Entry · catalog no. 2466
Beale Street
/ /biːl striːt/ /BEEL street
noun · Memphis, Tennessee · 1910s
✓ Verified
1.
A street in Memphis, and in Black speech a name for the place where Black life concentrated and was fully itself — commerce, music, vice, church and politics on the same blocks, out from under white supervision. Invoked from outside Memphis it means that kind of street. In James Baldwin's hands it became a condition rather than an address.
“Every Black town had its Beale Street.”
Origin & Attribution
Memphis, Tennessee. The street was laid out in 1841 and became Black Memphis's commercial and cultural spine after Reconstruction. The pivotal figure is Robert Reed Church Sr., who bought land around Beale after the 1878 yellow fever epidemic emptied the area, became the first Black millionaire in the South, founded Church Park in 1899 and Solvent Savings Bank in 1908. Ida B. Wells ran her anti-lynching paper Free Speech there, and Tennessee's first NAACP chapter was founded on the street in 1917. W.C. Handy worked there and made the name national.
1917
W.C. Handy publishes "Beale Street Blues," composed the year before, and the name goes national
1917
Tennessee's first NAACP chapter is founded on the street
1974
James Baldwin publishes If Beale Street Could Talk, set in Harlem
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Memphis, Tennessee · 1910s
Spoken by
Black Memphis merchants, bankers, newspapermen and musicians; Black communities nationally by way of the blues and the Great Migration
$BEALESThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Enduring109 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
58/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1917
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
W.C. Handy, "Beale Street Blues" (Handy Bros. Music Co.)
1917
■
+ Cite a sourceJames Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk
1974
See also