"Walking in Memphis" — Marc Cohn
A struggling New York session singer takes a trip to Memphis to cure his writer's block, hears Al Green preach, sings "Amazing Grace" with a retired schoolteacher named Muriel in a Mississippi café, and comes home with the song of his life. Number 13 in 1991, a Song of the Year nomination, and a Grammy for Best New Artist.
In 1985 Marc Cohn was singing on other people's demos in New York and pursuing a record deal when, listening to his own tapes one night, he decided he did not deserve one, because he had not yet written a great song. He had read that James Taylor cured writer's block by going somewhere he had never been, so he went to Memphis. A friend told him two things he had to do there. The first was to hear the Reverend Al Green preach at the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church on a Sunday morning; Cohn recalled sweat running down his face and tears in his eyes, and called it one of the great experiences of his life. The second was to drive thirty-five miles south to the Hollywood Café in Robinsonville, Mississippi, where Muriel Davis Wilkins, a retired schoolteacher in her sixties, played gospel standards on a beat-up upright piano on Friday nights. On her breaks they talked, including about the death of his mother when he was two, and she invited him up to sing "Amazing Grace" with her.
Back in New York, Cohn tried the song on guitar, where it went nowhere, then moved to the piano, where it flowed; he has called it a fairly easy song to write and an impossibly hard one to record. The song is a travelogue: Beale Street, Graceland, the church, and finally the café, where "she said, 'Tell me, are you a Christian, child?' and I said, 'Ma'am, I am tonight.'" Cohn has called the song 100 percent autobiographical, a song about "a Jewish gospel-music-lover," and says that line is what makes it work: he is Jewish, and people still ask. In 1986 he went back to the Hollywood Café to play Wilkins the new songs. "The one where you mention me at the end? That's the best one you got," she told him. She died in October 1990, months before the single came out.
Atlantic released "Walking in Memphis" in March 1991 as the first single from Cohn's self-titled debut; it peaked at number 13 on the Hot 100 that July and hit number 3 in Canada. At the Grammys in February 1992 it was nominated for Song of the Year and Best Pop Male Vocal, and Cohn, a kid from Cleveland, won Best New Artist. Cher covered it in 1995, but the original is the one everyone knows, and the one that still leads listeners to assume its writer is a Christian.
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