3/8
Lisa o’neill
on
marc cohn, "walking in memphis"
(march fadness 90s edition)
For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.
March Xness is a fun tournament, but also at times a cruel one! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round (and 63 of 64 will bow out before a winner is crowned). Because of the pace of the first round, many of our readers probably don’t get a chance to closely read all of the essays each year! So for 2025 we wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read, this time on their own, no competitor. Just a moment of attention and even of glory. The Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look. There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? This year we’re not voting: we’re only reading and celebrating and remembering. The tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above). We hope these great essays will again earn your love. Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee
The Importance (Always and Especially Now) Of Being Earnest
Eight years and several lifetimes ago, I wrote an essay for March Fadness, a tournament of one-hit wonders, about Marc Cohn’s song “Walking in Memphis.” This was in the before-Covid times and very early into T’s first term. I was different then. We all were. Then me couldn’t fathom the things that now me has lived through, nor the ways they would alter who I am and how I see the world.
We are beleaguered by these years we’ve lived through: a sci-fi health crisis landscape we couldn’t have imagined as real; the layers of grief from losing people we loved and a more carefree lifestyle that carried less risks; genocide; fascism; societal collapse; and the looming (some might argue more than looming) death of democracy. We are not living in easy breezy times.
And it is because of this, not in spite of it, that I’m doubling down on “Walking in Memphis” and the earnestness expressed in the song. “Walking in Memphis” is a song that says what it means and means what it says. In a world increasingly manufactured by artificial intelligence, where it’s hard to know what is genuine, we need something real. As we are lied to by leaders who tell us they are here to protect us while simultaneously issuing orders to strip us of our autonomy and rights, we need songs that tell the truth.
I wrote about this song as one that spoke to me when I was a pre-teen. I have always been a sensitive person. As a child, my sensitivity was sometimes used against me, treated as a weak dam that should’ve been better shored up. I wasn’t effortlessly cool in the way some kids were nor was I willing or even able to play a game of pretense. In adulthood, that has transitioned into a desire to be direct, a need for vulnerability in my relationships, and a call to be true and authentic above all else.
I lost in the first round back in 2017 to “How Bizarre,” a song that is very catchy, a bop. I liked the song fine when it came out. With the “doo doo doo”s of the trumpet, the repeated “how bizahhh”s, and the spoken verses, it was a fine enough song to tap your foot to sitting in a bar. But it doesn’t have any substance. It doesn’t mean anything. I don’t agree with the author of the essay on it that it “wins on popularity and pathos.” “Walking on Memphis” didn’t hit as high on the charts for as long–though it did respectability–but the song hits a deep vein of pathos. I have always been an admirer of songs that mean something, songs that tell a story. And “Walking in Memphis” takes you on a journey.
In addition to writing prose, I’m also a songwriter, and I’ve been fortunate to go on many songwriting retreats (the first one later the same year I wrote this essay) with one of my songwriting heroes Dar Williams. At her Writing a Song That Matters retreats, she often discusses her own process of writing and, while the people attending the retreat write all kinds of songs, she likes to ask the question: Where did you go? Where did you really go?
Because a song contains layers. There is what is being said through the music and lyrics and what is happening inside, underneath.
I can’t tell you where the narrator of “How Bizarre” really went, but I can tell you where the lead in “Walking in Memphis” really went.
Besides, literally, Memphis, and all the places he visits while he is there: Beale Street, Graceland, Full Gospel Tabernacle Church. And the Hollywood Cafe (which is really in Mississippi, 35 miles outside of Memphis). The narrator heads to Memphis “blue as a boy can be,” but inside the place and the world of the song, he sees the ghost of Elvis, he eats soul food, he listens to gospel, and he is invited to and accepts the invitation to sing.
We travel to places when we are lost and restless and looking for something. And we often find another way to look at ourselves and at life. Marc Cohn was lost and searching when he wrote this autobiographical journey song that would come to define his career.
He finds what he is looking for, the clarity and the community, through being in this place and being in communion with other people–that communion echoed by voices of the gospel choir at the end of the song. He takes us with him, he connects with other people with and through music. At the end, he is changed. So are we.
