“The creative people moved out, and crime moved in.” Spotted with Baptist churches and the kind of hairdressing parlours whose primitive signage gets Shoreditch graphic designers so excited, it’s a neighbourhood that will take an awful lot of care and money before gentrification sets in. “After Stax left, the decay started,” says Deanie Parker, President and CEO of Soulsville Inc, the organisation that runs the new Stax Museum of American Soul Music on the site of Stax’s old Capitol Theatre building, in the district known as Soulsville. Signing Lena Zavaroni can’t have helped.To some extent, the shock waves are still continuing. In the same year that “That’s All Right” came out, the Civil Rights legislation that would eventually put an end to segregation was passed. In Memphis this due process would take an awful long time.It was the racial shock waves following the assassination of Dr King in 1968 that helped to bring to an end the easy interplay of black and white musicians originally associated with the Stax label (and epitomised by the Booker T and the MGs quartet, who appear at a sold-out Barbican concert on 25 April, bringing the It Came From Memphis festival to a close) Stax never really recovered, going bankrupt in 1975. Such blatant appropriation remained offensive to many: when the young Elvis shared an early tour bill with country harmony duo The Louvin Brothers (his mother Gladys’s favourite group), Ira Louvin called him “a white nigger”. Presley’s first record, “That’s All Right (Mama)” released in 1954, became a local hit after Sam Phillips slipped “Daddy-O” Dewey Phillips (no relation) an acetate test-pressing that the DJ played on his Red Hot & Blue radio show over and over again.Elvis’s appearance – the patent-leather hair-do and pimp clothes – also corresponded perfectly to that ideal of a miscegenated marriage between black Beale Street style and white country manners that the era of the rockabilly cats had demanded.

When he suspected that Sam Phillips had soft-pedalled his support of “Red Hot” in order to concentrate on the career of Jerry Lee Lewis, Riley poured whiskey all over the Sun recording equipment – a classic, Memphis-style, gratuitous act. The incendiary power of “Red Hot” is recaptured in some of the present wave of Memphis garage bands such as the North Mississippi All Stars, who appear in the opening It Came From Memphis concert on 3 April.Of all the rockabilly cats who came to record at Sun Records (which Sam Phillips had started in 1952 – first hit: “Bear Cat” by the future Stax star Rufus Thomas the following year), it was Elvis Presley who most authoritatively provided what Sam Phillips was looking for (“If I could find a white singer with the Negro sound and the Negro feel I could make a million dollars”). Riley, who recorded perhaps the rocking-est of all rock’n'roll songs, “Red Hot” for Sun Records in 1957, had a reputation for wildness that rivals Turner’s own. But the real mistake was I signed a contract with the Disney Corporation giving permission for someone to play me in the movie. There was a clause saying they could do it anyway they wanted but I was so wrapped up in drugs that I didn’t even read it. I didn’t know what I was signing but I couldn’t do anything about it But you know, it’s amazing how things can turn round.

I tell you, God is good, you know? I went through seven years of hell, man; they assassinated me but people’s forgotten all that stuff; they’re fascinated with my show and what I’m doing now.”Intriguingly, for the Barbican’s It Came From Memphis concert on 18 April, Ike Turner is set to appear on the same Sun Studios bill as the white rockabilly artists Billy Lee Riley, Sonny Burgess and Jack Clement. Released on Chess under the name of the band’s saxophonist, Jackie Brenston, who delivered the vocal, the song became an R&B number one.The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio officially recognises “Rocket 88″ as the first ever rock’n'roll record. “I don’t even debate that,” Ike Turner told me on the phone from Los Angeles. “Those people who inducted me, they must have had to do their research If it is, it is. But it’s like in America they always got to put a name on something. Rock’n'roll was nothing but fuckin’ boogie woogie until a fuckin’ white boy played it; when it’s a black guy, it’s just the blues.”As to how Turner feels about his portrayal by Laurence Fishburne (basically, as a coke-snorting maniac) in the Tina Turner biopic, What’s Love Got to Do With It, I couldn’t help but ask “How would you feel about it?” he replied. “I was angry with myself but life goes on, you know? It was a mistake I made, but that is not me.

In 1951, Izear “Ike” Turner and his band went to Phillips to cut the raucous automobile-themed rocking blues track “Rocket 88″. Ralph Peer of Victor Records described his first impression of future country star Jimmie Rodgers, “the Singing Brakeman” from Meridian, Mississippi, as “a bus boy in a roadside cafe, singing nigger blues”.Similarly, the Grand Ole Opry radio show in Nashville developed, according to one historian of Memphis music, Larry Nager, from the black Vaudveille acts that its founder, George Dewey Hay, saw at Beale’s Palace Theatre when he worked as a reporter for The Commercial Appeal in the early 1920s. Hay wrote a “humorous” column called “Howdy, Judge”, culled from court reports and specialising in minstrel-style dialogue and “coon” stereotypes. Beginning in 1925, the Opry shows featured black minstrel musicians such as DeFord Bailey (later dropped, Hay said, for not changing with the times) and a “folksy” style of humorous presentation that drew on black urban, as much as white rural, culture. But I don’t want to stray into territory that suggests we are exploiting Biggie’s widow. All the money was distributed among the band or sunk into equipment. The monies that would be going to Biggie’s widow would be generated by sales of The Shed Sessions.