Marketing Inspiration From Memphis: Where does yours come from?

by. Bo McDonald

Recently on a beautiful, cool July evening I had the pleasure of sitting front row for Marc Cohn’s concert in Greenville SC. If you’re asking who Marc Cohn is, perhaps you know the early 90’s tune “Walking In Memphis?”

Musicians like Marc sit at their piano and serenade the audience with tunes for 90 minutes or so, but Marc brought so much more than just the music to his show. Between songs he entertained the audience with a quick joke or two, but more importantly, he shared behind the scenes personal stories about many of the songs such as his first hit from the early 90’s, “Walking In Memphis.” Cohn was void on inspiration for writing the songs for this album when he received advice from a fellow songwriter: “When you need inspiration, buy a plane ticket to anywhere.” That advice proved priceless, and Cohn’s first airfare purchase turned out to be worth it, as it turned out to be the inspiration for his first number one hit on the charts.

“It’s a pretty literal transcription of a visit I made there in 1986,” Cohn says about the song. Every lyric in the song follows an actual event during his trip. “I went to Graceland, I heard Al Green preach the gospel, I saw W. C. Handy’s statue. But the song is about more than just a place, it’s about a kind of spiritual awakening, one of those trips where you’re different when you leave,” Cohn continued. The main part of the Cohn’s inspiration during the trip is summed up in the last verse, about a lady named Muriel. Muriel Wilkins was a little-known club singer and pianist, at a restaurant an hour outside Memphis. “I talked to her for an hour and then she invited me up to sing. She ended up changing my life. She had an incredible effect on me, not only as a musician, but as a person. She saw things in me and shared things with me that I don’t normally talk about, mostly revolving around my parents, who died when I was pretty young.”

Hearing stories like that, such a personal and powerful story behind that song, will forever change the way I hear it every time it comes on the radio now. To know that the song isn’t about Elvis or a dreamt up story makes it real.

What if you did followed that formula in writing your 2015 marketing plan? Here are two takeaways from the story of Walking In Memphis: