DOWN in Memphis, the music's like a heatwave. And in a langorous, sweaty way, the heatwaves are a bit like music. Some torpid double bass thumping away like a lazy pulse, oozing indolence out into the sticky-tarred streets, soaking broken neighbourhoods in its honey-sweet balm. It is mid-August, and the sickly scents of the south assail your nostrils; a miasma of magnolias and mud cake, dry-fried ribs and the meandering Mississippi. Across town - and across a universe - from the tacky madness of Graceland with its crooning sideburned clones and ringing tills, a haggard whore parades her wares under a fireball sun. Behind her, biker types lounge in the doorway of a grungey tattoo parlour which looks like it would include a bonus bout of hepatitis with each piece of body art. Several boarded-up doors away, a sign perches in an unassuming shopfront, announcing the 'Ebbo Spiritual Supply House'.
Looking around the neighbourhood, you can't help but think some spiritual supplies would come in handy. For those not tethered to the Elvis juggernaut, Memphis can be a dismal place. The heady days of Beale Street are a fond and fuzzy memory, the swinging hep cats and gravel-voiced bluesmen long supplanted by a cruel and touristy simulacrum. BB King's legend blinks in neon outside his bar - but the man himself skedaddled to the bright lights of Las Vegas years ago.
Clustered husks of long-gone shops squat in shadowy, shattered-glass silence like little theme parks for bums. Every few blocks, a 'gentlemen's club' provides a relatively lucrative living for those long of leg and firm of breast, where cheap suits treat themselves to an eyeful and a Jack Daniels or three, or maybe even - hell yeah, why not? - a private lap dance. Tremulous little pockets of gentrification subsist among bleak suburban wastelands. Unemployment is high, hopes are low.
In such times, you might turn to drugs or crime. Or you might turn to religion. You might even turn to a syncretisation of Catholic saint-worship and earthy paganism that promises speedy results, potent spells and soothing rituals. You might turn to voodoo.
INSIDE the Ebbo Spiritual Supply House, an immense black woman judders and jellyrolls her way past shelves groaning under powders and potions, candles and lotions. Trailing in her wake is her painfully thin husband, whose motley, salt-and-pepper beard clings to a gaunt, haunted face. The couple strikes up an earnest conversation with Rick Woodward, an unassuming, bearded chap who is the store's proprietor. They have come up from Holly Springs, a depressing hamlet about an hour's drive from Memphis in neighbouring Mississippi.
The only remarkable feature of Holly Springs is a rambling madhouse known as Graceland Too, where a deranged chap named Paul McLeod gabbles like a speed-freak as he shows bemused tourists around a home crammed to the rafters with all manner of Elvis arcana. I have met McLeod - and an hour in his manic presence would be enough to turn anyone on to weird religion. But the problem today is not Elvis obsessives. It is ghosts. 'I keep leavin' mah watch in the saaame place on mah dressah, then nex' day it gone and done turn up somewhere else,' the huge woman booms. 'I jus' know it got to be some damn ghos' or sumpin!' The husband's problems are simpler. He's been on a losing streak at the casinos and needs something to change his luck.
