Beale Street & Blues Walk

Welcome to Memphis, and to Beale Street, a key place in the history of the city and of the blues. It runs about 1.8 miles from the Mississippi River, and it was created in 1841. From the 1860s, Black traveling musicians began performing here. Robert Church bought land around Beale and became the first Black millionaire from the South, and in 1899 he paid for Church's Park, where blues musicians gathered.

In 1889, Ida B. Wells co-owned and edited an anti-segregation paper, Free Speech, on Beale, until a white mob destroyed her presses. In the early 1900s, the trumpet player W. C.

Handy came to Memphis. He wrote The Memphis Blues, and his 1916 song Beale Street Blues helped change the name from Beale Avenue to Beale Street. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, Memphis Minnie, B. B.

King and others played here and helped create the Memphis blues. By the 1960s Beale had fallen on hard times, but in 1977 Congress declared it the Home of the Blues, and today its clubs draw crowds again.

This is AutoZone Park, home of the Memphis Redbirds, the Triple-A minor league affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals. It opened in 2000. It was designed by Looney Ricks Kiss Architects of Memphis with HOK Sport, now Populous, and it cost 80.5 million dollars, by far the most ever spent on a stadium for a minor league baseball team.

It was built to major league standards, but without outfield seats or food stands far down the foul lines, so it's been described as a major league stadium with only the good seats. The Redbirds were unusual in baseball, because they were owned by a non-profit community foundation. But the foundation defaulted on its bond payment in 2010, and in 2013 the Cardinals bought the team, while the city took over the stadium. In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, it became the first place outside New Orleans to host the Voodoo Music Experience.

And in 2007 and 2008 it hosted Major League Baseball's Civil Rights Game. The biggest crowd so far, 18,620 fans, came on August 31, 2008.