Reading through the comments under the song on Youtube, there is a chorus of people echoing this feeling of connection and transformation:
“This song is one of my dad’s favorites of all time…he’d put it on when we drove across the border to Tennessee through Memphis and his 3 girls, me and my two sisters, would sing this at the top of our lungs!!! And Daddy used to just laugh and laugh and loved it all! …My daddy passed away three weeks ago to the day today after battling cancer. This song gives me chills and brings a few tears to my eyes, as it makes me feel like my dad is sitting right beside as I listen to this and sing along….” (@landraliebling5699)
“I was 17 in 1991 and I immediately felt a deep connection to this song. I'm 47 now and the connection is still there.” (@idanwillenchik3050)
“I'm a native of Memphis - born and raised. Left when I went in the Army and was gone for many years at the time this song came out.... I heard this song the first time when I was living in Europe.... it made me so homesick I moved back home within a month!” (@TombGuard206)
“This song mentions my paternal grandmother Mrs. Muriel Davis Wilkins who helped him through a rough time. I am so happy that he dedicated this song to her.” (@craigwilliams516)
“It's one of those songs that just makes you feel something. It's a legend wrapped-up in a beautiful melody. Ugh, I just love it.” (@samsong24)
In a time when leaders are trying to talk us out of the basic human emotion of empathy, isn’t feeling something what we need?
Two of the questions that were offered as fodder for this reflection were: Did you get robbed? Did you get justly defeated?
Those questions feel irrelevant to me.
The song exists, and there is a truth in it that makes people love it. My essay on the song exists, and what I wrote feels true, then and now.
What matters to me about art is not how popular it is but whether it resonates.
Is it of use? Does it matter to someone? Does it allow them to see something a little differently? Does the listener find some beauty in it that makes the day a little easier?
Do I think this song should have won? Yes. Does it matter? No.
Because regardless, the song matters. It makes people feel something. It is a good song. —Lisa O’Neill
lisa m. o'neill on "walking in memphis": Earnestness or Do I Really Feel the Way I Feel?
I have always been attracted to the earnest. Children’s trembling voices as they recite their lines in the school play. Weeds and daisies piercing pavement. Blurted professions of love—especially uttered by those who likely don’t have a chance with the object of their affection. The striving, the yearning, the refusal to kowtow in the face of potential failure, the trying too hard. To be earnest is to risk the saccharine in pursuit of the sweet, to bellow when others may deem you too loud or too much. And one of the most earnest songs I’ve ever heard is Marc Cohn’s “Walking in Memphis.”
I was 11 going on 45 when the song first came out. I loved Paula Abdul as much as the next early ‘90s tween but my black boombox spent most of its time tuned to the Adult Contemporary station. Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart, and Sting rasped out their argument of all for one and one for love. Bonnie Raitt crooned about how you can’t make your heart feel something it won’t. Whitney Houston told me the children were our future and I believed her. No, that’s not right. I knew in my bones that what she said was true: learning to love yourself was the greatest love of all. Their words and voices permeated and I belted along as if I knew what it meant to be ignited by love or struck down with the grief of betrayal.
I excelled at falling in love with hit singles and buying the entire cassette when these songs spoke to me. That’s how I ended up with stacks of Pebbles and Taylor Dayne. I remember the crestfallen feeling after shelling out carefully-counted allowance money only to discover that “The Living Years” was the only good song on Mike & The Mechanics album of the same name.
That song, like “Walking in Memphis” is a tale of middle-aged reckoning and spiritual awakening: “Say it loud/Say it clear/You can listen as well as you hear/It’s too late (it’s too late)/When we die (oh, when we die)/to admit we don’t see eye to eye.”
Before I broke into my teenage years, I was already nostalgic for the life I had yet to lead. I worried I wouldn’t ever do the things I wanted, that I wouldn’t tell the people in my life I loved them before it was too late (never mind that I didn’t know who most of these people were yet). These songs provided for me a container for the deep-seated fear that life was not, in fact, all it was cracked up to be and that grown-ups were as clueless as us kids.
Despite my love of these earnest songs, I was also embarrassed. I understood that to be earnest was to be exposed, to risk being seen as deeply uncool. Your desire and need laid bare.
