Posted inTravels

Music Roots Road Trip: Nashville, Memphis & More

May 30, 2022

In March 2022, I embarked with my sister on a pilgrimage of sorts to learn more about the roots of American music. Our destinations included Nashville, Memphis, Muscle Shoals, Asheville and Bristol.

I’ve done several companion posts: my Memphis Music Education and National Museum of African American Music Playlists. For a more specific post on the Road Scholar portion of the trip, see Reflecting on My Road Scholar Music Cities USA Tour: Nashville and Memphis.

Pre-Trip Plans and Thoughts

This trip gestated in my mind and heart for a number of years. I wanted to visit some of the origin points for American music and get to know more of the history and connections that weave so many genres together: Country, Bluegrass, Blues, Rock and Roll, Soul, Rhythm & Blues, Pop, Americana, Appalachian, Mountain, Old Time — so many labels and so much overlap. I also wanted to see for myself some sections of the country I had never been or only touched briefly, chiefly Tennessee but also the Mississippi Delta region, northern Alabama, the Carolina mountains and the Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia corner promoted as the Crooked Road.

Ken Burns’ 2019 Country Music documentary series cemented my desire to make this journey. The only questions were when, how and with whom. Covid-19 put a two-year dent in all travel but also gave me time to daydream and research. I looked into a variety of organized tours and itineraries online, and thought hard about doing the trip on my own or through a tour. Eventually I came upon the Road Scholar Nashville-Memphis tour that seemed to include many of the highlights I wanted to visit. I opted to use the Road Scholar week-long tour through Nashville and Memphis to cover the basics in those cities, then added my own road trip to include the Mississippi Delta, Muscle Shoals, Asheville (to see family) and Bristol in a manageable two-week journey. I also decided to add a day-and-a-half in Nashville ahead of the tour in order to see additional museums and potentially some performances.

Saturday, March 12 – To Nashville 

We flew from Washington, D.C. to Nashville, arriving to unseasonably cold weather for March. We checked into our hotel, the Hyatt Place Nashville Downtown, in the early afternoon and were quickly ready to get some food and hit our first museum. The Woolworth’s Cafe that I had scouted had gone out of business so we opted for Pucketts, another historic restaurant on the same block where we shared plates of ribs and fried catfish (the catfish was better). I didn’t realize at the time but that Woolworth’s was one of the last remaining sites of the famous lunch counter sit ins of the early Civil Rights era; I wouldn’t find out about that until later researching why the name of the street had changed to John Lewis Way (see our bus tour on Monday, below).

Musicians’ Hall of Fame Museum

We walked a bit further up the road in the freezing wind and eventually found the entrance to the Musicians Hall of Fame & Museum, entering around 2:30pm which gave us more than the recommended 1.5-2 hours needed for the self-guided tour before the museum closed at 5pm. We had dutifully downloaded the museum’s app which included an audio guide for the tour so we thought we were set, but as we got our tickets, we saw a sign for an $8 audio guide. The ticket person explained that the $8 got you a device with an updated guide as the app’s one was a little out of date. We elected to stay with the app.

We had to wait a few minutes for an introductory movie about the museum, a grainy, desultory 10-minute piece narrated by Duane Eddy. We then went into the museum proper and promptly got lost using the audio guide. The audio guide is narrated by Joe Chambers, the museum director and a songwriter whose heart may be in the right place but who makes for a very dull, rambling speaker. The first entry in the guide was for a display of guitars back in the lobby and the second entry was for a room of audio equipment that we’d already walked through. On top of that, you couldn’t advance from one track to the next in the app. I finally figured out that we needed to fully exit the app then come back in to get to the next display. 

We followed along with the app’s audio guide, getting a lengthy, seemingly unscripted, unedited explanation of every item in every display case…basically whatever came into Joe Chambers’ mind at the time. Some descriptions were interesting, others not nearly as much, but there was no easy way to skip forward. We moseyed along, inch by inch. We got through the Nashville and Motown sections, and I was up to the LA (Wrecking Crew) exhibit when they announced the museum would be closing in 15 minutes. We had already spent more than 2 hours in the museum but were less than halfway through. I turned off the app and raced through the rest of the museum, blasting through the Sun Studios, Stax, American Studios in Memphis, Muscle Shoals and other exhibits. There was a lot I would have liked to see and hear about in more depth, including the whole interactive Grammy Gallery, the Mobile Studio and the Johnny Cash and Jimi Hendrix displays (though exactly why they were there was an unanswered mystery to me — they were hardly backup studio musicians) but there was no more time.

It was, in all, a disappointing visit. It’s a shame because the museum really does have some interesting artifacts and I like the focus on the musicians behind the various recording studios and styles. The museum presumes a good acquaintance with the actual music it would be very helpful to have more access to the actual recordings being discussed — there were a lot of references we didn’t fully understand. The museum has the feel of being something of an afterthought in the galaxy of Nashville music/tourist destinations — a little forlorn and under-resourced — which is too bad because it’s trying to fill an important role in celebrating the musicians and support systems that make the songs soar.

We walked back to the hotel in the frigid afternoon, crossing the crowded Broadway bar scene that was already getting louder and very crowded. We warmed up and rested in the room while I scouted dinner options nearby so we wouldn’t have to walk far in the cold. We decided on Bakersfield, only a block away. It turned out to be a decent choice for margaritas, chips and tacos.

After our meal, I braved the weather to see the scene on Broadway. It was crowded, noisy and very cold. There were lots of young, booted and bearded kids waiting in lines to get in the dozens of loud places. Every place had a band (or several, one on each floor) thumping away. Nearly everything I heard was straight up classic rock and roll or maybe country rock — Eagles, Tom Petty, Bon Jovi, Garth Brooks — music to get drunk and party to. It was loud, obnoxious and very cold, an extended frat party. I walked the 6 or so active blocks of Broadway in each direction and had enough after 30 minutes. Nothing was remotely appealing about any of the crowded, noisy honky tonks. Our trip was off to a less than stellar start but I held out hope that things would get better. At least I was sure the weather would get warmer which would be an improvement.

Sunday, March 13 – Nashville

National Museum of African American Music

After breakfast at the hotel, we checked out the pedestrian bridge over the Cumberland River, which offered a fine view of the Nashville skyline in one direction and the football stadium in the other. Worth doing once in the daytime and maybe again at night.

After that scenic vista, we headed over to the National Museum of African American Music (museum website). The museum tries hard to control the number of visitors per hour which means you need a timed reservation; we’d made ours online ahead of time. If you are willing to give them an email address, they outfit you with a bracelet that lets you save music selections to personalized Spotify playlists. These playlists turn out to be an excellent souvenir and reminder of the visit; it’s a gimmick that I wish other museums would quickly embrace. The playlists stay active on the NMAAM site for 60 days; I have downloaded ours to a separate post and may delve into them more deeply as time permits.

The museum turned out to be excellent, with a good introductory movie and a number of informative interactive displays that let you listen to a wealth of music. We spent about four hours there, working our way through display areas on pre-1900 music, gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, rock, disco, hip hop and today.

While each exhibit area was informative with artifacts and descriptive displays, the heart of the museum were banks of interactive touch screen stations with headphones from which you could explore vast archives of curated music selections. There were two main databases or interfaces. Rivers of Rhythm was organized by a timeline of major eras in African American history — and I’m a sucker for timelines. I wandered through each era and downloaded the playlist for each.

Another station, Roots and Streams, was a way to explore artist-by-artist based on who influenced them, their peers, and who they in turn influenced. Both databases were excellent and extremely educational; I wish they were available online. While the museum doesn’t make the databases publicly available, taking home personalized playlists of favorite songs at least hints at some of the connections.

I didn’t realize the museum had opened just a year earlier in January 2021, during the pandemic. Nor did I realize there was some controversy within Nashville that the museum wasn’t located in the historic black section of town. I have to say its current location across the street from the Ryman Auditorium, a block away from the Broadway tourist hubbub and two blocks from the Country Music Hall of Fame makes it very easy for tourists to visit. I think it should be on everyone’s itinerary. It’s a shame it wasn’t on the Road Scholar itinerary; I recommend it should be added.

Road Scholar Tour Orientation

We came back to the hotel around 4pm to check in with our Road Scholar group. Our group leader, Terrie Dal Pozzo, oriented us to the itinerary and rules of the tour. It became clear that Terrie was primarily our tour guide and logistics person, not a particular expert on music. But she was a veteran guide and proved to be an enthusiastic, efficient leader.

