I'm on my way to Memphis, heading down over Kentucky and West Virginia, over rivers and routes and railroads. It has been three years since I was last in this pocket of Tennessee, stopping off then for a few days between Nashville and Clarksdale. But I remember it well, this sprawling city on the fourth Chickasaw Bluff, the way the bustling main streets blurred so quickly to mimsy borogoves, the juke joints, the heavy rain, the way the warm air rubbed up against your legs.

We ran all over town, my best friend and I: to the Stax Museum, to Sun Studios, to a Jimbo Mathus gig, to the Lamplighter with its magnificent landlady and its marvellous jukebox, to a little middle-of-nowhere-no-name bar where we thought we might get killed, but where we were disappointed to find only a guy with a mullet singing well-polished country songs.

We went to the famous Beale Street, of course, which you could walk down wearing your pyjamas, according to Chuck Berry, but which is today a bit of a tourist drag, all neon and nostalgia and nick-nacks. We drove out to Graceland, and to Graceland Too, a pink-painted shrine to the King sitting out in Holly Springs. And one night we went to see BB King. The crowd spilled out the door and on to the street, and I had to stand on tiptoes and squint just to see King's hands sitting way up there on the 10th fret, second string, bending notes.

But the room was so crowded mostly all I could see was the broad back of the man in front of me, green shirt sticking to the strip of skin between his shoulder blades, and the sound of King's playing was drowned by the noise of the street running through the open door. And in that hot, airless room I strained to see, and I strained to hear, and I strained to think what any of us there that night had ever hoped to find in Memphis.

Memphis is a city tethered not only to Presley and King, but also to Howlin' Wolf and Jerry Lee Lewis, to WC Handy, Johnny Cash and Booker T Jones and many more besides. And it's this that summons people, blues buffs, soul devotees, as if they arrive hoping that the air itself here - humid, subtropical, moist with the Gulf of Mexico, floating down Beale Street heavy with mosquitos - might somehow explain the music they love.

It made me feel strange to see them sniffing the air and chasing ghosts all over town; standing in the Stax museum staring at Otis Redding's favourite brown suede jacket, shuffling round Graceland with a lanyard and an audio guide, waiting for a whiff of magic. But the only thing the air seemed to give up was the scent of dead men's clothes.

One morning we went on a tour of the Gibson Guitar factory, 10 bucks, 45 minutes: a guide to the processes of binding, neck-fitting, painting, buffing, fine-tuning that make a Gibson guitar. I remember watching the luthiers, working carefully, soberly, and the smell of carved wood and the high, thin fumes of the varnish rising up to the ceiling. The part I liked most was the sight of the guitars drying on the binding tree; wrapped in long pale strips of material, they looked like giant pupae, and inside a Gibson waiting to unfurl.

My favourite song about this city is Tom T Hall's That's How I Got to Memphis - a song covered so exquisitely by Solomon Burke a couple of years back. "If you love somebody enough you'll follow them wherever they go," it runs. It's a song about love of course, and devotion, but it casts Memphis not only as the place where his true love has fled, but as a city of hope, a place where that love can be resurrected. And it was this that I felt standing there in the Gibson factory - that people come to this weird, muggy corner of Tennessee not just because of their devotion to BB King or Elvis Presley or Carl Perkins, but because of all the hope they place in music, and because, as Solomon sang: "I've got to find her and tell her that I love her so."