The constituent parts of Memphis of the late 19th and early 20th century were race, violence, prostitution, alcohol and drug abuse, music, and political corruption and manipulation.

Thus the first response to absorbing Preston Lauterbach's account of the growth of Memphis is to mutter that his work contains fascinating historical curiosities but that nothing of substance has truly changed.

There is a moment when describing events in 1918 when Lauterbach notes that "the police force terrorised black Memphis". This enduring truth is testified to on cities across 21st-century US.

Lauterbach's first book was an engaging account of the playing of live, black music on the chitlin' circuit. His second work is more ambitious and demands greater powers than deep research and sweeping narrative. Beale Street stands for much of both the heart and soul of a US reborn after the Civil War. Lauterbach can tell the story but a work of raw power lacks the refinement of a steady hand in drawing character or providing a contemporary resonance.

The striking strength of Beale Street Dynasty is that it rarely fails to move the reader, whether in fascination or anger, sometimes both. Lauterbach has attempted to employ the Church family - particularly Robert and his son of the same name - to chart a period of Memphis history that has a resonance far beyond a piece of initially ramshackle real estate.

There is, of course, the story of prostitution, the introduction of cocaine to the streets as early as 1890, the birth of the blues, and the "boss'' culture of the American city where votes were cast according to the wishes of a powerful patriarch, one who usually had control of the illegal industries of sex, gambling and drugs. Lauterbach covers this in a rambunctious style with spicy anecdotes alternating with the more mundane fare of the political reality of power being held by the wealthy, and a criminal wealthy at that.

But the greatest, most powerful, most profound message of Beale Street Dynasty is the matter of race and how it persists in a style still recognisable 150 years after Lauterbach's post-Civil War period starting point. The most casual visitor to the US is immediately struck by how the race issue has never been resolved by anything approaching a universal respect for and understanding of the black population. Those who walked down Beale Street from 1866 to 1940 - the period covered by Lauterbach - would be surprised by the physical changes in the thoroughfare that now exists in the 21st century. It is a tourist area, celebrating an idea of blues and a reality of using history as a conduit to a buck.

But the residents of old would not be surprised by the modern culture where black men are killed in police custody, where race is a reliable predictor of the more likely prospect of incarceration and the lowered opportunity of further education, and where colour can be used by actuaries as a pointer for early death. They may pause before the reality of a black president before realising that the power in America is held by the kingmaker rather than the king.

The bravery of a section of the black population runs through the book. There is Ida Wells, the fearless champion of civil rights. There is Robert Church Sr who built a business through ruthlessness but governed it and himself with a fastidiousness and care that owed much to the realisation that he was a black man in a white man's world.

This sentiment is repeated throughout Beale Street Dynasty but, in truth, it is present if unspoken on every page. Of course, there is nothing innovative or revolutionary about charting these iniquities but Lauterbach retains the power to stun.

It is salutary to remember that the Civil War freed the blacks only into another form of slavery that was political, economic and social. It does no one any harm to recall that the Supreme Court upheld segregation, that black businessmen had to thrive in areas that were on the fringes of legality, given that they were excluded from what would be termed respectable professions.

But it is dreadful, debilitating to read of lynching and officially sanctioned shootings of blacks and realise that such shots from the past echo down the years. Thus as one praises the resourcefulness of such as Church and his son who used the system and barely survived it, one is left constantly to view the bodies of the victims. Some of them were merely roughed up by an abrasive white population. Others were diminished by a poverty that walked through Beale Street and greater Memphis and beyond far later than 1940.

But others were killed, brutally and systematically. This is a book that has a soundtrack by WC Handy, the father of the blues, and the presence of the political chicanery of Boss Crump but it also is littered with bodies, mostly black and routinely innocent.

There are hangings by lynch mobs, there are burnings at the stake and there is a scene where a severed head and foot are thrown at black men on a corner of Beale Street to encourage them not to dally outside the imperatives of main street America.

Lauterbach's testimony is powerful, even if it can occasionally lack coherence, even focus. But he has presented a history that has an agonising twist: it simply has not ended.

Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song And The Struggle For The Soul Of Memphis by Preston Lauterbach is published by Wiley, priced £16.99