You can walk down Beale Street, honey, wearing your pajamas
Partly it’s the narrator’s singleminded pursuit of the “mama/pajama” rhyme that makes “Going Back to Memphis” seem like such a total work of genius to me. But there is something deeper at work, too. It’s in how distinctly “Going Back to Memphis” is neither a love song, nor a dance song, nor a traditional blues. It’s a ballad in every sense of the word, but its narrative tactics involve shading a recent past and imagined future in carefully chosen non-neutral colors so as to carve out an incredibly vivid picture of the present. “I went hungry in New York; Chicago was no better” -- add this to “the only clothes I got left that ain’t rags is my pajamas” and our picture of the narrator is complete, lacking nothing, even though the concretely descriptive language here is strictly limited to a strange and wonderful delineation of the kinds of clothes that we’re not talking about.