Terrie made us introduce ourselves to the group so we could meet our 20 or so fellow travelers. They were all older folks…just like us, which wasn’t a surprise since Road Scholar is aimed at retirees (excuse me: lifelong learners). This was the first time my sister or I toured with Road Scholar. Most of the others were veterans of other Road Scholar tours, which I took to be a good sign for Road Scholar’s sake. Most of them also seemed to be couples in one form or another, either married, close friends or family. Only a few were singles. They were from many parts of the country — mostly east coast and west coast, a few from the midwest. A surprising number seemed to be taking the tour simply for the sake of having something to do or to see new places rather than any actual familiarity or love of music. After the introductions and orientation we shared a hotel buffet dinner where we got to know a few others a little better.

Monday, March 14 – Nashville

Country Music Hall of Fame

We gathered in the lobby for our first day of official touring. Our first stop: the Country Music Hall of Fame, a three-minute walk from hotel. Terrie gave us three hours to get through the museum on our own with an audio guide. I hoped it would be a better guide than we had at the Musicians’ Hall of Fame.

The museum is arranged in three floors; you start at the top to work your way down. I skipped a special exhibit on country music veteran Bill Anderson, not realizing he would be one of the acts we would see two nights later at the Grand Ole Opry. The audio guide was better than at the Musicians’ Hall of Fame but again it was light on actual recorded music…it offered a recitation of objects in the display cases but not a whole lot of context if you don’t already know the artists or their songs.

There was a special exhibit on Outlaws and Armadillos featuring lots of folks I like, though the emphasis was on the original generation of Outlaws including Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson whom I respect but don’t really love as much as later artists that fall under the Outlaw Country genre. I’m more a fan of next-generation folks like Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, Buddy Miller, Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, Jason Isbell, and so on. Some of them were mentioned in the exhibit, including a re-creation of Guy Clark’s workshop, but there was more of a focus on the first generation which I guess makes sense in a museum.

After the Outlaws and Armadillos exhibit there was a whole special section of the museum dedicated to Kasey Musgraves and her wardrobes which frankly seemed like an unnecessary use of museum real estate. There was also a section on rising current (2021) stars that evidently included mentions of several folks I like including Allison Russell, John Hiatt and Jerry Douglas’ recent collaboration (which I was pleased to find, as Leftover Feelings was one of my favorite albums of the year), Brittney Spencer, Billy Strings and many others. By the time I got to this area I was running out of time and sped through it and the Hall of Fame area. I spent a full three hours in the museum and could have stayed longer but we were on a schedule. We had to get lunch on our own before meeting back at 1:15 for the afternoon tour activities.

In comparing notes on the museum, my sister wondered why there were no exhibits for folks she admired like Dolly Parton (how could there be no permanent Dolly cabinet?), Rhiannon Giddens, or Iris DeMent. I agreed that the exhibit selections seemed a bit scattershot, and we both agreed that there was a need to be able to listen to the actual music in case you weren’t well versed in it already. The museum started with a fairly coherent thread of a story through the early 20th century but somewhere around the 1950s it splintered into a lot of smaller displays that showcase different genres and eras without a lot of context or connection between them, which somewhat reflects the state of the country music industry as a whole.

Assembly Hall

The tour let us fend for ourselves for lunch so my sister left a few minutes before me to grab a spot at the nearby Assembly Hall. We figured we should try a Nashville Hot Chicken sandwich from Prince’s Hot Chicken which had an outpost in the Hall. The sandwiches turned out to be OK, with a definite kick but nowhere near intolerable heat…though I don’t think I had the very highest setting. I’d rate it as good but not quite as tasty as Popeye’s spicy chicken sandwich. There are evidently lots of variants on Nashville Hot Chicken but we didn’t end up trying any others. Maybe next trip, whenever that may be.

Nashville City Tour and Studio B

Our group assembled back at the museum at the appointed hour of 1:15pm for an afternoon bus tour of Nashville. We boarded our bus for the for the first time and met our driver, Gary, who would be with us for the duration of the week. We also met our tour guide for the afternoon, Ron Harman. Ron started the bus tour reading from a detailed script which was informative but a little stilted. He seemed especially interested in telling us the history and room count for each of the major downtown hotels as we passed.

Our first actual stop was at the Nashville Parthenon in Centennial Park. This concrete replica, originally constructed in plaster, wood and brick for the 1897 Tennessee Centennial, is nowhere near as imposing as the Athens original but Nashville is proud of it anyway. We took a group photo on the steps but couldn’t go inside (it was closed that day for a private tour anyway). We wandered to the nearby Women’s Suffrage memorial for a moment before hopping back on the bus.

We next headed to the Bicentennial Park (not to be confused with Centennial Park) where we took a short walk through history. The park included a World War II Memorial with a number of pillars dedicated to different themes and phases of the war. We walked down the Pathway of History that documents great moments in Tennessee history. I would have like to take more time to read the many inscriptions and events, but we had schedules to keep. There was a break in the Pathway for the Civil War which was a nice architectural touch; unfortunately the very first thing after the Civil War was the formation of the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee. Heartwarming.

Bicentennial Park was opened in 1996; little was said on our tour of its history other than that the area had fallen into disrepair in the 1970s-80s and was ripe for redevelopment. A few weeks after the trip, I watched a PBS documentary, Facing North: Jefferson Street, Nashville which tells how Jefferson Street (which borders the north end of the park) was a vibrant hub of the African American community in Nashville in the early-to-mid-20th century until it became the route of Interstate 40 and urban renewal starting in the 1960s. It’s a story that is all too prevalent in American cities and all too overlooked. I have to say the black history of Nashville was pretty much non-existent on our tour; this would have been a good place to at least say something.

It also would have been good to mention at some point during the tour why the name of Nashville’s 5th Avenue from Jefferson Street past the Ryman down to I-40 south of downtown was changed last year to “John Lewis Way”. Congressman Lewis had been a college student in Nashville and participated in the historic lunch counter sit-ins at the Woolworth’s on 5th Avenue and other locations in 1960. He represented Nashville as one of the 13 original Freedom Riders the next year. Both Ron and Terrie mentioned the name change in passing but mostly out of annoyance that it wasn’t 5th Avenue anymore. It would have been good if there was a clearer explanation. But then again, none of us on the tour asked at the time.

For that matter, there were several veiled references from various Nashville guides that the downtown area around Broadway was a seedy red-light district in the last decades of the 20th century and the vibrant current area is a triumph of tourist-based redevelopment, led partly by the relocation of the Country Music Hall of Fame along with luring NFL and NHL franchises…and building downtown arenas for both. I don’t know the full story but it’s kind of interesting that it’s not front-and-center in Nashville’s boosterism. The redevelopment and current party atmosphere is presented as the God-given natural order of things; the not-too-distant past is something to be brushed over and forgotten.

Our short walk in Bicentennial Park ended at the Rivers of Tennessee fountain (dry at this time of year) and a giant granite map of the state where again I would have liked to spend more time. But it was time to get back on the bus. Ron had been sticking close to his script so far and seemed eager to keep us on schedule. As we were driving, he filled time with an extended game of matching nicknames for various Country Music Hall of Fame members. I knew maybe half or two-thirds of the nicknames, but I daresay I knew way more than anyone else on our tour. It was somewhat disheartening proof that we were with no real hardcore music fans, just a bunch of old folks taking a tour for something to do.

As we got to Music Row, the bus slowed and Ron started relying less on his script. This was the section he really knew. The bus crawled up and down the eight blocks or so of 16th and 17th Avenues twice so Ron could get in all his stories. We finally stopped outside RCA Studio B, the most famous of the studios on the Row. Ron was totally in his element here and proceeded to delight us with an hour-long dissertation on the history, lore, notable stars (especially Elvis Presley but many others as well) and music produced in the studio. He clearly loved the subject and dramatically played with the lights as he queued up various tracks to illustrate his stories. It was a true one-man performance, well beyond the boundaries of a regular tour. It was the highlight of the day, even if we never did quite get a handle on what defined the Nashville Sound.

Line Dancing at Wildhorse Saloon

The bus took us back to our hotel for a short wait until it was time for dinner and line dancing. We assembled in the lobby and walked a few blocks, past Broadway to 2nd Avenue. I didn’t realize that this was the street where the Christmas 2020 RV bomb went off until someone in the group mentioned it. Sure enough, there were still boarded-up buildings and construction sites just up the block from our destination, the Wildhorse Saloon. Evidently, most of 2nd Avenue had been shut down for most of 2021 and only the two blocks near Broadway were slowly reopening.

The Wildhorse is mecca of line dancing, specially built as a showcase and site of a line dancing TV show in the 1990s. My sister is an active line dancer and looked forward to this evening. I, on the other hand, am emphatically not a line dancer and rather dreaded the whole idea. I took it as a dose of cultural immersion to be endured and enjoyed mainly on my sister’s behalf.

On this Monday, the Wildhorse was closed to the public except for us and another tour group. We were the first to arrive and our little 21-member group was dwarfed in the cavernous three-story room. A live band headed by frontman Steven Metz was already up and playing loud, with full lights and video. When it was clear after the first few tunes that we were not going to swarm the dancefloor, the band made some effort to quiet down and not intrude too much on our dinner — a very ordinary little buffet of southwestern food — but it was still quite loud and we were seated right next to the speakers. It all felt silly to have the band playing oldies for our little group of oldies while they made believe a much larger crowd was in the house. A gig is a gig, I guess, and bands are a dime a dozen in Nashville.

After about an hour of listening to the band, they took a break and an energetic young woman came out to lead a line dance lesson. The other tour group hasn’t shown up yet so we all felt obligated to get up and give it a try. My sister and a few of the ladies were in their element but very quickly I and the other guys drifted back to our seats. As the dancing lesson progressed, the other tour group showed up — a bunch of high school kids, evidently a music/band tour. Fortunately, there were close to 100 of them and they enjoyed dancing so the floor filled up enough that the whole thing seemed slightly less silly. After 30 minutes or so of actual dancing, the members of our group started leaving and before long we did too, leaving the Wildhorse and the band to the teenagers. We hope they all had a good time.

Tuesday, March 15 – Nashville

Ryman Auditorium

After another buffet breakfast at the hotel we met in the lobby for the short walk to the Ryman Auditorium for our tour. We had a proper tour guide for the first 30 minutes or so, then were given another hour to wander the Ryman and look at the exhibits in more depth. The tour and the Auditorium were very impressive.

I didn’t know much of the history of the Ryman: that it was started as a tabernacle by riverboat captain Thomas Ryman in 1892 after he saw the light at tentshow revival; that an enterprising stenographer, Lula C. Naff, started booking highbrow entertainers, speakers and shows in 1904 and effectively became the General Manager for more than 50 years; that the Grand Ole Opry made the Ryman its home in 1943 — somewhat against Lula’s wishes — after the radio show bounced around various Nashville venues for close to 20 years; that the Ryman fell into disrepair after the Opry left in 1974, nearly facing demolition; that a series of 1991 concerts by Emmylou Harris and the Nash Ramblers helped revive interest in the decrepit auditorium (only 200 people were allowed in the shows for safety concerns); that major renovations in 1994 and 2015 restored the Ryman as a world-class concert venue, “The Mother Church of Country Music.”

Toward the end of our tour, our little group got to sit in the front-row pews and get a photo on the stage. It was a nice little touch and it actually did feel a little bit reverential being so close to all the history that came from that stage.

Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge

After a couple of hours at the Ryman, we were on our own for lunch. My sister and I decided to go around the corner to Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, one of the oldest and most famous of the honky tonk bars on Broadway so at least we could say we went in one. We climbed three flights of stairs, passing a band on each level playing quiet afternoon sets for a handful of patrons each. We found a spot on the roof and ordered what proved to be a pretty crappy patty melt and chicken sandwich. But the view was nice and the music pleasant enough from a girl and guy — mostly old Tom Petty, Fleetwood Mac and Jimmy Buffett covers. The 70s rule! So much for country music. We didn’t properly appreciate the history of Tootsie’s (evidently a core part of the revival of the downtown area), nor did we peruse the many historic photos on the walls, but we did enjoy the view.

Grand Ole Opry House Tour

We got back on the bus for our 20-minute jaunt out to the Grand Ole Opry House for our afternoon tour and evening performance. True confession time: despite it being an American institution and perhaps the most recognizable national outlet for country music, I have never listened to a radio broadcast of the Grand Ole Opry. I think it’s mostly because I don’t listen to the radio at the times it’s broadcast (generally Saturday from 9-11pm) and unlike most things on Sirius/XM nowadays, the show doesn’t seem to be rebroadcast or streamed on-demand (I could be wrong, but in any case I haven’t found it). Similarly, I’ve never actually watched a TV broadcast for pretty much the same reasons: it’s been hard for me to find to watch at the times I want to watch. It’s been mostly a matter of inconvenience but also a matter of not knowing who was appearing when and not wanting to sit through a package of acts I don’t know or like to get to the one or two I want to see. It’s the same reason I never listen to mainstream country music stations — most of it I just can’t take so I find other ways to seek out the (unjustly) “fringe” artists I like. So I walked into this afternoon’s tour and evening performance not knowing a whole lot about the institution or its traditions.

The Grand Ole Opry moved to this showcase concert hall and TV studio in 1974, part of a whole Opryland theme park and tourist attraction at the time. Today, the theme park is gone, replaced by a giant Opry Mills mall, but the concert venue, mall and nearby Gaylord Opryland Hotel still feel quite like a standalone theme park. The whole thing is the spawn of Ryman Hospitality Properties, the corporate overlord of all things Opry…and so much more.

Our hour-long Grand Ole Opry Tour started with a star-studded, highly produced introductory film featuring Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood as the reigning royal couple of country music, I suppose (I’m not a fan, can you tell?). After the film, a guide briefed us further on Opry history and led us through backstage areas including the TV soundstage where Hee-Haw was filmed for many years (I had no idea).

We were guided through the backstage “front desk” and Opry Post Office. Evidently you can address a fan letter to your favorite Opry member in care of the Grand Ole Opry and they will get the mail right in their little post box. A cute gimmick. I’m sure Garth and Trisha stop by regularly to collect their mail.

There was a wall commemorating Opry Members. Much is made of Opry Membership, which I didn’t know much about. It’s not the same as being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, but has its own mystique hyped by the Opry machine. The Opry’s intro movie and Circle TV network repeatedly sprinkle clips of the moment various stars are “surprised” on stage by getting their invitation from an existing Opry member. The clip most prominently featured is that of Darius (Hootie) Rucker being invited in 2012 — most prominent because a) Darius seems genuinely surprised and moved by the honor and cries appropriately and b) because he’s black and it shows that the Opry is really truly open-minded, shamelessly papering over the fact that Rucker was (and still is) only the third black Opry member in its history (the other two: Charley Pride in 1993 and DeFord Bailey in 1926).

Opry membership criteria is opaque and very much a subjective commercial decision made by the vaguely defined “Opry management team”. Membership is for life (usually) and includes an obligation to perform with some frequency on the Opry program, evidently up to 12 times/year though there’s little evidence the big stars appear that often. Oddly, despite Internet denizens’ penchant for documenting everything, I can find no track record for how often various performers actually show up. There are, for example, a handful of Opry members I’d like to see or search out their clips (e.g., Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, Marty Stuart) but I can’t find when or how often they’ve performed. Opry membership skews heavily toward mainstream country radio artists that are not in my wheelhouse of music preferences. That said, I’ve found one pandemic show from 2020 that featured Old Crow Medicine Show (an Opry Member), Molly Tuttle, Billy Strings and Dom Flemons. I’d enjoy seeing more shows like that. Where are they?

We were escorted through dressing rooms, a few of which had actual band members starting to get ready for the evening’s show (though no one I recognized). We went in the green room for a few minutes where we had the option to sit in the actual couches that held country music legends’ butts! I didn’t sit. It’s kind of hard to believe they let tour groups in there every day, but it’s all very much part of the mystique the Opry cultivates of everything being close to and all for its audience.

That mystique was strongest when we were shuffled onstage for a few minutes and given the chance to worship at the circle in the center of the stage (though if you wanted an official photo that would be $45 extra, please). This circle of wood from the original Ryman Auditorium stage (actually taken from a rear corner of the Ryman stage during reconstruction) is now treated as a holy relic and symbolic center of Country Music. The circle is wrapped up in the self-reinforcing mythology of the song, Will the Circle Be Unbroken, its links to the Carter Family and country music’s oldest roots, the circle of Grand Ole Opry members, the deep history of all the performers on the Opry, and permeates the Circle TV network, one of the current key propaganda wings of the Opry empire. Even though we didn’t get a picture in the circle, it was pretty cool to be onstage for a few minutes while the tech people got ready for the night’s show. It is a full-scale professional production as big-league as it gets, four nights a week or more.

The tour finished around 3:30pm which left 3.5 hours to kill before showtime. To help fill time, Terrie took a bunch of us on the bus to the nearby Gaylord Opryland Hotel to be wowed by its vast enclosed atria of gardens and such. We were duly impressed.

For the rest of the time until the 7pm show, Terrie left us to our own devices to feed or entertain ourselves in the Opry Mills mall. We made our way to the Bavarian Bierhaus where we shared some wings and beers until it finally neared time for the show. We made our way back to the Opry and were pleasantly surprised to find Road Scholar arranged a nice block of seats for us near the left front of the stage.

Grand Ole Opry Show

For the several months leading up to the show I checked the Opry website to see who would be performing. The whole time, even a week before the trip, it said the lineup would include Carly Pearce, Dailey & Vincent, Karen Mills, Randall King, and more. I didn’t know any of them well though I learned Carly Pearce was a rising star in the Nashville firmament and just won top female entertainer awards from the CMA and ACM. Evidently her star rose far enough she found something better to do because she wasn’t actually on the bill when we showed up. Instead, Bill Anderson, Dustin Lynch, MacKenzie Porter, and Chris Young were added. I didn’t know any of them either, other than the longtime Nashville fixture Bill Anderson whose exhibit we had skipped at the Country Music Hall of Fame the day before…and even then I really only knew his name, not his songs. I don’t know how frequently the Opry juggles its show lineups but I get the feeling it’s pretty often. I guess the audience is there for the overall Opry experience, not so much for the specific performers.

The show started promptly at 7pm for the live radio and streaming video audiences. Bill Anderson opened the show with three quick songs and a smile and then was gone. I guess at age 84 he has an early bedtime. Randall King brought some youthful energy in what I believe was his Opry debut but I won’t be running out to find more of his songs. Comedian Karen Mills did some stale jokes for her set. Dailey & Vincent closed the first hour with three quick bluegrass tunes and an a capella gospel song.

There was a little break before the top of the hour when the Circle TV audience was added for what was effectively a second show featuring Dustin Lynch, MacKenzie Porter and Chris Young. None of the songs or performers were especially memorable. By 9pm the main show was all wrapped up. We were asked to stay in our seats while Chris Young and his band recorded one more song for a video. And that was it. Back to the buses. In all, the Opry was an interesting spectacle but the performers and music were so-so at best. There was not a lot of magic to be had this night, though everyone gave it their TV-energy all. I was not converted to become a regular fan.

Wednesday, March 16 – Nashville to Memphis

Belle Meade Plantation

We had one last Hyatt breakfast then checked out and boarded our bus by 8:30am. We rode a short distance into the Nashville suburbs to Belle Meade Plantation (Wikipedia). Belle Meade was mainly a horse farm going back to 1807 but is now basically a tourist attraction. We spent a while in the gift shop before touring the main house. The guides made a good effort to keep things interesting but there’s honestly not a whole lot of history to be had unless you’re particularly interested in the Harding family or their line of thoroughbred horses. I’ll give the curators credit for at least mentioning several of the key enslaved people that played important roles running the house and keeping the horses (though I’m afraid I didn’t note their names, nor did they make it into the Wikipedia entry). The Plantation was built to take advantage of the Natchez Trace which gave me an incentive to look up the fascinating history of this ancient trail but it was research I had to do on my own.

After the house tour, we were given nearly an hour to have a wine tasting and wander the grounds before having a very early 11am lunch at the carriage house. We got back on bus at 12:15 or so to begin the 3-hour drive to Memphis. In my view, this Belle Meade stop was entirely unnecessary. There was no connection to music or anything else on the tour and we easily could have made it to Memphis before needing a lunch break. If the Road Scholar folks were looking to fit in one other Nashville attraction, I would have much rather spent a couple of hours at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, even if it was 25 minutes in the wrong direction from downtown. 

West Tennessee Delta Heritage Center

After a couple of hours on the road Terrie said we would make a special stop at a museum dedicated to a singer originally named Anna Mae Bullock. I think I was the only one on the bus that knew she was talking about Tina Turner. We stopped at a small roadside visitor center, grandly named the West Tennessee Delta Heritage Center & Tina Turner Museum. The Center looked like a former chain restaurant that was now mainly a gift shop with bathrooms. There were three smallish rooms given over to displays of cotton growing technologies, local wildlife and history, and local blues musicians. We wandered through them for a few minutes and wondered what they had to do with Tina Turner.

Behind the “Heritage Center” were two much older buildings. One was the Flagg Grove School which Anna Mae Bullock attended as a child; it had been moved to this location from her hometown of Nutbush (chronicled in her song “Nutbush City Limits“) a few miles away. This one-room schoolhouse now houses the Tina Turner Museum with items contributed from Tina herself. Evidently Tina supports and approves of the museum but has never actually visited. The displays include a small mix of costumes and memorabilia but don’t capture the breadth or achievements of her extraordinary life; she deserves a more extensive showcase. The museum includes a partial recreation of the schoolroom setting, a stark reminder of what some rural schoolhouses looked like as recently as the 1960s.

Even more stark was the second, much smaller building, the home of Sleepy John Estes. He was one of many old Blues singers whose name I vaguely recognized but about whom I knew very little. I didn’t learn much more about him walking through the sparsely furnished cabin other than he was very poor. Wikipedia and iTunes told me more about his career and influential recordings in the 1920s-1940s and rediscovery in the 1960s. It’s hard to imagine these two tiny rooms were his home through much of his later life.

In writing this post, I discovered the West Tennessee Delta Heritage Center is part of the Americana Music Triangle, a website I hadn’t seen before but wish I had. The site offers an inclusive overview of Americana music (with timelines and playlists that are a nice complement to what we saw at the National Museum of African American Music), routes to travel and sights to see. It’s not clear to me who actually runs this site but they’ve done a good job collecting information that would have been useful planning our trip or making adjustments as we went along.

Peabody Ducks

We got to Memphis in time to quickly check into our hotel, the Hampton Inn & Suites Memphis – Beale Street, then walked over to the Peabody Hotel to see their famous duck march at 5pm. The ducks were not officially on our itinerary but Terrie was nice to lead the way so we could see it. There were signs outside the Peabody discouraging non-guests from viewing the duck march but Terrie led our group of ducklings right in. I’m not sure we would have seen it otherwise. We wedged into spots on the balcony for a decent view of the crowded lobby.

The Duck March is a silly tradition but fun to see once. The hotel makes a big deal of it, with a long spiel by the Duck Master and the appointment of an honorary kid duck master to assist. Eventually the five resident ducks hop out of the fountain and march on their red carpet to the elevator to return to their “apartment” on the roof for the evening. We didn’t go up to see their rooftop digs, but evidently for a duck it’s quite palatial.

B.B. King’s Blues Club

After the ducks, our group gathered for a short walk down Beale Street for dinner at B.B. King’s Blues Club. Beale Street is the legendary entertainment district in Memphis, famous as a showcase for the Blues and African American culture for more than a century. About four blocks are now pedestrian-only and lined with bars, tourist shops and noisy places to spend your money. Some of the storefronts were empty and appeared to have not survived the Covid slowdown in business. The street was less raucous and energetic than Nashville’s Broadway honky tonk scene, but that suited me just fine.

I wasn’t expecting much from the B.B. King’s Blues Club, but it had a prominent spot on Beale Street and a crowd of tourists waiting to get in. Our group was ushered to reserved tables right near the bandstand. There was a good semi-acoustic quartet playing some tasty blues and R&B for the first hour, followed by a louder upbeat quartet with a featured female singer. The first group was more our speed but both were good; I’m sorry I didn’t get the names of either of them but we enjoyed their playing and left tips in their buckets.

The first group pulled off a nice nice trick by starting one song with a guitar and drum riff that the tourists instantly recognized as Chris Stapleton’s 2015 monster hit “Tennessee Whiskey” (which has become something of a national anthem for good ole boys all across the South). Before everyone could sing along, the bandleader noted that the tune was actually Etta James’s 1967 song “I’d Rather Go Blind“. The band seamlessly moved from one version to the other, illustrating how closely intertwined Country and R&B music are. Two sides of the same coin, pitched to different audiences, but with credit not often given to the original (usually the Black one). It makes for an interesting case study. I didn’t realize that “Tennessee Whiskey” was written in 1981 and was originally a hit for David Allan Coe and later George Jones, in versions that sound nothing like “I’d Rather Go Blind”. Stapleton evidently mashed the two together, and though others have noted the similarity, I can’t find any direct attribution from Stapleton…and I wonder if any royalties went to the writers. The Etta James version was justly famous on its own and has been covered many times, even relatively recently by Beyonce and Dua Lipa. I guess there’s some small justice in that. I’d still like to see something more overt from the Stapleton camp.

The food at B.B. King’s was surprisingly good. The servers quickly brought our drinks and an appetizer of fried pickles that none of us would have ordered but we devoured. They were addictive. My sister and I shared ribs (finally some fall-off-the-bone ribs, the tastiest we had on the trip) and chicken fried chicken. A few of our party braved the dance floor. Overall, it was the best evening of food and music we enjoyed on the tour. There’s something to be said for having lower expectations at the outset.

Thursday, March 17 – Memphis

We had breakfast at the hotel then gathered in a conference room for an introductory lecture on Memphis History presented by Dick Cockrell. I can’t remember his credentials other than being an enthusiastic amateur historian, a fan of Memphis music, and I think Terrie said he was a former Road Scholar guide in Memphis. I believe with a little preparation I could have pretty much given the lecture, but Dick had some decent slides and music samples. I didn’t learn much that I hadn’t already picked up from my own deep dive on Memphis music, but before doing that dive a few months before the trip I hadn’t known much at all.

This was, in retrospect, the “scholar” portion of our Road Scholar tour — the only classroom lecture of the tour. I don’t fault Dick for his local knowledge and willingness to share with us, but it was a pretty superficial scratch at the surface of the wealth of music and complicated history that has intertwined in this region for a couple of centuries. It wasn’t a bad introduction but I sure would have liked to explore deeper. As I think it through, though, if you go much deeper you very quickly touch on racial and political nerves that could make for a very uncomfortable rest of the journey with any given set of tour mates. I guess I can see why Road Scholar doesn’t press too hard on the scholarly part of their mission, but I wish they would do at least a bit more.

National Civil Rights Museum

For a more emphatic history lesson, we took a short bus ride to the National Civil Rights Museum, located at the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968. We arrived at 9am at this already crowded site and had to wait a while on the bus before we could get in. Even then, we had to jostle with crowds all the way through the museum. I was glad to see that the museum was popular, but the crowd made it a little difficult to see each of the exhibits.

While we waited outside, I overheard one of the docents speaking with a group in front of the balcony where Dr. King was shot. There was a brick line leading over toward the boarding house indicating the direction of the shots. I was surprised to hear the docent say something to the effect of, “These are are where the shots came from if you believe that James Earl Ray was the assassin. There are other theories and other possible locations for the shots depending on what you believe.” I thought it was well established that James Earl Ray had been the shooter and didn’t realize there were a variety of alternative conspiracy theories in play, much less that they would be promoted by the museum staff.

Once we got inside the museum and past the very good introductory movie, we were given audio guides and could move at our own pace through the exhibits that chronicled many milestones of the Civil Rights movement. Exhibits included an overview of the rise of slavery and the extended eras of segregation that followed, then more detail on the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling (1951-1954), Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956), Lunch Counter protests in Greensboro, Nashville and elsewhere (1960), Freedom Riders (1961), the 1963 March on Washington, Selma Voting Rights marches (1965), and the Memphis Sanitation Strike (1968) leading to the assassination of Dr. King (1968). I remembered news reports of many of these events from my youth but it was very helpful to see them contextualized and laid out in sequence. I still don’t know as much about them as I should, but I have a better grasp having visited the museum and read more since.

Once again we were only about ⅔ of the way through the main part of the museum when our three hours were nearly up. I hustled through the last segments from 1964-1968 and aftermath, and never got across the street to the boarding house. I learned afterwards there were even more exhibits over there. The museum was very well done and I felt like we needed to go back to see the rest.

We left the museum somewhat reluctantly because few in the tour group made it all the way through. Nevertheless, it was back on the bus for a short ride back to downtown and lunch at a local restaurant, Sugar Grits. Terrie had been talking this up as one of her favorite spots. When we arrived it seemed clear the restaurant was not expecting us. Evidently, the previous manager quit a few days before and took all his notes, so the new people only had a vague idea we were showing up. They improvised moderately well but the meal was slow and not very good. The shrimp and grits I had were passable, better than the nearly inedible chicken with grits variant my table mates received. This lunch was an unfortunate low point on the tour, a victim of raised expectations this time.

Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum

After lunch it was back on the bus for another short ride to the Rock n’ Soul Museum (itself just a short walk from our hotel). We spent two hours at this very compact but well put-together Smithsonian-affiliated museum. They had sections on the rural roots music of the region, Memphis Blues from the early 20th century, the development of Sun Studios and rock ‘n’ roll, Stax Studios and soul, and a bit of what followed. The audio guide was helpful and they had a nice gimmick of featuring juke boxes with more music from each era to explore. I could have spent longer at this museum but at least I managed my time well enough to get through all the exhibits.

Sun Studio

We got back on the bus to go to Sun Studio (Sun website), the erstwhile birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll. The original couple of storefronts make for some very tight quarters. We started in the gift shop for a bit before being ushered upstairs to an orientation room/museum with an enthusiastic guide. He set up the story of Sam Phillips before taking us downstairs into the surprisingly small studio, riffing on the piano for a bit to escort us down — it was nice to know we were in the hands of an actual musician. He continued with a good summary of the studio history including Elvis and the Million Dollar Quartet while allowing time for photo ops. This was a good tour, with a lot of information, history and energy packed in a small space. It’s odd to consider they still regularly use this cramped space as an active recording studio and site for TV shows in the evenings after the day’s tours are done.

After this busy day we had dinner and the evening on our own. It happened to be St. Patrick’s Day so we were a little worried about things being crazy on Beale Street. We decided to get appetizers at Itta Bena, a restaurant above BB King’s that I found on Yelp and TripAdvisor. The restaurant turned out to be a lovely upscale spot with a quiet guitar and piano duo playing pleasant dinner music.

Friday, March 18 – Memphis

Graceland

We made it to the bus in the morning in time for our departure to Graceland (official website). Terrie dutifully played a bit of Paul Simon’s “Graceland” on the way. The Graceland complex now encompasses Elvis’s home, an adjacent hotel, and a large exhibition space and museum area across the street. Call it Elvisland, the theme park.

We arrived promptly at 9am then waited a few minutes in the ticket area before slotting into our time for the introductory movie. The movie gave a decent 15-minute synopsis of Elvis’s life and career but was hardly a critical masterpiece. Before catching a shuttle across the street to the Graceland house tour we each got our own iPad with an audio tour narrated by John Stamos. Why John Stamos? Wikipedia says “Stamos is a big fan of Elvis Presley and has often referenced or paid homage to him in the show Full House.” OK, whatever.

As I suspected, a little of Elvis goes a long way, as does a little of Graceland. I wasn’t terribly impressed by the shrine, despite the best efforts of John Stamos and the reverent staff members helping make sure we didn’t wander anywhere off limits. We toured the ground floor and basement playrooms of the mansion. The upstairs bedrooms are off limits. I thought I heard a guide or someone say that some family events are still held at the mansion though it’s hard to believe anyone actually stays there. The main levels are strictly in museum mode, set to the early 1970s before Elvis died.

The audio guide is reasonably informative and keeps you moving along at a regular pace, but it also meant you couldn’t easily linger anywhere or ask questions. You are kind of force-fed the Elvis legend like you are a pâté goose.

I was struck by a clip of a press conference that played in a loop in the office at the rear of the mansion. I had to take off my audio guide to listen to it. The press conference was done in that office “at Vernon’s desk” the day after Elvis got back from his military service in Germany. In it, Elvis was asked (at about the 5-minute mark) whether he “left any hearts in Germany” and he replies “not any special one.” He goes on to say there was a “little girl” he was seeing quite often but “it was no big romance.” There’s no further explanation around that interview or quote, but the reference was to Priscilla, who later became his wife. I don’t think there was any other mention of her anywhere else in the mansion or the museum areas, despite many references to their daughter, Lisa Marie. I had to later read some gossipy websites to get more details about the sad relationship between Elvis, Priscilla and Lisa Marie. You weren’t going to get that story at Graceland.

After touring the house, we shuttled back to the Elvisland complex across the road, an umpteen thousand square foot array of exhibit areas and gift shops (many, many gift shops) featuring his cars, his outfits, his military service, his movies, his concerts, a random assortment of other stars that were evidently inspired by his wardrobes, and a section on growing up Lisa Marie. And don’t forget his airplanes!

The exhibits are extensive in square footage and include a number of interactive arcade-style gadgets that let you insert yourself into various scenes or costumes from Elvis’s career so you can snap a digital photo and further promote the Elvis brand on social media. The exhibits, however, amount to a mountain of empty calories in terms of actual information conveyed. You don’t really learn much but you get a lot of Instagram opportunities…and many gift shop purchase opportunities as well.