*
“Walking in Memphis” is a journey. The song begins: a pounding arpeggio on the keys. We put our blue suede shoes on. We board the plane. We touch down in the town of the Delta blues in the middle of the pouring rain. The song satisfies in the unique way only narrative songs can because we accompany the singer through the journey: we walk down these physical and psychic streets, we reach the bridge, we circle back to where we came from, with new discoveries lingering in the final notes.
“Walking in Memphis” is entirely autobiographical, based on a trip Cohn took to Memphis when he felt stuck and worried about the trajectory of his career. In an interview with Keyboard magazine, he said, “One night while listening to all of my demos, I came to the realization that I shouldn’t be signed, because I didn’t have any great songs yet. My voice was good and the demos were interesting, but the songs were only just okay. I was 28 years old and not in love with my songs. James Taylor had written ‘Fire and Rain’ when he was 18, and Jackson Browne wrote ‘These Days’ when he was only 17. I thought, ‘I’m already ten years older than these geniuses. It’s never going to happen for me.’”
“It was a pretty desperate time” when he booked his flight to Tennessee—inspired to do so after reading an interview with James Taylor who said when he was blocked, he went somewhere new.
In his formative years, Cohn devoured music and Memphis was home to some of the artists who most inspired him: Ann Peebles, Al Green, plus the rest of the Hi Records’ soul singers and Elvis, Isaac Hayes, and the rest of the Stax catalogue. “[There was] an almost endless stream of brilliance and soul that came out of Memphis. I was aware early on that just like Detroit and the music of Motown, there was something going on in Memphis that was utterly inexplicable,” he said. “It was part of what made me want to be a musician in the first place.”
Most of the video—shot in black and white—features Cohn singing while looking pensively into the distance, sitting and playing piano, or traipsing around recognizable sites in Memphis: the W.C. Handy statue, the quarter-noted gates of Graceland, Sun Studios, a bridge on the riverwalk. In one shot, superimposed over his face is the riverboat The Memphis Queen. He is a tourist: nostalgic, looking for meaning, walking us through the places we have been or places we would go.
On the recommendation of a friend, Cohn went to see the Reverend Al Green and his Full Gospel Tabernacle Choir. As he sat in the pew and listened to Green preach and sing and preach and sing, he witnessed how the Reverend’s voice strengthened, as if gaining power, as the sermon continued. Cohn began to cry. Not impatient tears like in his childhood synagogue days in Cleveland when he couldn’t wait to leave. No, instead, this would go down in memory as one of the best experiences of his life.
Then Cohn drove south 35 miles to Robinsville, Mississippi to the Hollywood Café where Muriel Davis Wilkins played. In the Keyboard interview, he said, “The Hollywood Café had supposedly once been a slave commissary, but it was now a lovely little restaurant that served fried pickles and catfish. Muriel was a schoolteacher [in her sixties] who on weekends made extra money playing music.” She played old gospel standards like “The Glory of Love” and “Nearer my God to Thee.” Some patrons listened but most talked and ate their supper. He says, “I felt an immediate connection to her voice, her spirit, her face, and her smile. I was totally transfixed by her music.”
His rendering of that time is my favorite verse in the song: “They brought me down to see her/They asked me if I would/Do a little number/And I sang with all my might/She said, ‘Tell me, are you a Christian child?’/and I said, ‘Ma’am I am tonight.’”
I’ve been thinking so much about these lines and why they beg to be sung too loudly in your car or at karaoke. It’s not just because they are the climax of the song. Something else is at work here. “All our might” speaks to a vulnerability placed solidly in the realm of childhood. I see a little girl in patent leather shoes with hands clenched tight at her sides so that she gets one more ounce of volume. Only every so often as adults do we experience—do we allow ourselves to experience—what this earnestness feels like. When we free ourselves from posturing as experts. Every single one of us knows what it is to sing with all our might. Belting out the notes. Holding nothing back. Pouring every iota of ourselves into the song. All that striving.
Right after this verse, the gospel choir joins him on the chorus. When I heard the song for the first time in a long while, I was both startled by the memory of their presence and remembered the power of their voices as a big part of why I love the song. The voices in solidarity, the blatant spirituality of living, the reaching up and out, the unwillingness to be grounded by our petty fears and insecurities, or the tragic histories of this land. The song itself a working through.
