There's just something about Memphis that sets it apart from Nashville, something that becomes ingrained in your soul if you spend any time there. Maybe it's Memphis' role as the biggest city in the Mississippi Delta (which is said to start in the lobby of the iconic Peabody Hotel). Maybe it's the city's drawling and sprawling Southern charm, stretching from the nightclubs and dives of Beale Street and moving out Poplar Avenue toward Midtown and the tony neighborhoods of East Memphis and beyond. Maybe it's the Bluff City's culture of art and music, long revered and still appreciated by the disparate personalities that make Memphis one of the most contradictory cities in the South, where the down-at-heels and the well-heeled live side by side, bound together by a hunger for barbecue and biscuits, bourbon and ballads, rhythm and blues.

The changing social mores and challenging political climate of Memphis in the mid-20^th century provide the backdrop for the Tony Award-winning musical Memphis, now on a national tour that wends its way to Nashville this week for an eight-performance run at Tennessee Performing Arts Center's Andrew Jackson Hall. With the acclaimed musical's national tour kicking off in the city that gave the show its name (Memphis' historic, and beautifully restored, Orpheum Theatre played host to the company as it readied for its nationwide journey), it makes sense that Nashville audiences would find themselves among the first cities to get a taste of the show that continues to draw rapturous audiences on Broadway.

"From the underground dance clubs of 1950s Memphis  comes a hot new Broadway musical that bursts off the stage with explosive dancing, irresistible songs and a thrilling tale of fame and forbidden love," according to press releases trumpeting the imminent arrival of the company in Music City USA. "Inspired by actual events, Memphis is about a white radio DJ who wants to change the world and a black club singer who is ready for her big break."

Winner of four Tony Awards in 2010, including Best Musical, Memphis features a Tony Award-winning book by Joe DiPietro (I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change) and a Tony-winning original score with music by Bon Jovi founding member David Bryan. Direction is by Tony nominee Christopher Ashley (Xanadu), and choreography is by Sergio Trujillo (Jersey Boys). It is loosely based on the life of celebrated Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips, one of the first white DJs to play music by African-American artists in the 1950s.

Bryan Fenkart, who plays the starring role of DJ Huey Calhoun in the national tour and who made his Broadway debut in Memphis as the Huey stand-by to Tony nominee Chad Kimball, says the experience of mounting Memphis in Memphis is one he'll never forget - and one which affected the entire company in so many ways.

"It was really a kind of magic that happened in Memphis," he contends. "So in many ways, it didn't feel like the tour started until we got to Houston [the tour's second stop]. Memphis had a crazy energy about it that made it that much more electric - and being around people who may have been alive during the times these things were happening made it really special."

But more than simply pulling together a national tour in the city that inspired the musical, the whole experience gave company members a unique sense of time and place that, perhaps, lends further credence to the show itself.

"More than just being at the Orpheum and rehearsing and putting everything together, it was going down to Beale Street and hearing the live music performed by some of the best musicians you'll ever hear - some of the best talent in the world who will never be known outside that street -  is what reallyl was magical," Fenkart explains. "People who are playing their brand of music at 1 a.m. in a club, they're the kind of talent that gets overlooked - that was more eye-opening than anything that we experienced in Memphis."