W. C. Handy Home & Museum

W. C. Handy was living in a two-room shotgun house on Jeanette Place in South Memphis when he wrote "The Memphis Blues," "St. Louis Blues," and "Beale Street Blues" — the three compositions that opened a national market for the music and earned him a title that stuck: Father of the Blues. He had moved to Memphis from Alabama in 1909, after years of touring the Delta, and the house he rented was as plain as they come: narrow floor plan, one room opening into the next, no hallway.

Memphis by then was already the world's largest spot cotton market and hardwood lumber center, a river city built on commodities and the labor that moved them. The blues had been traveling north out of the Delta for years, but Handy gave it a commercial shape — notation, arrangement, publishing — that made it legible to an industry that had never taken it seriously. He did that work from Jeanette Place.

In the mid-1980s the house was lifted off its original site and moved to 352 Beale Street, where it was restored and opened as a small interpretive museum. Heritage Tours runs it now. Inside: photographs, a few instruments, the desk he wrote on. It is the simplest building on Beale and the most consequential. You go because the songs that changed American music were written in a house this small, and because the house is still here.