After dutifully touring the exhibits, we had vouchers for lunch at Vernon’s, a “meat and three” place (a Nashville invention, evidently, though come to think of it we didn’t officially encounter any there other than our first day at Puckett’s) served cafeteria style. I chose fried fish and was given plenty of it, along with sides of green beans, and mac and cheese (I did meat and two, always an option). One of our tourmates said this may have been the best meal she had on the trip. OK, if you say so. The hot sauce on the table was the best thing about mine.

Leaving Graceland, I was struck by a number of things. One was a question of who was in Elvis’s posse of hangers on and facilitators who evidently populated Graceland and indulged Elvis’s whims? They were mentioned amorphously several times during the tour (and in Lisa Marie’s life) but there was no real detail on any of them. Later, I found they were a floating crew of largely disreputable (but trusted by Elvis) hangers on called the Memphis Mafia (more). There’s a lot to be said about them — little of it good — and little of it actually said at Graceland.

Also, what about the staff and helpers at Graceland? How many were there? Were there any black faces? Any that stayed with him an especially long time? I later found this BBC interview with his longtime cook, Mary Jenkins. There was also Nancy Rooks, a maid who wrote a book about her experiences with Elvis. Why couldn’t there have been a passing mention of them or others? At least at Belle Meade the curators made some effort to acknowledge the role that enslaved and post-Reconstruction-era African-Americans played in the estate’s prosperity and hospitality. Graceland could benefit from a little more representation.

The whole experience at Graceland is heavily whitewashed, scrubbed to venerate the legend…and sell trinkets in the endless gift shops. Who is profiting from all this? Does Lisa Marie “own” Elvis, Inc.? Who actually runs Graceland? Part of the answer, not that you’d learn it at Graceland, is that Elvis Presley Enterprises was formed after Elvis’s death by Priscilla Presley acting as Lisa Marie’s guardian in what proved to be a savvy move at the time. Since 2013 it has been 85% owned by privately held conglomerate Authentic Brands Group, which itself is now owned by an assortment of private equity investors in anticipation of an IPO (though it was recently delayed indefinitely). Lisa Marie Presley owns the remaining 15%; I presumed she was doing OK, but evidently her share of the estate was squandered and as of a few years ago she was more than $16 million in debt as she sued her executor. I’m not sure where things stand now. It’s another sordid chapter of the Elvis legacy that goes unreported at Graceland.

There just seems to be a lot more Graceland could do to build some credibility toward being an honestly informative museum rather than a money-making shrine. There’s room for a fuller discussion of Elvis and his impact on the music business and society. I would love to see some good charts or displays on several topics:

  • Sales of Elvis’s various singles and albums over the years, on their own and in comparison with other pop sensations. It’s a complicated topic (kudos to Nick Keene at Elvis Australia for his detailed research…and for all who do the extensive work at this impressive site), and comparisons are even tougher now that we’ve moved into a world of streaming and downloads, but Graceland seems a good place to at least try to get a handle on the subject for the general public.
  • Revenues that Elvis, Inc. generated from music sales, performances, movies, merchandising, etc., over the years. This may be more or less private corporate data, but Elvis Presley Enterprises surely knows and could provide a sanitized version. It would be fascinating to see the various revenue streams shift over time. It would give a lesson in the shifting values of media and brand management over the course of a career and beyond.
  • More discussion of how and why Elvis became such a symbol/caricature of American culture, particularly to international audiences…and why he remains one.
  • Some credible discussion of the role Col. Tom Parker played in managing Elvis and the profits he derived. Parker is almost nonexistent in Graceland or its exhibits. The forthcoming Baz Luhrmann Elvis movie seems likely to generate more discussion of Parker’s role. I hope it’s a decent film.

I left Graceland feeling more than a little nauseated by the Elvis fawning but also with very little appreciation for the significance of Elvis and his music. There is so much emphasis on Elvis the brand, his movies, lifestyle and surrounding folderol that the essence of his music and its social impact is overwhelmed. We got a better sense of his musical impact at Sun Studios and to a lesser extent the Studio B tour in Nashville. At Graceland it is a given that Elvis was a god; there’s little effort made to explain why so many thought so.

In May 2022, about two months after our trip but before Baz’s Elvis movie came out, The Washington Post published a good article, “Should Elvis Presley’s Legacy Live On?” based partly on a trip to Graceland that raises a number of the same questions I’ve been grappling with, and tries to answer a few of them. It’s an ongoing debate. I’m of the opinion that Elvis should be remembered and his substantial accomplishments put in context, but he should not be personally deified.

Beethoven Club

We departed Elvisland for one final tour activity, a visit to the grandly named Beethoven Club for a musical performance and lecture. This was advertised in our itinerary as a highlight for the tour so I looked forward to hearing a musician play especially for us. The Beethoven Club turned out to be a rather nondescript older home in a residential neighborhood and the performance turned out to be another older white guy explaining Memphis music history, this time with a piano. The lecturer/performer was Richard Raichelson, a professor and folklorist who published at least one book about Memphis music and local history, so at least he had some academic credentials. His stories, however, covered pretty much the same ground as our first day’s speaker, Dick Cockrell. They were pleasant but tame, and while his piano playing was fine he admitted his voice was not in good shape so the performance was not his best. Not a whole lot was learned, unfortunately.

As I thought about it later, this was a sorely missed opportunity for a capstone recap of the trip, a chance to tie together some of the threads we had gathered from Nashville to Memphis. Richard Raichelson might have been a decent choice for this task but that’s not what he tackled. How much more powerful it would have been to have an authoritative voice (and better yet, a black one) give us a parting perspective, with or without an actual performance. This gave rise to some further thoughts, below, grist for another post at some point, perhaps, but I want to capture them here, so bear with me.

It would have been worthwhile pointing out the history and musical connections we’d been exposed to on the tour, a reminder that the relevant Memphis (and Nashville) history spans about 200 years from the 1820s. I’ve done a little research myself, in my amateur enthusiast fashion. Here’s a thumbnail. The Native Americans who settled the Tennessee/Mississippi valleys for at least a millenium before the 1800s have largely been obliterated from the current narrative, a sad fact that deserves its own consideration. From 1820-1850 the region was slowly populated by white settlers who brought (and bought) enslaved people from other parts of the United States; there was no (official) importation of Africans after 1806. Memphis became a transportation hub with railroads arriving in the early 1840s. The city boomed for several decades, growing from under 2,000 in 1840 to more than 20,000 in 1860, with German and Irish immigrants joining the mix of white and black settlers from the eastern U.S.

The Civil War and Reconstruction were unstable times for Memphis, compounded by race riots and recurring yellow fever epidemics in the latter 1800s. The city went bankrupt and lost its charter in 1879 but began to revive in the 1890s. The first half of the 20th century was another heyday for Memphis, driven especially by cotton and transportation, largely under the guidance and patronage of Boss Crump.

In this stew brewed a mix of spirituals, work songs, folk traditions, classical music, minstrel and tent shows, revivals, pre-Vaudeville, etc. There was nationwide growth in sales of sheet music through the 19th century and into the 20th. Ragtime developed in St. Louis in the 1890s, just as jazz was brewing in New Orleans. Traveling bands like W.C. Handy’s in the 1880s-1910s spawned new classes of entertainers and new entertainment districts like Beale Street. The businesses on Beale Street were largely Black and Jewish owned, and catered to owned and catered to a largely Black clientele. (Where there any connections between Beale Street and Tulsa’s Black Wall Street before 1920 riots?) 

W.C. Handy penned “Memphis Blues” in 1909, sold the rights in 1912 and saw it become a hit lining someone else’s pockets. Having learned that lesson, he formed his own company in 1914 and wrote “St. Louis Blues”, “Beale Street Blues” and more which became nationwide sheet music hits. Handy moved to New York City in 1917 and became perhaps the first successful African American music entrepreneur.

Recorded music and radio arrived in the 1920s and we’re off to the races…the story folds into my Memphis Music Education. Memphis music has deeply intriguing stories from the 1920s through 1968 when MLK was killed. Within a few years, the music scene shifted from Memphis towards Nashville, Detroit, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Why?

Memphis remained a cultural touchstone but increasingly a place of nostalgia. There are lots of Memphis songs from the 1970s-2000s up to today but they seem to be mostly backward-looking. What of Memphis today? Beale Street “revived” but how integrated is it really? Which places are Black owned? Where are these tourist dollars flowing?

Beyond giving a better grounding in history, I wish that Road Scholar (or someone) would include at least a hint of a call to action for taking things forward, for those so inclined. What organizations today are building bridges rather than walls between and among cultures? The Blues Foundation? The Center for Southern Folklore? Arts Memphis? Can Road Scholar get speakers from them? Offer a list of worthy websites or foundations to learn more and maybe support? What can we as freshly educated and potentially empowered tourists do next? The tour could do more to foster dialogs, consider what we’ve learned, talk about experience with family and friends. Encourage participants to find artists, songs, organizations that you love, and support them in any fashion. Take small steps, see where they lead. 

