memphis

With a massive golden cross in her outstretched hand and a tear on her cheek, Lady Liberation looms nine storeys over the birthplace of rock’n’roll. She bears a remarkable resemblance to New York’s Statue of Liberty, but this Memphis, Tennessee, replica has a very different message.

With a handful of albums and awards, Blind Mississippi Morris Cummings, a harmonica-wailing fixture in Memphis since the 1980s, is cut from the same downtrodden, wayward cloth as many bluesmen who came before. ”This morning before sunrise, them old blues came a calling/I lay alone in my bed/That sad and lonely, empty feeling makes you wish you were dead,” Cummings sings in Morning Before Sunrise.

Victims of El Salvador’s bloody civil war are prepared to tell a federal jury about the torture they endured and deaths they witnessed more than two decades ago. Nicolas Carranza, a former Salvadoran army colonel who has lived a quiet life in Memphis since 1985, was set to go on trial on Monday in a US District Court.