Visitors to Memphis’s Beale Street are usually disappointed. Although the street is famous for blues, blues is rarely heard there these days; the street’s fate was truly sealed when the city tore down the Black neighborhoods surrounding Beale between 1967 and 1974, and today it has the atmosphere of a tourist attraction, leaving disgruntled tourists wondering where to go for an authentic blues experience.
If their hotel concierge is in the know, or perhaps if they ask the right local, they might end up on Vollentine Avenue in the working-class Black neighborhood of North Memphis, at a hole-in-the-wall called Wild Bill’s. For decades, older Black Memphians have made their way to Wild Bill’s after the workday is over for camaraderie, chicken wings, beer and live blues.
Whether from the DJ Tall T, or from Big Don Valentine and his band, who has been singing around the Mid-South about as long as Wild Bill’s has been open, blues is the nightly fare at the juke. It’s an after hours kind of place, with music often not starting until 9 or 10 PM, and while the live band might finish around midnight, the club’s doors stay open until 5 AM. Almost everyone knows everyone, and the audience and musicians interact with a familiarity that would be rare in a big downtown club.
Not that the occasional outsider is not welcomed. Tourists are received with just as much welcome as regulars, and the periodic student visitors from Rhodes College or the University of Memphis are accepted too, unless they are the privileged types who are asking for craft beer. Wild Bill’s is a hood club; they have forty-ounces and chicken wings. Chances are you will sit with people you don’t know. But by the end of the night you will know them. It is the most authentic blues experience one can have in Memphis. And the last juke of its kind in the home of the blues.
Wild Bill’s
1580 Vollentine Av
Memphis, TN 38107
(901) 206-3272