Hollywood Cafe

The Hollywood's best-known song began as a cure for writer's block. In 1985 Marc Cohn, a session singer in New York, went to Memphis, heard Al Green preach, saw Graceland and stopped at a small Mississippi nightclub, the Hollywood. Back in New York he began composing Walking in Memphis, which Atlantic released in 1991 and which reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100. The next year Cohn won the Grammy for Best New Artist. He has called the song 100 percent autobiographical.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa — 20 mi
  A National Historic Landmark Mississippian mound town on a bluff over the Mississippi, with a university museum, a replica house and a nature trail inside T. O. Fuller State Park.
• Graceland — 23 mi
  Elvis Presley's 1939 limestone house in Whitehaven, bought in 1957 and opened as a ticketed museum in 1982, with his grave in the Meditation Garden and a commercial visitor campus around it.
• Mississippi River State Park — 23 mi
  A state park and gateway to the St. Francis National Forest, where the river, Crowley's Ridge and the Delta meet, with a Trail of Tears site at the Mississippi and St. Francis confluence.
• Elaine Massacre Memorial — 25 mi
  A memorial dedicated in 2019 in Helena for the Black people killed by white mobs and troops in the 1919 Elaine Massacre, the deadliest racial confrontation in Arkansas history.

More markers nearby

• Son House — 2.3 mi
• Highway 61 Blues — 2.9 mi
• Abbay & Leatherman — 3.0 mi
• Memphis Minnie — 13 mi