I wish I’s back in Memphis, back home with my Mama
If this were a younger person singing -- say, if we had the misfortune to hear LeeAnn Rimes do it, the mere imagining of which makes me want to die outright -- that might be a coy line, or a misguided attempt at schlocky melodrama. But it’s Chuck Berry; in the version I’m listening to right now, it’s Levon Helm, whose voice, one of the most distinctive in the entire history of rock, is to “youth” as “Jim Beam” is to “Latter-Day Saint.” In either case, the maturity of the singer makes the line carry a heavy, bitter burden, crackling with humor born of deep disappointment. It’s also genuinely wistful, of course, but it establishes early on a sort of undercurrent, an underlying damn-it-all dismissal of the immediate surroundings. We don’t even know what the immediate surroundings actually are; we just know that they’re not Memphis:
Just a great big town full of cold hearted strangers