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Beale Street has been quieter this week. Its musical mayor is missing. Rudy Williams, 70, the nattily clad trumpeter who performs in front of The King's Palace Café and The Pig on Beale, called his wife, Marva, 68, on Saturday around 8 p.m., but she couldn't make out his voice.
A neighbor later told Marva that Williams came home around 9 p.m. and then went for a walk. That seemed odd to her.
"Never," she said, shaking her head from behind the iron grate-covered glass door of her home in Whit...
ehaven on Tuesday afternoon. "He never goes on walks. Never ever." He had earned a reputation as a walker because he would be in nearby Polly Williams Park, along with morning joggers, where he would practice his trumpet as early as 3 a.m. and was known as "the pied piper."
Their daughter, Meghan, is "shattered," Marva said. It was Meghan who first called Beale Street merchants on Sunday to ask about her father's whereabouts. He normally didn't perform on Sunday, so it wasn't until he didn't show up for work on Monday that the merchants got worried too.
Meghan filed a missing-persons report, and Beale Street merchants spoke Tuesday with police who, they said, promised to put a detective on the case. And Tuesday afternoon, three officers spoke with Marva about Rudy Williams' whereabouts. But "there is not a missing persons report on file with MPD for Rudy Williams," said Alyssa Moore, a Memphis Police Department spokesman, when asked by The Commercial Appeal on Tuesday.
Rudy Williams came to music early. In elementary school, as a Boy Scout, he asked his father for a bugle but got a trumpet instead. While still in elementary school, he joined Booker T. Washington High School's marching band when its director caught him playing trumpet behind the band during a football game. After high school, he joined the Army and played in its band, too, serving at Fort Ord in California. But he has been a fixture on Beale Street for the last 50 years, earning his self-declared but widely respected title of "The Mayor of Beale Street."
He played for the unveiling of the W. C. Handy statue there in 1960. When Beale Street fell into a dim period in the 1960s and 1970s, he performed at Blues Alley on Main Street. He has performed in front of King's Palace Café for 20 years, adding The Pig to his mix two years ago. He preferred performing in tuxedos and suits with derby or bowler hats.
In her living room Tuesday, amid her collection of crystal angels blowing golden trumpets and walls full of framed article clippings of Rudy Williams' glory, Marva Williams sat on a plush sofa and sighed. "People know my husband around the world. They come from around the world to see him," she said. "But Memphis doesn't know him. He never gets invited to anything. To the Blues Ball, never."
Asked if she was missing Rudy these past few days, she shook her head. "No, I don't miss him because I love him," she said. "And loving," she continued, "don't feel nothing like missing."
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