Opening up Sun Studios
Okay, this is the, "I Just Woke Up From a Dream and Have Crazy Ideas in my Head" Edition of Collaboratory Blogging.
So I was thinking about the migrant Chicano workers up on Jackson Avenue and how they are not in the Edge. Then I thought about ways to involve them in the Edge. I wonder if we could rent out Sun Studios for an evening (do they allow groups to use the facility forevents?) If so, then what if we train some tour guides to give a version of the Sun Studios Tour that is in Spanish? What if it intersperses moments in Mexican American history of the 1950’s that coincided with the releases of Sam Phillips’ hits? Maybe we can, through research find Xicana attempts to break into the music world and insert them into the Sun Tour?
Along those lines, what if we research what car ownership was like for black people in Memphis during the time when the dealerships were in the Edge? Could black people buy cars on Monroe Avenue? Did black people sell cars?
Over the first sixty years, the dealer networks were 'male and white' - ethnic minorities had little opportunity to enter the retail car business as dealers. In 1960, there were a total of 36,000 domestic/import new car dealerships in the U.S.A. - none were black owned. However, as a result of the influence of the Reverend Martin Luther King and the riots of 1967, corporate America began to change the way it did business with ethnic minorities, but particularly African-Americans.
What if we had an event where slow driving tours of the Edge highlighted black history in the Edge. Actually, what if we had cars set up all through the neighborhood that people could sit inside of and hear histories of that part of the neighborhood? Or cars with recording devices where people could sit and tell their memories of the neighborhood?
To the right is an image "The Roof is on Fire," a 1993/1994 work by Suzanne Lacy, Annice Jacoby, and Chris Johnson
"The Roof Is On Fire featured 220 public high school students in unscripted and unedited conversations on family, sexuality, drugs, culture, education, and the future as they sat in 100 cars parked on a rooftop garage with over 1000 Oakland residents listening in."
What if we threw an event that specifically brought in Senior Citizens from Memphis and got them to reminisce about the neighborhood, about buying cars, about Sun Studios, about other reasons they came to this neighborhood. The senior citizen group could be from Orange Mound or Whitehaven. Maybe our event could involve Tad picking senior citizens up where they live in his Cadillac and driving them around the Edge while they tell him stories, sort of a reverse tour-guide. Maybe the Sun Studios tour could be a reverse tour too, where people are brought into Sun and they give the tour-guides alternative histories?