Musical development, genres, personalities and technology in Nashville, Memphis and the country as a whole are inextricably woven into and influenced by our nation’s larger history and culture. Music offers insights into who we were and who we are, a fascinating prism for education and reflection.

The Beethoven Club event was the last official stop on our itinerary but Terrie offered to add two quick side trips for those of us that wanted to stay on the bus. Most of us did. The first stop was at the Memphis Pyramid, now the world’s biggest Bass Pro Shop. Terrie gave us a short history of the pyramid, skipping over most of its troubled past as a mostly publicly-funded boondoggle, then let us loose for 20 minutes to gawk. It was a quick and overwhelming look at a thriving corner of American hunting and outdoor culture that I rarely see. We were strangers in a strange land.

After our short stop in the alternate universe of the Pyramid, it was back on the bus for a walk on the Big River Crossing across the Mississippi so we could say we stepped into Arkansas. Photo op! The pedestrian bridge is part of the Harahan Bridge, now primarily a railroad crossing. It was a chilly, grey walk out to the middle of the bridge, the river looked cold and forbidding, the Memphis skyline was a long way away, and we could discern nothing consequential on the Arkansas side of the river other than highways and scrub trees, but I can now say I had a good look at the Mississippi River and set at least one foot in Arkansas, if not on actual dry land.

Road Scholar Tour Final Dinner

We had one final dinner with our Road Scholar tour group at the Majestic Grille, a well-reviewed Memphis restaurant that I wanted to try anyway, so win. The restaurant is mostly known for its steaks but we were offered a set menu on which nothing looked better than barbecued ribs, even though I was kind of tired of ribs at that point. They were not as good as at B.B. King’s, but OK. We said farewells to our tour mates and sneaked tips to our tour leader and driver. Road Scholar doesn’t seem to have a specific policy on tips but we were all happy to make a contribution.

I can’t say that we made any lifelong new friends on this trip or even met anyone whose name I could remember for more than five minutes at a time, but everyone on the trip was pleasant enough and stayed out of everyone else’s way. Some were easier to get along with than others, but mostly I was happy that my sister and I could hang out together. Most of the tour members were couples in one form or another and stayed to themselves. Only a few were singles; I can imagine it must be a bit harder to be on a tour like this as a single. But then again, it’s probably easier to go to new places as a single with a tour group rather than traveling completely on one’s own.

Overall, I was pleased we did the Road Scholar tour. It simplified much of the trip and got us into places we might not have seen. The tour certainly got us better seats at things like the Grand Ole Opry and B.B. King’s than we would have on our own. There were only a few superfluous stops (Belle Meade and the downtime at Opry Mills, for example) but for the most part the tour was well paced and covered most of the stops I knew I wanted to see. I wish the tour had been stronger on actually educating us about the sights we saw and music we heard, but most of that was left to the individual traveler. I would have liked to share more time with actual musicians and experts to get a better sense of the history and threads of connection between the different types of music we encountered but I can understand how that might be a far higher logistical (and expensive) challenge for a tour operator.

If we had only done the tour, however, I would have been less satisfied. I’m very glad that we added days before and after the tour to see additional sights and satisfy more of my curiosity. I would liked to have added more but there are always limits to the time and patience of others. Plus it would have been more expensive. There are always tradeoffs.

As it was, my plans for the next few days were to spend more time in Memphis on Saturday, rent a car and drive through the Mississippi Delta region on Sunday, then on Monday head east through Muscle Shoals in the direction of Asheville to see family. I’d originally thought we’d go to the Stax Museum on Saturday but I decided we’d probably covered enough of my interest in Memphis soul music between our visits to the NMAAM in Nashville and the Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum in Memphis. (The Stax Museum’s website also does a good job chronicling the Stax story.) I was also interested in the Blues Hall of Fame Museum but it was still closed due to Covid. Instead, my sister and I felt we could use more time in the Civil Rights Museum to see what we’d missed on Thursday. I was also interested in trying Gus’s Famous Fried Chicken, one of the highest rated restaurants in Memphis on both Yelp and TripAdvisor. And finally, I needed some downtime to do some laundry.

Saturday, March 19 – Memphis

I started the morning doing laundry. My sister joined me and we had a good talk about the things I thought were lacking and could be added to the tour. The discussion helped clarify my thinking but I still needed to sit down and write things out…which is largely this exercise right here.

Eventually the laundry was done and we headed out in the late morning to Gus’s Famous Fried Chicken. Just before we left, I bought tickets for the Civil Rights Museum which they suggested buying online. We decided on 2pm tickets to give us plenty of time in case there was a line at Gus’s.

Gus’s turned out to be only a 10 minute walk from the hotel. The place was an old hole in the wall but there was a table available when we walked in. I had fun watching the kitchen where a guy hand-dredged a tub full of chicken, piece-by-piece, tossing them into the fryers. After a few minutes ours came out. The chicken was OK but not great – it’s hard to believe it’s really world famous. We were done in about 15 minutes or only a little after noon, way early for our 2pm tickets at the museum.

National Civil Rights Museum, Redux

Without anywhere else to go, we made our way to the museum and arrived just as they were starting to manage the line of people at the door. We were told to line up in one of two lines, one for ticket holders and one for people who needed to buy tickets. They called ticket holders up in 15-minute increments and in-filled with people from the other line. It became clear that the people who didn’t have tickets were getting in faster than those of us who pre-ordered. We waited for about an hour, getting more frustrated but eventually they let us in at about 1:20, well ahead of our 2pm slot. I guess we shouldn’t complain…but it wasn’t very well managed. On the other hand, I remain pleasantly surprised that the museum attracts enough visitors that crowd management was an issue.

We were able to skip over the museum sections we’d already seen but that basically got us to 1964 in the Civil Rights timeline. We worked through the rest – there was a lot of detail on each Civil Rights action in 1964-1968 (and there were plenty of them). It’s good that they’ve documented it so well but it makes for a lot to cover. After about an hour I made it through Dr. King’s assassination. 

From there, one crosses the street to the location where the shots were fired – or were they? There are at least three competing conspiracy theories about what really happened and who was responsible. Was James Earl Ray acting alone or in league with others? Or was it really the FBI, Memphis law enforcement or the Mafia that did the deed? There were two more floors of detailed displays that walk through the manhunt for Ray, the voluminous evidence produced at the trial, plus the competing conspiracy theories. That took me at least another hour to go through, then I sat and waited for my sister to catch up. She eventually did, just as the museum was closing at 5pm. In all, we spent nearly seven hours going though the whole museum, a very worthwhile experience.

We tried to walk back into downtown Memphis via the Bluffs Walk but the segment we found was under construction. We walked a little bit along some railroad tracks then down along the waterfront for a few more blocks before turning up into town and along Main Street for a while. It strikes me as odd that Memphis is kind of built with its back to the river. Few of the top attractions in Memphis feature a river view or have any emphasis on the Mississippi and its role in the town’s existence. The river itself was rather cold and forbidding at this time of year. There is a Mississippi River Museum on the forbiddingly named Mud Island but it hadn’t yet opened after Covid…and the park itself proved hard to get to and not very inviting. St. Louis and New Orleans seem to feature the river more prominently. It seemed like Memphis is somehow missing a beat.

After a rest in the hotel for a while, we ventured back out for a meal at the Rendezvous, which I pretty much insisted on in honor of John Hiatt and his song, Memphis in the Meantime. The restaurant is mostly a tourist trap; we shared a ribs and chicken platter. The ribs were not all that good and the chicken was a simple boneless breast. Nothing special, despite my desire to get “good and greasy”. Now I’ve done it and don’t need to go back.

Sunday, March 20 – Memphis & Mississippi Delta

We took a taxi to the airport to rent our car for the week. The cab driver was nice, a former FedEx director that once had the job Tom Hanks portrayed in Cast Away. When the movie was being filmed in Memphis he met Hanks and Helen Hunt and regaled us with some stories (Tom was great, Helen more reserved). Another brush with celebrity. When we got to the airport and saw the sea of FedEx planes it was a reminder of how important the company has become to Memphis’s economy.

Mississippi Blues Trail

We got our rental car and drove south on Highway 61, the Blues Highway, once I found it after missing a turn or two while I was trying to play and explain Memphis in the Meantime to my sister. We listened to my Memphis Songs playlist for the rest of the way, including Bob Dylan’s Highway 61, Revisited, of course. Our road trip was underway.

