What critics are saying about

Beale Street Dynasty

Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis

“Preston Lauterbach has conjured a fascinating demimonde that’s dead and gone. After reading this, I dreamed all night about street hustlers, hoodoos, and snake oil salesmen on Beale Street, the Main Street of black America. Here Lauterbach gives us Beale in its heyday—the chitlin joints, the rough-and-tumble politics, the fecund music—and deftly paints a portrait of the one improbable millionaire who towered over this vibrant world. Read Beale Street Dynasty and you begin to feel you’re communing with ghosts.” — Hampton Sides, bestselling author of Hellhound on His Trail

“In his last book, The Chitlin’ Circuit, Lauterbach shone light into obscure, all but unknown rooms of the rock-’n’-roll story. This time he turns to a chapter we thought we knew well—Beale Street, one of the grounds zero of American culture, with Tin Pan Alley and Congo Square and Concord—and the result is every bit as illuminating. Lauterbach has become one of my favorite people to read on 20th-century popular music.” — John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead

“You may know about Beale Street, W. C. Handy, and the Memphis Blues, but chances are you’ve never heard of the Church family and its achievements. Could an African-American political dynasty, against all odds, have managed real power in a Southern city a century ago? Preston Lauterbach tells the tale authoritatively and with flair.” — Luc Sante, author of Low Life

“Preston Lauterbach takes readers on an uproarious, sometimes shocking jaunt through Memphis history by way of Beale Street, the remarkable thoroughfare that has hosted the likes of W.C. Handy, Ida B. Wells, and Richard Wright. Beale Street Dynasty is a compelling, witty, deeply researched, and always enlightening book.” — Gary Krist, author of Empire of Sin

“Beale Street’s decadent and uplifting components alike were brought and held together through regional politics of the most brutal sort: vote bundling, poll taxes, stolen ballot boxes, anti-Negro pogroms, lynchings and assassinations by men who could get away with murder. All aspects of this complex, fascinating history are told in ‘Beale Street Dynasty’ with verve and vivid erudition by Preston Lauterbach.”

“So much American history is the story of power, race and money. And that story runs extra deep and vivid in the old Tennessee river city of Memphis. On the Chickasaw Bluffs, above the Mississippi, Memphis moved after the Civil War…from slaves and cotton to sex and song. There was a furious battle for power. For a time, blacks won a notable share. It built Beale Street.” Tom Ashbrook, NPR On Point

“Beale Street Dynasty is both good history and a good yarn. … [A] Southern answer to Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York or HBO’s similarly titled Boardwalk Empire.” Memphis Commercial Appeal

“…a masterful job of depicting the ruthless entrepreneurship that yielded a lot of tangled vice and, perhaps not surprisingly, some tangible good as well.” Washington Post

“Beale Street Dynasty…is an important and impeccably researched social and political history of Memphis that may be one of the best historical narratives of black life in the American South from the end of the Civil War to the 1940s. It’s also a riveting tale that’s hard to put down.” Jackson Clarion-Ledger

“It’s a tale littered with vice kings and philanthropists, graft-driven politicians and progressive activists, human depravity and timeless music….Lauterbach presents the lively history of this period with meticulous research, an engaging plot that resembles a tense political thriller, and the white-hot language of hardboiled crime fiction.” Knoxville News Sentinel

“His skill as a writer is to interweave historical facts with the stories of the characters that populated Beale Street and its surrounds.” Seattle Times