By the middle of the present century, Mr. Crump—West Tennessee’s presiding political genius from 1909 to his death in 1954—could boast that Memphis had more churches than it had service stations. This was true, and it followed a tradition dating back to long before Billy Sunday and Gipsy Smith held court in the region. One such preacher, early on, was Elijah Coffey, a sometime shoemaker and Free-Will Baptist. He’d left a wife and a shaky reputation up in Illinois, but Memphis cared nothing for that. His pulpit style was more important, and an eyewitness has left us a description of it: “In the delivery of his sermons he held his left hand to his ear and slashed around with his right in a frightful manner, taxing his lungs to their fullest capacity.” When a ranter like Coffey came along, there was a bullpen padded with straw for the physical safety of those most violently afflicted with the “shakes.” Out on the rim of the uproar, young people also had their fun, taking the opportunity for courting. “For a mile or more around the campground,” the same witness testified, “the woods seem alive with people. Every tree or bush has its couple, while hundreds of others are seen prowling around in search of some cozy spot.” Hallelujah!

Other excesses developed and expanded down the years. Crime, for instance, especially murder. In 1922 a Prudential Life Insurance Company statistician announced that Memphis —with 67.4 murders per 100,000 population, as compared with far-north, sinful New York City’s 5.8—was “the murder capital of America.” Big Shelby—so called because it is the seat of the county named for Isaac Shelby, the first governor of Kentucky and one of the city’s prospective founders—had been badmouthed before and even took pride in some of the accusations made when it was a roisterous bluff-top stopping-off place for flatboatmen bound downriver with a load of steam that would not wait for Natchez. But this was different; this affected business , particularly the insurance business, which Mr. Crump personified. Moreover, the charge was unfair, to a considerable degree. Half-murdered victims from miles around were rushed to Memphis for emergency hospital treatment, and if one didn’t survive, he swelled the grim statistics. In much the same way, field hands and high rollers, up from the Mississippi Delta and down from the Missouri boot-heel, came to town and got into shootouts over dice and cards and women, and those outlanders who died were added to the list.

All the same, this murder-capital tag was just too much, and the answer was fairly clear. Though Mr. Crump had never discouraged good times in all forms, the gamblers and the madams and their houses had to go, along with their hangers-on and easy riders. So go they did, across the Mississippi line and over the Harahan Bridge to Arkansas. Yet in many ways they took the vibrant soul of Memphis with them. Repudiating