Cher – Walking in Memphis

Marc Cohn’s true story of one Friday night in Mississippi became the song Cher chose to restart her career, and in Europe her version outran his.

On a Friday night in the mid-1980s, a New York songwriter named Marc Cohn drove south out of Memphis to the Hollywood Cafe in Tunica County, Mississippi, where a retired schoolteacher named Muriel Davis Wilkins played piano and sang gospel. Before the night was over she had brought him up to sing beside her, feeding him the words as they went. Cohn has called the song he wrote afterward, Walking in Memphis, completely autobiographical. In 1995, four years after his own recording made his name, it became the record Cher chose to start her career over.

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Cohn had gone to Memphis following James Taylor’s advice to “do a geographic,” to shake loose a creative block by going somewhere new. He heard the Reverend Al Green preach at the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church, toured Graceland, and ended up at the Hollywood. After they finished singing, Wilkins leaned over and told him, “Child, you can let go now,” a moment Cohn said transformed him. Back in New York he wrote a song that names Beale Street, W.C. Handy, Graceland and Reverend Green, and puts Muriel at the piano. She died in 1990, before the record came out. Atlantic released it in 1991, it reached No.13 on the Hot 100, and at the 1992 Grammys it was nominated for Song of the Year while Cohn won Best New Artist.

By the mid-1990s, Cher’s recording career had stalled. She later called the television infomercials she made in that period devastating to her career, and she set out to rebuild it. She signed with Warner Music UK in 1994 and recorded It’s a Man’s World in London the following year with producers including Trevor Horn, Stephen Lipson and Christopher Neil. Neil produced her Walking in Memphis, with Simon Hurrell engineering and mixing. WEA released it as the album’s lead single in Europe on October 13, 1995, and the album followed on November 6.

From the bus to the TV studio

Britain took Cher’s version to No.11, and it reached No.7 in Norway, No.13 in Sweden and No.17 in Austria. In Europe it charted higher than Cohn’s original. The promotional video leaned into the song’s Memphis mythology: Cher walks the city dressed as Elvis Presley and sings aboard a bus, a nod to a lyric that has its narrator trailing Elvis’s ghost to the gates of Graceland. She also launched the single on television. BBC’s Top of the Pops featured it as a new entry on October 19, 1995.

This performance comes from that promotional run. TROS, the Dutch public broadcaster, featured Cher on the TROS TV Show, broadcast on November 23, 1995, seventeen days after It’s a Man’s World reached stores. By then the single had already done its work in Britain, and the appearance belonged to the wider campaign to reintroduce her across Europe as a singer first, ahead of the album’s later singles.

The song stayed with her. Cher brought it into her concerts, including the Do You Believe? Tour that followed her 1998 return to No.1, and it has remained part of her live repertoire. Cohn’s original endures as his signature, and the two recordings tell the same story from different places: his of a stranger changed by a city that was not his, hers of a star using someone else’s pilgrimage to find her way back to her own career. Muriel told Cohn he could let go. Cher, in her own way, took the same advice.