First port of call was Bellevue Baptist Church. This is where Ernest was a member for 20 years and taught in Sunday School. The property is ENORMOUS. The membership is 30,000 and the main auditorium holds 8,000. Even with a wide angle lens it took three shots go get all the seats in. There are rooms where they can have overflow, probably for another 8-10,000. The ministry has probably always been Arminian, but under the current minister it is militantly and intolerantly Arminian. Calvinists are lambasted and lampooned. How can a real Christian be a Calvinist is the attitude. They are demonic and have horns and you wouldn’t want them anywhere near your children, let alone teach them. So Ernest was forced out. The model appears to be that of a large corporation. Big is beautiful, the bigger the better. Who wants to be a member of a small fellowship, which is clearly unsuccessful and going nowhere. Join us and you can say you’ve joined God’s biggest and best. So goes the argument. Which is clearly fallacious, as on that basis we should all become Roman Catholics. Rome is clearly bigger and wealthier than any other church group in the world. Sadly, such thinking and this model is becoming the norm in many parts of the US. The few Reformed causes seem to be leaning towards hypercalvinism, never appealing to sinners to repent, thinking that just stating the gospel is sufficient. It tends to communicate a coldness to people.

It being Memphis, with its great musical history, Ernest drove us first to one of the most important sites in the history of contemporary music. Sun Records is where rock and roll began, under the influence of Sam Phillips. It was here that Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Conway Twitty and Charlie Rich first recorded their music. The location was sold in the late 60s but was restored as a recording studio in the 80s and is a major tourist attraction. We didn’t go inside as there’s not a lot to see and it probably costs something ridiculous. Ernest says the building that everyone goes in is not the correct one, but the smaller one to the left which is still used as a recording studio.

We then walked round the corner to the Peabody Hotel. As a result of a drunken hunter leaving one of his live duck lures in the lobby a tradition started of bringing ducks in. There they were, paddling in the fountain. A bottle of Dom Perignon champagne would have set us back a mere $395. Ernest and I just had the coffee at $2.40 for a large cup, plus almonds, cheesy biscuits and dried peas with covered with dried horseradish. It seems the ducks live on top of the hotel and a big thing is made of them coming down in the lift and waddling to the fountain every day. On the edge of the lobby is a clothes shop that Elvis used to buy his clothes from. You begin to appreciate that Elvis spent a lot of time around Memphis and that his “ghost” is everywhere. This year is the 35th anniversary of his death. He would have been 77 this year had he lived. Ernest regaled us with many stories about him. And no, we didn’t go to Gracelands, which was not somewhere we were bothered about.

We then drove down to the Mississippi, and walked across the tram tracks and a busy road to get to the riverside. There were Mississippi riverboats here that you can take up and down the river. The whole of the South used to be heavily involved in the cotton trade. Memphis was a major trading point through which the cotton would be exported. Some would have gone to Manchester for processing and Thomas Barnes’s business may have had a hand in some of it. It was because of the summer heat that the plantation owners felt the need to use black slaves. Emancipation came after the American Civil War (what, only ONE civil war?) but also came impoverishment of the South. Slaves may have been freed but they often had no work and continued to be downtrodden. An example of the law of unintended consequences.

We returned for a break. I needed a snooze as all the driving was catching up with me. Later in the evening Ernest and I went out to Cracker Barrel Restaurant to get some food for the wives. I must have misunderstood as Ernest had us sit down at a table and we ordered a meal for ourselves and takeout for the wives. The pot-roast steak, with corn, dumplins (not a typo) and macaroni cheese was delicious. American dumplins are just like dumplings but they are cooked without the suet and so lack the airiness of dumplings. We returned to find Marianne watching a film about Secretariat, supposedly the greatest racehorse that ever lived. A difficult title to maintain as it only raced in America and was never raced against horses from other parts of the world. I suppose it’s a bit like the baseball “World” series, where only American teams play and the winners can claim to be the best in the “world”.