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BELLS, TENN.
What's Love Got To Do With It
Long before Anna Mae Bullock was renamed Tina Turner, this teenage future icon fell in love with an 11th-grade football player named Harry Taylor. He was two years older and mighty fine. "His skin was smooth and dark ... and he had beautiful white teeth," she once said. "The right size lips, the right size nose ... and a great little body." One night on a date, they parked a friend's 1937 Plymouth near a Bells beer joint, and Anna, who was about 15, let Harry slip past her "Nutbush City Limits." "Naturally, I lost my virginity in the backseat of a car: This was the '50s, right," she recalled. "Well, it hurt so bad — I think my earlobes were hurting. But I did it for love." The couple didn't last, though. Soon, Taylor, a known playa, moved on to other conquests, proving himself to be — as Tina would later sing — a "Typical Male."

- Craig Seymour

MEMPHIS, TENN.
True Grits
There's something about second-degree burns — rendered by boiling hot grits — that will make you find the Lawd. Soul singer Al Green's jilted lover Mary Woodson committed suicide soon after scalding him with the Southern comfort food. A spiritually renewed Green saw the assault as divine intervention and founded the Full Gospel Tabernacle in 1976. For nearly two decades, Green has won converts by pairing straight-no-chaser Biblical references and heavenly croons steeped in gut-bucket soul. In Full Gospel Tabernacle, Green exorcised his prurient demons and — until recently — disavowed secular music by refusing to perform much of his classic material. Tourists, religious purists, and social outcasts seeking spiritual renewal continue to flock to his modest Memphis sanctuary in droves.

- Edward M. Garnes Jr.

Full Gospel Tabernacle, 787 Hale Road

CLARKSDALE, MISS.
What Would Lucifer Do
One of America's most enduring music myths is that of Delta blues pioneer Robert Johnson's deal with the devil. The story goes that Johnson was a so-so young singer/guitarist, then disappeared for a spell and came back with prodigious talent. Word circulated that he struck his Faustian deal one spooky night at the crossroads of Highways 61 and 49 in Clarksdale.

Today, the location is marked with a sign that simply says "The Crossroads." The tribute is fine from a tourism standpoint, says Roger Stolle, owner of Cathead Delta Blues and Folks Arts in downtown Clarksdale, but "it's not where 61 and 49 crossed in the '30s." The intersection of Old 49 and Old 61 is about a mile away.

Earlier this year, Stolle interviewed 90-year-old bluesman Honeyboy Edwards, a friend and contemporary of Johnson's. "Robert told Honeyboy that he did make the deal with the devil, but Honeyboy said he didn't believe it," Stolle recounted.

Either way, the "crossroads" as a concept was popular in Delta culture. Edwards admitted to sitting at rural intersections by himself, drinking white whiskey and playing a little guitar, then "getting a little tired and moving on" because Lucifer never showed up.

Even sans the crossroads myth, Clarksdale has been fertile musical turf. A roll call of legends were either born there (John Lee Hooker, Ike Turner, Sam Cooke, Son House, Junior Parker) or lived there (Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Pinetop Perkins, W.C. Handy).

In 1937, blues singer Bessie Smith got into a car accident outside Clarksdale and severed her arm. She made it to Thomas Hospital, where she died. The hospital closed in 1940, but was reopened four years later as the Riverside Hotel, where many blues musicians stayed while passing through town. The hotel, a decidedly rustic, one-story affair with warped wood floors, ancient mattresses, tattered linens and one bathroom each for the men and women, still operates today. But though it might not be the most inviting place in the world, as Stolle says, "I don't believe there's anywhere else in the world with that much blues history that you can actually stay in."

- Eric Snider

The Riverside Hotel, 615 Sunflower Ave.

Photos provided by: Scott Henry, www.svetdvd.cz, www.img.photobucket.com, www.muzieklijstjes.com, wirthentertainment.com, brooksbluesbar.co.uk.