Late that night I drifted out of the Peabody and found myself wandering the Memphis bank of the South’s most storied river. I sat and watched it ripple past, my mind circling a thousand thoughts—not just on this article—on the stuff that was, as Dalton and Jeff Rogers had so aptly put it, “just an aside,” but on the bigger picture: of our business, and what we might really do.

I was just beginning to see the magnitude of what Phillips had accomplished. I was, after hearing Burnett and King, after listening to the music these men had made together, getting a truer picture of Sam Phillips’ vision. From 706 Union Street, a tiny storefront two hundred yards off Beale, he’d set out to mingle black and white culture, to bring us all the best of what each had to offer, and to blend it into something new, and something better than any of us would have ever known living secluded lives.

In Sam Phillips, I saw qualities I envied: a quirky, creative flair, a compulsion to create and cultivate, an inborn need to bring out the best in others—to ring out every last drop of whatever God had put in—and to spread it indiscriminately around the world.

And in an odd way, I thought—if you looked at it from a certain kind of weird angle, Phillips was a bit like Martin King. He gave the Negro a place to sit, side-by-side with his white neighbors, where he was free to use his gifts fully.

Music, records, the radio business, and his own nearly boundless imagination were the tools Phillips used. With them, he freed what was inside; he released what was bound up in the hearts of the poor, and he turned up the volume for us all to hear. It was, though Phillips would have never used the phrase, his own version of King’s “beloved community”. He mixed the races in a way nobody ever had before, and his purpose was to elevate us all.

This was the work he’d be born for.

I pitched a stone toward the river, thinking about the contingent factors in my own life—the step-by-step path the led me here—to this spot, on this night, at this exact bend in the Mississippi River.

The silhouette of a long, flat barge rounded the river’s north bend. A cool gust kicked past, sending fall leaves pattering by. It was after midnight and my mind ricocheted off one thought and on to another. I was the editor-in-chief of America’s newest magazine. And I, like Phillips, had to deal with the life and the gifts I’d been given.

Uninvited—from a distance and through time—Carson Powers began to nag: If a thing is wrong, do we really want to be a part of it?” he’d once asked. Do we want to start down a path that leads where we do not want to go?

The barge eased south, past one beguiling city—rich with the blues and home-cooked barbeque—on its way to another, resounding with jazz and the Cajun spice of jambalaya.

I gazed up at the glittering sky and thought to myself: I’m friends with Percy and Walter Jackson. I drink coffee with Martin Luther King. I’ve met Daisy Bates and Elizabeth Eckford. And I’d just spent an evening with B.B. King. I knew people that Carson Powers didn’t. And I now knew that they possessed gifts that would sweeten our lives—and that our gifts might add spice to theirs.

I watched the Mississippi pass, wondering what would matter in a thousand years. And who, when my great grandchildren ran the business, would have had the more profound effect on the world: W. A. Gayle, the mayor of Montgomery, or Sam Phillips, the founder of Sun Records? Who, fifty years from now, would have had the greater impact: Marvin Griffin, the governor of Georgia—a man who had power, influence, and more friends than a movie star? Or Martin Luther King, a Negro pastor who couldn’t get a seat in most of Atlanta’s restaurants?

B.B. King once played on street corners to pay his power bill. Howling Wolf had played in overalls and cut up shoes. I’d listened to Willie Kizart make a miracle through a cracked amplifier he couldn’t afford to fix. And I wondered, there on the east bank of the Mississippi, who’d done more to make the world better: them, or the Arkansas state legislator Jim Johnson?