We had a great couple of days in Memphis - and actually ended up staying a night longer than we'd planned. We did make it to Graceland, which really was a rather surreal experience - viewing the mansion was like being transported back in time to a particularly ghastly 70s nightmare. The famous 'jungle room' was astonishingly gruesome, with wall-to-ceiling green shagpile carpeting and a bizarre assortment of hideous stuffed toys, ceramic animals and heavy wood-carved furniture. Elvis may have been the King of Rock & Roll, but his interior design skills certainly left something to be desired. The best part of the tour was the special exhibit entitled Elvis Jumpsuits: All Access, 'the largest-ever exhibit of Elvis’s iconic stage costumes from 1969-1977'. This glittering collection definitely ranks up there with the Rodeo Museum in Colorado Springs in terms of strangely entertaining exhibits.
Memphis of course gained notoriety as the city where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. The infamous Lorraine Motel has now been transformed into a National Civil Rights Museum, where we spent several hours walking through the incredibly informative, and moving, exhibitions about the civil rights movement in the US.
Museums aside, we spent most of our time in downtown Memphis sipping the local beer and soaking up the atmosphere in a variety of blues bars on the famous Beale St., where there was a huge amount of very good, high quality live music on offer. One of the reasons we stayed an extra night was to see Hugh Masekela, who was performing at the historic Orpheum Theatre. He's now 69, but very spry and put on a great show - including a wonderful rendition of Grazin' in the Grass.
However, the highlight of our Memphis trip was undoubtedly seeing the Peabody Ducks. In 1935, author and journalist David Cohn, who hailed from Greenville in Mississippi, wrote that 'The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of The Peabody Hotel and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg'. Given that the aim for our trip was to follow the path of the Mississippi Delta, we thought we should go and check out the Peabody lobby before we hit the road. We had heard that there were some famous resident ducks at the hotel, but were unprepared for the huge crowds who had also turned up to see these webbed celebrities. Since 1940, a family of ducks (presumably not still the same ones) has been making the journey from the penthouse roof, on which they spend the evenings, to the marble fountain in the hotel lobby, where they reside during the day. This little trek, known as the Peabody Duck March, is enacted to musical accompaniment and is takes place every day at 11am, when they arrive, and 5pm, when they waddle off down the red carpet to the lift back to their penthouse. These ducks are more famous than Donald - they have appeared on Sesame Street and the Oprah Winfrey Show - but seemed very at ease with their megastar status, taking time to poo copiously on the carpet as they headed home for the night.
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