My therapist told me that the songs that resonated with us at age 10 or 11 are “soul songs.” She was referencing the work of folklorist and anthropologist Angeles Arrien. In her book the The Four-Fold Way, Arrien talks about soul retrieval, the need to reconnect with core parts of ourselves to reawaken the visionary, healer, teacher, and warrior within us. We do this by remembering who we were before we could fully control or censor our desires, before we knew to be ashamed. She asks: What songs from childhood stay with me? Between the ages four and twelve, what activities captivated me for hours without the need of anyone else around?
I grew up in the Mississippi Delta where this song is situated. Music was my communion. Listening to the song, I see the crescent of the muddy river winding through, oak trees dripping with moss, men frying catfish in back kitchens, families gathered at the park for picnics, singers in old piano bars, their voices soaking into the wood siding. I hear the breathy song of riverboat calliopes. At 11, the time I first heard this song, my feet were too big for my body, my best friend left me behind for a new best friend, my parents sat me down in our yellow living room and told me they were separating, I switched to a new school. At 11, I presented a Social Studies project focused on deltas and the mouth of the river. I learned the word silt: fine sand or clay carried by running water before being deposited, settled back down.
*
In my early to mid-twenties, I was a music writer and reviewer in my hometown of New Orleans, covering local and national musicians. I loved interviewing them to get insights into process and artistic vision. In green rooms and living rooms, they gesticulated wildly or curled themselves into the corners of couches. They broke randomly into song or pulled guitars onto their laps and began to explain how a song came into being. Seeing how their selves unfolded into the music onstage or streaming through the radio ignited my curiosity and expanded my understanding. But I hated doing reviews.
To dissect, divide, and discuss someone else’s creation was a responsibility I did not want. Not only did I believe that not all music was made for me, I resisted the idea that because I sang and played instruments, because I had a somewhat trained ear, I should be an authority on another person’s creative work.
More than that, I had written songs and I knew what it meant to sit with a string of words or an empty page, a riff or a chord progression and try to seam those bits into something that felt true. Who was I to say that if someone wrote a song that didn’t resonate with me that that song wasn’t resonant? Who was I to use my words to break apart something someone had tirelessly woven together? Whatever the flaws or shortcomings, doing this to someone’s work felt like a deed of disregard, an act of unmaking, a stridency in the face of what was, ultimately, an offering.
*
In the bridge of the song, Cohn sings “when you haven’t got a prayer” and his voice flips. That gesture was something I wanted to do before I even understood it was there. The sudden change in register, on purpose, that suspends us for a second and makes the emotion real.
His voice settles for the next line: “Boy, you’ve got a prayer in Memphis.”
One definition of earnest is: “resulting from or showing sincere and intense conviction.” Another is “a thing intended or regarded as a sign or promise of what’s to come.”
*
Cohn worried about including Elvis in the song at all. Although how do you write a song about Memphis without mentioning the King? Still, one tribute to Elvis’ legacy, Cohn has said, is if you include him in a song, the song becomes about him. Such was his power and influence.
Elvis grew up in Mississippi, singing gospel music and although he is often credited for his blend of gospel, blues, country, and rock, his songs are threaded through with the clear influence and inspiration of Black musicians in the South who revolutionized that sound: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Big Mama Thornton, Big Boy Crudup. Southern roots of colonialism and slavery continue in the erasure of the work of Black artists. What happened in Memphis wasn’t “utterly inexplicable” as Cohn once noted of music coming out of Memphis and Detroit, but the result of generations of musical experimentation and emotional ancestry, in large part led by African-American culture bearers from the South. Elvis was not the only royalty, not the only King.
In “Walking in Memphis,” Cohn sees the ghost of the Elvis, watches him walk through the gates of Graceland: “security didn’t see him/they just hovered round his tomb.” I was born two years after he died and Elvis’ death was the first exposure I had to celebrity rumors and conspiracy theories. Elvis Lives. Is the King really alive? A willful suspension of disbelief for someone whose music resonated with so many, for someone who maintained, even as a grown man, a wistful air about him; a childlike insistence; blatant, unapologetic desire.
