern Arkansas, northern Mississippi and the bootheel of Missouri. Once the habitat of a few traders, Indians and visiting freshwater teamsters, the booming town increasingly sported a population of cotton merchants, bankers, wholesale grocers and, of course, slave traders.