Trump is bragging that putting troops on the streets of Washington DC has brought down crime. Considering that the National Guard alone is costing $1 million a day – the city’s entire police department budget is less than twice that – the 10% reduction hardly seems worth it, but facts and fascists don’t mix.
Trump made lots of mouth noises about invading Chicago next, but backed down when Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker stood up to him. So he switched his focus to Memphis, located in blood-red Tennessee, where the governor presents no problem. The mayor isn’t happy with it – Trump naturally lied and said he was – but it seems lots of disaffected National Guardsmen will soon be walking in Memphis.
They’re unlikely to get as much out of it as Marc Cohn did when he visited the city in 1985. “The song is 100% biographical,” he says. Working as a session singer in New York and writing songs even he didn’t like, he took a trip and was shown around by some locals. “Not just the places that everybody goes like Graceland, but Al Green’s church and the Hollywood Café, where this wonderful woman named Muriel was singing.”
He was transfixed by Green’s preaching – “Even after three hours of continuous singing, his voice only got stronger” – but made a real connection with Muriel Davis Wilkins, a schoolteacher who moonlighted at a roadside joint in northern Mississippi. Between sets Cohn introduced himself and told her his struggles as a performer and songwriter, and she invited him onstage to sing with her.
“One other thing we had talked about the death of both of my parents when I was quite young. I lost my mother when I was two and I lost my dad when I was 12. … The very last song we sang together that night was ‘Amazing Grace.’ At the end she just leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘Child, you can move on now.’ It was an incredibly maternal thing for her to say to me.”
“Walking in Memphis” became the first single from Cohn’s 1991 debut album. It spent almost six months on the Hot 100, topping out at No. 13.
“To this day, people still ask me if I am a Christian,” Cohn said in 2014. “While I have to admit that I enjoy the confusion the lyric brings, the thing that makes that line work is the fact that I’m a Jew. So many great artists over the years needed to hide the fact that they were Jewish to protect themselves and their families from anti-Semitism, so I’m proud of the fact that I could come right out and practically announce my religion on the first song I ever released.”
Cohn returned to Memphis the next year to play Wilkins the songs he had written since their talk. “When I was all done playing, she said, ‘Those are beautiful songs child. But you know that one where you mentioned me? Play that again. I think that’s the best one.’” She died a few months before the record was released.
