THERE are plenty of musical cities around the world but none of them has come close to having the same worldwide impact on popular music as Memphis, Tennessee.

“They’ve got catfish on the table, they’ve got gospel in the air,” sang Marc Cohn in Walking in Memphis. There’s also the tradition of blues, jazz and country music that stretches back decades. It’s a city where black met white and set off a seismic musical shift that still reverberates today. That such a revolution took place in a racially-segregated city which many saw as backward and reactionary is just one of the paradoxes of Memphis.

It was in the years immediately after the Secord World War that Memphis music changed irrevocably. The city became a stopping-off point for thousands of black people who left the Mississippi Delta in search of prosperity in the big cities. Many of those passing through stopped and put down roots. And it wasn’t just a black migration. Vernon and Gladys Presley, with their young son Elvis, moved to Memphis from rural Tupelo in 1948 in search of a better life.

Sam C. Phillips, a recording engineer, had moved to Memphis from Alabama and ended up supervising big-band broadcasts from the Peabody Hotel. But as the Presley biographer Peter Guralnick has pointed out, Phillips had a nobler idea in mind. “I thought to myself: suppose that I would have been born black . . . I think I felt from the beginning the total iniquity of man’s inhumanity to his brother.”

Phillips opened his own recording studio in 1950 with the aim of of “providing an opportunity for some of the great negro artists”. And great they were, ranging from the gut-bucket blues of the larger than life Howlin’ Wolf, the artist he called his greatest discovery, to the one-man-band Dr Ross.

That didn’t stop Presley, then an 18-year-old truck driver with greasy hair and sideburns, coming to the studio to cut demo discs as a present for his mother and hoping for an invitation to take part in a recording session. The invitation came in April 1954. Presley and his backing musicans, Scotty Moore and Bill Black, started fooling around on an Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup number called That’s All Right (Mama). “We thought it was exciting,” said Moore, “but what was it? It was just so completely different.”

In reality it was white country hillbilly music meeting the blues head-on and fulfilling Phillips’s dream of finding a white performer who could sing and play the blues with the same vitality and energy that stars such as Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Parker and B. B. King had shown. Eighteen months later Phillips had sold Presley’s contract and forsaken the blues for the rock’n’roll of Jerry Lee Lewis and country of Johnny Cash.

Then another revolution began. As Phillips and his Sun label quietly faded at the end of the Fifties, a country fiddler, Jim Stewart, and his sister, Estelle Axton, were taking over a disused Memphis movie house as the headquarters for their newly-formed company, Satellite, later Stax records.

Although originally a country label, Stewart and Axton found they had a local rhythm and blues hit on their hands when they recorded a black father and daughter, Rufus and Carla Thomas, singing Cause I Love You. Soon in the Stax studios white musicians such as the guitarist Steve Cropper and bass player Duck Dunn were mixing and playing with black musicians such as the organist Booker T. Jones and drummer Al Jackson Jr.

That was inside. Outside, Memphis was still a segretated city. When the New York producer Jerry Wexler came to meet Carla Thomas and her father in the early Sixties, he had to escort them to his room in the Peabody Hotel through the service entrance.

But Stax was different. “We never saw colour, we saw talent. That was what was great about being there,” said Axton.

The atmosphere changed, at least outside the studio, when Martin Luther King was shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in 1968. But the hits kept coming, including those by a former session man and composer called Isaac Hayes, while a new kid on the block, Al Green, had signed for the rival Hi label. Soon, with a string of soulful ballads, Green was filling the gap left empty by the death of Otis Redding in a plane crash.

But Southern soul and funk couldn’t compete with disco, and musical memories were short-lived. The Sun studio became a scuba diving shop and the Stax studios were sold and then demolished. Only Graceland survived.

But, as the city’s place in the history of Western pop was acknowledged, things began to change. The Sun studios have been reopened, the Stax studios have been rebuilt and the Smithsonian has opened a rock and soul museum next to Beale Street. Presley would have been proud.

LONG-DISTANCE INFORMATION

It Came From Memphis by Robert Gordon (Secker & Warburg, £14.99)

Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax Records by Rob Bowman (Schirmer, £14.95)

Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom by Peter Guralnick (Mojo, £12.99)

Last Train to Memphis: the Rise of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick (Abacus, £12.99)

Rhythm Oil: a Journey through the Music of the American South by Stanley Booth (Da Capo, £12.50)

Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock’n’Roll by Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins (St Martin’s Press, £9.34)

• The Barbican’s It Came From Memphis season (www.barbican.org.uk/memphis, or 0845 1207595) opens on Sunday and runs until April 25