Memphis Slim (1915-1988) was one of America’s leading postwar blues performers. Beginning his career as a “race” recording artist after World War II, Slim moved to France in 1962 where he became a regular sight in European jazz clubs, concert halls, and on screen. Yet, despite this long and varied career, existing accounts of his music are overwhelmingly American-centric: historians neglect the twenty-six years – more than half his professional life – that the pianist spent in Europe.

Drawing on recordings, interviews, and film, this article traces Memphis Slim’s expatriate life and work. I argue that Slim performed a diaspora identity, one that combined his audiences’ expectations of him as an “authentic” blues singer with personal and collective aspirations of African American international mobility. Addressing both the promise and precarities of the migrant experience Slim became an ‘ambassador’ for an emerging diasporic blues culture, one that counters existing scholarly accounts of the blues’s international dissemination and reception.

Lawrence Davies is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University. His research focuses on the globalisation of the blues. He is a contributor to the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (2017), Jazz Research Journal (2020), and The Oxford History of Jazz in Europe(forthcoming), and has articles based on his research forthcoming in Jazzforschung, Songwriting Studies Journal, and The Global South. During 2018-19, Lawrence was a postdoctoral researcher in jazz and popular music at the Institute for Jazz Research at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz.