Beale Street Dynasty Sex Song & the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis

Between Reconstruction and Prohibition, Beale Street in Memphis thrived as a cauldron of sex and song, greed and race hatred--a strip with unique soul that inspired folk legends, scandalized Faulkner, and reshaped American politics. Preston Lauterbach tells this thrilling story through the life of the South's first black millionaire, an ex-slave named Robert Church, who built an underworld dynasty in the booming river town. With a compromised fortune gleaned from brothels and gambling houses, Church and his son bankrolled the militant civil rights activism of Ida B. Wells, furnished the venues where W. C. Handy invented the blues, and built a powerful black political machine. Fighting to redeem themselves and their city, these vice kings clashed with the forces of Jim Crow to create a hotbed of black culture. Brilliantly researched and swiftly plotted, evokes a lost world of swaggering musicians, glamorous madams, and ruthless politicians on the fabled Memphis strip.

"You may know about Beale Street, W. C. Handy, and the Memphis Blues, but chances are you've never heard of the Church family and its achievements. Could an African-American political dynasty, against all odds, have managed real power in a Southern city a century ago? Preston Lauterbach tells the tale authoritatively and with flair." Gary Krist, author of Empire of Sin

"Preston Lauterbach takes readers on an uproarious, sometimes shocking jaunt through Memphis history by way of Beale Street, the remarkable thoroughfare that has hosted the likes of W.C. Handy, Ida B. Wells, and Richard Wright. is a compelling, witty, deeply researched, and always enlightening book." Memphis Commercial Appeal

"Preston Lauterbach has conjured a fascinating demimonde that's dead and gone. After reading this, I dreamed all night about street hustlers, hoodoos, and snake oil salesmen on Beale Street, the Main Street of black America. Here Lauterbach gives us Beale in its heyday--the chitlin joints, the rough-and-tumble politics, the fecund music--and deftly paints a portrait of the one improbable millionaire who towered over this vibrant world. Read and you begin to feel you're communing with ghosts." John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead

"In his last book, , Lauterbach shone light into obscure, all but unknown rooms of the rock-'n'-roll story. This time he turns to a chapter we thought we knew well--Beale Street, one of the grounds zero of American culture, with Tin Pan Alley and Congo Square and Concord--and the result is every bit as illuminating. Lauterbach has become one of my favorite people to read on 20th-century popular music." Gary Krist, author of Empire of Sin

"Lauterbach brings the history of Memphis to life in this vivid reconstruction of its volatile history... an engaging, entertaining, and thorough history. Lauterbach superbly handles the city's race relations and the black struggle for equality... a wonderful portrait of a city in flux and a neighborhood's lasting, though oft-overlooked, legacy." Tom Nolan Wall Street Journal

"Lauterbach here provides the exceptional story of a southern city that matches in sheer bravado and outrageousness any rival metropolis, and in so doing he fills in a gap in America's urban and racial history... [F]ascinating." Publishers Weekly

"Excellent study of an iconic Southern place and the fraught, violent history behind it... Lauterbach adds to the rich library devoted to "old, weird America" established by writers such as Michael Ventura, Peter Guralnick and Greil Marcus. Beale Street is mostly a tourist trap now, but it was a place of 'whorehouses, saloons, and bullet holes' not so long ago. By Lauterbach's illuminating account, the past was more fun--or at least more interesting." Mark Levine Booklist

"[A]n engaging, surprising, at times edifying tour of a civic past... is both good history and a good yarn. ... [A] Southern answer to Martin Scorsese's or HBO's similarly titled ." Kirkus Reviews

"All aspects of this complex, fascinating history are told...with verve and vivid erudition." New York Times Book Review

"Adds a fascinating chapter to civil rights history. But for all the hatred it depicts, this gracefully written book never loses sight of the fun that made Handy exalt that stretch of dirt road." James Gavin

Following the Civil War, Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, thrived as a cauldron of sex and song, violence and passion. But out of this turmoil emerged a center of black progress, optimism, and cultural ferment. Preston Lauterbach tells this vivid, fascinating story through the multigenerational saga of a family whose ambition, race pride, and moral complexity indelibly shaped the city that would loom so large in American life.

Robert Church, who would become the South s first black millionaire, was a mulatto slave owned by his white father. Having survived a deadly race riot in 1866, Church constructed an empire of vice in the booming river town. He made a fortune with saloons, gambling, and shockingly white prostitution. But he also nurtured the militant journalism of Ida B. Wells and helped revolutionize American music through the work of composer W.C. Handy, the man who claimed to have invented the blues.

In the face of Jim Crow, the Church fortune helped fashion the most powerful black political organization of the early twentieth century. Robert and his son, Bob Jr., bought and sold property, founded a bank, and created a park and auditorium for their people finer than the places whites had forbidden them to attend.

However, the Church family operated through a tense arrangement with the Democrat machine run by the notorious E. H. Boss Crump, who stole elections and controlled city hall. The battle between this black dynasty and the white political machine would define the future of Memphis.

Brilliantly researched and swiftly plotted, Beale Street Dynasty offers a captivating account of one of America s iconic cities by one of our most talented narrative historians.

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The dramatic rise and fall of Beale Street, the legendary Memphis thoroughfare that shook American culture.

The vivid history of Beale Street--a lost world of swaggering musicians, glamorous madams, and ruthless politicians--and the battle for the soul of Memphis.

Preston Lauterbach's first book, The Chitlin' Circuit: And the Road to Rock 'n' Roll was named a best book of the year by the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and NPR. A Curb Visiting Scholar in the Arts at Rhodes College, Lauterbach lives near Charlottesville in Nelson County, Virginia.