By Preston Lauterbach | W. Norton & Company | $16.95 | 352 pages | 2015

“I’d rather be there than any place I know,” W. C. Handy lyricized in his musical hit of 1917, the “Beale Street Blues.” Many of us who know and love Memphis feel very much the same way. The Beale Street of the late 1800s and early 1900s, however, was a far different and much more treacherous landscape, at so many levels, than that of 2016. How a powerful family dynasty shaped this vibrant and historic part of downtown Memphis is the saga depicted in Preston Lauterbach’s Beale Street Dynasty.

The dynasty in question is that of the Church family: father and son, Robert Church Sr. and Jr., left their imprimatur on Beale and much of the political life of Memphis. As recounted by Lauterbach, the history of the Churches — the two greatest African-American businessmen and political leaders of Memphis between 1885 and 1940 — reads at times like a novel or like an early precursor of the cable TV series “Empire,” with Robert Church Sr. serving as a precursor to that show’s hip-hop entrepreneur Lucious Lyon.

Lest we forget, politics in the South had a very different cast for many years before the “Southern strategy” of the GOP changed party dynamics. The Churches were both diehard Republicans who delivered a significant number of African-American votes to the party of Lincoln. Church Sr. amassed a fortune and became the South’s first African-American millionaire. Church Jr. was a key advisor to Wendell Willkie, the Republican Party’s opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. Their Democratic political opposition was almost wholly white.

As the book’s subtitle suggests, Beale Street had a reputation for making Memphis a “Sin City” to rival New Orleans for many decades. Lauterbach makes clear that this reputation was deserved; he also makes it abundantly clear that Robert Church Sr. and his family owed a sizeable part of his fortune to the profits of sin. Alcohol, opium and cocaine could be found in profusion, even during Prohibition. What we now call human trafficking was open and notorious in the three-block area between Beale and Gayoso, with both black and white women as denizens of Memphis’s bordello district. (In a lighter moment, Lauterbach recounts a visit of the young William Faulkner to Memphis. Solicited by a prostitute plying her trade, the then-threadbare Faulkner replied: “No, thank you, ma’am, I’m on my vacation.”) But, the bawdyhouses, opium dens, gambling and “policy game” halls of Beale Street and its neighborhood were no laughing matter, as Lauterbach amply demonstrates.

“If Beale Street could talk …,” Handy mused in his lyrics. The neighborhood was more than just some knockoff of Storyville or an early Las Vegas, however; it also had an outsized role to play in civil rights and the history of American music. A former slave, Robert Church Sr. began to change his wicked ways after he encountered a young firebrand and early civil rights hero, the impassioned writer Ida B. Wells, who got her start in Memphis as a writer and columnist for several African-American newspapers. In late 1905, a bandleader in his early 30s came to town and found a suitable milieu to mesh his vision of transforming black folk songs into a new popular music for America and the world. W. C. Handy found Beale Street to be the perfect laboratory for his musical transformations.

For each Robert Church, however, there was a white man in the role of nemesis. For the elder Bob Church, this took the form of Judge David P. "Pappy" Hadden. Lauterbach’s recounting of the conduct and judicial outlook of this official makes for grim reading for any Tennessee lawyer or judge. Lynchings, shootings, open and notorious bordellos and opium dens galore made Beale Street something like the Wild West, but Judge Hadden had figured out how to make “crime pay the city rather than making honest citizens pay for crime.” Pappy Hadden’s court became a tool to tax suspects and criminals — and as well, to dragoon any hapless black man unfortunate enough to fall into his clutches into police servitude at hard labor — for the rebuilding of Memphis.

Bob Church the younger had to contend with the infamous Edward Hull Crump. Payments of protection money, voting fraud and cold-blooded murder were laid at the door of “Boss” Crump and his political machine, as was the use of the Memphis police to intimidate Church’s friends and business colleagues and shut down voter meetings. Although FDR was personally notified of Crump’s shakedowns and oppression of Memphis’s blacks, Boss Crump outlived Bob Church Jr. Lauterbach demonstrates how Crump’s persecution of Memphis’s African-American leadership and his muzzling of Church and his allies in the 1930s and 1940s set the stage for much of what would follow in the civil rights era.

Thus it was that “Beale became,” as Lauterbach argues, “the Main Street of Black America, a site of monumental innovations, thrilling promise and devastating tragedy.”

Beale Street Dynasty amply depicts the early days of this fabled neighborhood and the host of characters — from Nathan Bedford Forrest to Ida Wells; from W. C. Handy to the seamy “durable sinner,” Owen P. White; from Bob Church Sr. and Jr., to Judge Hadden and Boss Crump — who altered the social, musical, legal and moral landscape not only of Memphis, but of the rest of Tennessee and America, at this cultural crossroads beside the Mississippi.

JACK H. (NICK) MCCALL is an attorney with the Tennessee Valley Authority Office of General Counsel in Knoxville. Any views and opinions expressed herein are solely attributable to McCall.

Related reading: “Ida B. Wells at the Tennessee Supreme Court,” by Russell Fowler, Nov. 2015, Tenn. Bar Journal, www.tba.org/journal/ida-b-wells-at-the-tennessee-supreme-court.