Standing there watching Red I almost wondered aloud at my good fortune. I was hangin' with the guys...guys from Memphis. Blues players. The best in the business - practitioners of the art form they helped to invent. A race of dinosaurs, rare and unique - and about to disappear forever.
Their hometown, Memphis, TN, was chartered as a city in 1819 and is the only major US city whose name traces its origins to the African continent. Five thousand years earlier Memes, a little known warrior king, united the northern and southern kingdoms of Egypt and established a city to serve as its capital. The city was called Memphis. Situated south of the Nile delta, it occupied, in its proximity to a mighty river, the same locale (in mirror opposite), as the city which would eventually share its name. Ancient Memphis would be home to the great treasures left the world by Egyptian civilization - the Great Pyramids, The Sphynix and the Necropolis. Much of what we know of Egyptian antiquity comes from archaeological findings unearthed in and around ancient Memphis. It was an area rich in talented artisans whose craft and art accompanied the royal and wealthy on their journeys into the next world.
The local Egyptian deity in the Memphis pantheon was the god Ptah. As the patron of artists and craftsmen, Ptah was also a creator deity. According to local belief he created mankind in his heart, using his voice as the prime moving life-force. That synergy of heart and voice in old Memphis would be recreated in its present-day namesake. And it would be known as the Blues. Like the stone edifices and finely crafted art of the ancients it would become a great treasure - not one lodged in a glass case or left to fade under the elements. It would live and breath, beckon and cajole, challenge and comfort. It would be music and it would change the world.
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