Last week I was in Memphis, Tennessee for four days at a regional meeting. The meeting was entertaining, but not as much as Thursday night when we went to the Memphis In May Festival. As the website says, it really is the “Super Bowl of Swine.” I’ve seen it before but only on The Food Network shows about the event. Never in person. There was some awesome barbecue all over that place. If you like it dry rubbed, wet, spicy, tangy, etc….they had it. There was St. Louis style, Memphis style, Alabama style….white sauce, vinegar based sauce, tomato based sauce….they had it all. There were barbecue teams from all around the country. And even Texas. Damn, I bet there wasn’t a Muslim or Jew within twenty miles of that pork filled place!

Before I get into more stuff about Memphis and the festival…and the crappy cell phone pictures I took…let me put something out there for your consideration. Why do some people in this country (Yankees and other folks not in the South, but possibly in Central and South Florida) call the act of cooking meat outside on a grill barbecue? Barbecue is a certain style of meat. You can have pork, chicken or beef barbecue. Hell, I once even had Mongolian barbecue. There is sauce involved and sometimes it’s served on a bun or with a bone through it. You don’t “barbecue” hamburgers, hotdogs, steaks, chicken, etc. There should not be a verb version of that word. When you have friends and family over and you fire up the charcoal or propane grill, you’re cooking out. Possibly you’re even grilling out, but you are never barbecuing! All true Southerners would agree.

Okay, now that we have that cleared up, how about some pictures from Memphis.

Here we have the Mighty Mississippi and the bridge and pyramid thing in downtown Memphis.

In this snapshot you can see a lovely sunset, the river and Arkansas at the top and Tennessee at the bottom. Can it get more exciting than that?

This is one of the tents we were invited to party in. You have to have an invitation to go into the tents (there were like 70 of them) and there was a doorkeeper at each tent who would check for the appropriate arm band. Inside each tent that particular “barbecue team” would be cooking up their famous meat and serving it, and all the beer you could want, for free….if you had an invitation/arm band. How about that hot chick on the right in the green top? Her name was Marla, by the way, and she likes men who know how to deliver their sauce….or at least that’s what she told me….I got to know her while waiting in line at the port-o-potty.

In this final picture you can see the drive-by version of Sun Records, where Elvis and many others got their starts. If you’d like to see a pic of the place without the blur you can click here. Can’t you just imagine his pink Cadillac parked out front?

Alright Ladies and Gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed this educational and entertaining trip to the barbecue festival and Memphis. I also hope you’d never call cooking out side on a grill barbecuing. If you do, just remember those of us in the Deep South might just laugh at you. But never to your face….only behind your back. We’re nice like that…