On August 16, 1977, Elvis died of heart failure from a suspected overdose. He was 42.
On August 8, 2005, when he was 44, Marc Cohn was leaving a concert in Denver in with his bandmates and manager, who was driving the tour van, when he saw a man running towards them. His first thought was: I wonder who he is running from. Then he saw the gun.
Cohn yelled “Duck.” The sound of a shot firing and breaking glass. A solitary bullet grazed the driver before lodging in Cohn’s temple.
"I touched myself and there was blood all over my hands and my clothes. And I realized I was the one who'd been hit. Every second that passed by I thought that's the last one, that's the last second I'll be here," Cohn said when interviewed by 20/20 two weeks after the failed carjacking.
He was conscious during the entire shooting and aftermath, including when they removed the bullet from his skull.
The surgeon who treated Cohn said the bullet struck his skull without the velocity to fracture it but just enough to stop the bullet. Another centimeter or two and it would have hit his brain.
When he looked at the X-Ray, Cohn said, “"It was a terrifying moment and a moment of sheer relief. And release. I mean, I saw that there was exactly enough room in the soft tissue between the outside of my face and the beginning of my skull, there was just enough room to hold that bullet.”
He spent only one day in the hospital, and writing songs became part of his recovery, a way to write into and out of what he was feeling. He said in an interview with the Denver Post a couple of years later: “‘Five or six weeks after this happened, these songs sort of just came out. I had bad writer’s block for a while. And even the songs that have nothing to do with what happened, there was a clearing made by this event, and that’s another part of it that I can’t explain or understand.’ All of a sudden, ‘I could write.’”
*
Many people reference the line where Muriel asks him: “Are you a Christian child?” and his reply: “Ma’am I am tonight” and ask if the song is about being reborn. In interviews, Cohn talks about this: saying he is Jewish and that only a Jew could write that line. But to me, that line: “Ma’am, I am tonight” isn’t about Christianity or Christ or being saved by some other holy being or even about irony. That line isn’t about grace that comes from a higher power with a name. That line to me is about ecstatic offering, about might. That line is ushered into being by the gospel singers that follow after and by this basic truth: to live, to offer, to simply move through the world is an act of faith.
Some of the most joyful moments of my life have been singing in church. And even though I’m not a believer in the way I was as a child, I still feel a pulsing charge flood through my body when I hear gospel singers sing. When their voices carry up over the rafters, I feel the duende Lorca spoke about: sound both of and not of them, rising up out of the ground through their feet, their legs, their torso, their arms and neck, and ushered out of their open mouths and to our ears.
Even when their voices are imperfect, even when they go off key, even—and especially—when they falter, I feel a deep gratitude. I actually love when a singer’s voice cracks. I like music that reminds me of the humanity of those singing. I like music that reminds me of my own. I like music that reminds me that I am alive and breathing and that sometimes my breath carries and other times it just catches in my throat.
When Marc visited the Hollywood, Muriel asked why he was there. In between sets, he told her he was a songwriter looking for inspiration. He confided, too, that he had written profusely—in journals and songs—about his mother. She died suddenly when he was two and a half. The greatest heartbreak of his life so young. A decade later, his father followed. His stepmother raised him. I felt stuck in time, like I’d never quite been able to work through that loss. At the end of the night, she invited him onto the stage.
When Marc sang with Muriel, they didn’t know any songs in common. So Muriel played the weathered, upright piano and fed him lines from old gospel songs which he improvised melodies to. The last song they sang together that night was “Amazing Grace”: “I once was lost/but now I’m found/was blind but now I see.” When they finished the song, Muriel leaned over to him, whispered in his ear, told him: Child, you can let go now.
A native New Orleanian, Lisa M. O’Neill is a writer and storyteller whose work explores art, culture, politics, social justice, and our relationship to place. She is also a singer/songwriter who performs in New Orleans and beyond. She regularly posts on her newsletter The Feelings Union. Lisa’s writing has appeared in Bitch Media, DIAGRAM, defunct, Edible Baja Arizona, Everyday Feminism, The Feminist Wire, GOOD, Good Housekeeping, The Guardian, Salon, Shondaland, Talk Poverty, and The Washington Post.