Readers might be surprised to learn that even though most of Beale Street is set in New York City, particularly Harlem, the real Beale Street is actually in downtown Memphis, Tennessee. In American history, "Beale Street" is synonymous with the Blues in America. Since the 1860s, black traveling musicians began performing on Beale Street, and a growing music culture developed in the area. The first recorded band on Beale Street was the Young Men's Brass Band, who were formed by Sam Thomas in 1867. In 1890, the Grand Opera House was built over the site of a former coal yard, which is now called the Orpheum. Chuch Park, located at the intersection of 4th Street and Beale Street, became a meeting place for blues musicians and influential people of the period. Beale Street quickly became the commercial center for the black population of Memphis, housing a variety of resources as well as the headquarters of the newspaper Memphis Free Speech, edited by Ida B. Wells.
Today, Beale Street is a popular tourist attraction. This started in the early 1900s when businessmen started opening nightlife establishments, restaurants, and shops on and around the street. In 1909, W.C. Hardy moved to Memphis and the blues culture on Beale Street became famous across the country. Baldwin actually took the title of his novel from a song by W.C. Hardy, composed in 1916, called "Beale Street Blues." In the song, Hardy croons: "I'd rather be here than any place I know, / It's gonna take a sergeant to make me go!" In this way, as Lynn Orilla Scott notes in Baldwin's Later Fiction, "Baldwin's title identifies the novel with the cultural project of W.C. Hardy, to preserve the stories and songs of ordinary black people in their own language."
The connection to the real-life Beale Street makes Tish's blues narrative voice all that more salient, as it connects her story and the rest of the novel, to a rich cultural tradition tied together by ethnicity. Thus, Tish's story becomes the story of a community. In the same way, in Hardy's "Beale Street Blues," "Hardy extends the expression of the blues from an individual's story to the story of a place, a community which represents the blues' life" (Orilla Scott).
Before Tish tells her family the news of her baby in the novel, she sits with them in the living room and Ernestine puts on a Ray Charles record. This moment is an evocation of blues both in its content and form: Baldwin uses blues-like language when describing this family listening to the blues. Tish describes this moment: "out of these elements, this patience, my Daddy's touch, the sounds of my mother in the kitchen, the way the light fell, the way the music continued beneath everything, the movement of Ernestine's hand as she lit a cigarette, the movement of her hand as she dropped the match into the ashtray, the blurred human voices rising from the street, out of this rage and a steady, somehow triumphant sorrow, my baby was slowly being formed" (41). The commas in this passage create a rhythm in Tish's words as she expresses the "triumphant sorrow" of the moment.