I wanted to make this trip to get a better feel for the roots of the Delta Blues, the highly influential musical genre that fed so much of American culture. My main guide and inspiration was the Mississippi Blues Trail website and its list of destinations (list of museums). I learned that some of the museums were closed on Sunday and before the trip I had promised my sister we wouldn’t try to stuff too many museum visits into a single day. So I decided to mainly aim for the Grammy Museum in Cleveland which was open that afternoon.

Our first target would be the famous “Crossroads” where Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the Devil. We would pass through Tunica, a town with casinos which I guessed were related to Native American tribes in the area. I hoped we might find a tourist welcome center or something with more information about the Native American legacy in the region to go along with our Blues investigations.

I’d downloaded the Mississippi Blues Trail app on my phone with its map of many markers on our route but we didn’t actually consult it for most of the drive. I wasn’t clever enough to figure out how to get it and Google Maps on the car’s screen and I decided Google Maps was more important. That was something of a mistake since the markers were mostly not readily apparent from the road, and even if they were we would not be stopping at every single one. And I didn’t think it was fair to make my sister continually have her nose in the Blues Trail website. But lucky you, I can now go back and cross-reference the ones we missed, starting with Highway 61 Blues. Where there’s an equivalent Wikipedia post, I reference it as well.

The Memphis suburbs quickly give way to the geography labeled the Mississippi Delta, a 200-mile wedge of flat floodplain between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, not to be confused with the region in southern Louisiana where the river meets the Gulf of Mexico. This Delta is a flat frying pan of brown, muddy fields and lots of marshy areas. It’s a kind of hellscape, really. In mid-March, there were some stubby rows of what I figure were last year’s cotton plants. There were also scattered fields with little purple flowers that we guessed were soybeans, maybe. The little purple flowers were just about the only things we saw that weren’t brown, the only signs of life. There were hardly any people or many buildings, either. Agriculture is a mystery.

After about 30 minutes of mostly nothing but empty fields, we saw some billboards for casinos and a few entryways for what might have been developments, but no sign of the actual casinos. They evidently do exist in a town now called Tunica Resorts several miles west from Highway 61 and north of the actual town of Tunica. In any case, we missed them and whatever information we might have learned about the Tunica people. Wikipedia to the rescue (spoiler: it didn’t turn out well for the Tunicas). Hernando De Soto’s expedition encountered their well-settled agricultural communities in 1541 and left behind smallpox which ravaged the population. It was another 150 years before French traders made contact with a much smaller group of scattered villages. Over time, the Tunicas migrated south and now occupy a small reservation in Louisiana. The current crop of casinos in Tunica are not related to any Native American reservations; instead they exist through a loophole of floating on the Mississippi River like riverboats.

As we approached the actual town of Tunica, we were in need of a rest stop and my sister decided she wanted to look for stamps so she could send postcards to her family. We left the highway and followed signs to the Tunica “business district.” We passed a few streets of quiet, low mid-20th century houses that reminded us of our grandparents’ town in south Georgia, then we came to the main street of Tunica which was deader than a doornail. There were a couple of blocks of businesses but not a soul stirring on the street. We saw a post office but it was closed on Sunday so we stopped at a gas station next door to ask about stamps and a restroom. Neither were available. Check at the Piggly Wiggly, said the lady. So we went back to the highway and quickly found the Piggly Wiggly — you can’t miss it. We were somewhat surprised to find stamps and I found a bathroom once a nice cashier led the way to a very dodgy section in the back. Piggly Wiggly to the rescue!

Later research showed we missed some Blues Trail markers around Tunica, including ones for Son House (wiki), the Hollywood Cafe (where Muriel played piano in “Walking in Memphis“), Abbay & Leatherman (boyhood home of Robert Johnson), Hardface Clanton (gambler and entrepreneur), James Cotton (wiki), and Livin’ at Lula (home to Charley Patton and others).

We forged ahead to Clarksdale in search of the Crossroads made famous by Robert Johnson. Eventually we found the surprisingly nondescript intersection. A marker with guitar sign is stuck in the middle of a traffic island that is somewhat risky to reach. We took some obligatory photos and wondered what the fuss was about, but then again, the Crossroads doesn’t even merit an official Blues Trail marker so we should have been forewarned.

We decided to have lunch at Abe’s BBQ place on the corner, even though neither of us really wanted BBQ. The meals were adequate at best but we felt a small virtue for eating at a local place rather than a chain.

We missed a bunch of Blues Trail sites around Clarksdale, including the Delta Blues Museum (website, closed on Sunday), Sam Cooke (wiki) birthplace, Ike Turner (wiki), Wade Walton (wiki), Sunflower River Blues festival, WROX radio station (wiki), The New World neighborhood, the Riverside Hotel, Muddy Waters’s Cabin (home of Muddy Waters), Hopson Planting Co. (cotton plantation where Pinetop Perkins worked), Little Junior Parker (wiki) birthplace, Alligator Blues, Henry Townsend (wiki), Harlem Inn, Mound Bayou Blues, Po’ Monkey’s juke joint. We probably should have explored around the town of Clarksdale a little further but I’m not sure where else we would have stopped…and we wanted to get to the Grammy Museum.

Grammy Museum Mississippi

We headed south another 30 minutes to Cleveland, Mississippi, home of the Grammy Museum (wiki). We found the museum and thought it was closed because there were no cars in the parking lot. But we gave it a try and found the doors open and one person in the gift shop ready to welcome us (and take our money for tickets). For the next two hours we were just about the only people at the museum. As we prepared to leave, a group of high schoolers arrived for some sort of event.

The museum itself is very nice, modern and expensive-looking. There were soundbooths to let you play with mixing your own blues tune, a section of electronic Roland instruments (similar to what I saw but didn’t have time to play with at the Musicians’ Hall of Fame in Nashville) where you were invited to play (but none of which I could make work), and an array of displays and exhibits devoted to various genres and eras of Grammy awards and artists…most of which exposed how irrelevant and out-of-touch the Grammy awards generally are. The museum features touch screens which let you listen to lots of music, but I found the interface and information less intuitive than at the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville.

There was a large, incessantly loud special exhibit honoring the 40th anniversary of MTV that featured a whole lot of videos and gear I recognized from the early days of MTV. It meant to pay homage but mostly it reflected how vacuous video imagery, branding and celebrity superceded the musical merits of the entire industry. I found it more sad than celebratory.

I went back to the guy in the gift shop to ask how this museum, the only offshoot of the Grammy’s main museum in Los Angeles, came to be here in Cleveland, Mississippi. He pointed out that we were on the campus of Delta State University which wanted to feature its music curriculum and provided the land for free. Rather like the Grammy awards themselves or MTV, the museum’s existence seemed equal parts publicity stunt and tax writeoff with a tinge of genuine respect for and education about the music of the Mississippi Delta.

Dockery Farms

I asked the fellow what else we should see in Cleveland and he mentioned Dockery Farms, down the road. I had heard of the plantation but hadn’t decided whether or not it should be on our itinerary. His recommendation tilted the scale and also helped me decide which route to take back to Memphis, via Route 3 so we wouldn’t completely retrace our path. For completeness, the other Blues Trail options around Clarksdale included Chrisman Street, The Enlightenment of W.C. Handy, Peavine, and Greasy Street. But it was eastward toward Dockery Farms that we headed. We drove right by at first but I recognized the sign as we passed, so I made the next turn.

There was no gift shop or welcome center to greet us, just a handful of old buildings and the Blues Trail sign (Birthplace of the Blues?). The buildings were wired with a continuous soundtrack of old (Charley Patton?) blues and there was a video running inside one of structures that housed some imposing, rusting cotton gin equipment. It was eerie but also evocative wandering around these ghostly structures on our own. As Wikipedia says, Dockery Plantation “is widely regarded as the place where Delta blues music was born. Blues musicians resident at Dockery included Charley Patton, Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf….Dockery Plantation eventually supported over 2,000 workers, who were paid in the plantation’s own coins. In addition to the railroad terminal, it had its own general store, post office, school, doctor, and churches. The workers’ quarters included boardinghouses, where they lived, socialized and played music.”

The place felt haunted but I enjoyed our short but memorable time taking in the scene. I was glad I didn’t have to live or work there and can’t imagine what it must have been like in the middle of a hot Mississippi summer. We left a donation and signed our names in the guest book. I hope the ghosts appreciated it; I have a slightly better appreciation for what they must have gone through. Our few minutes at Dockery were more powerful and worthwhile than hours spent at some of the museums.

It was getting later in the afternoon so we started to drive north back to Memphis via a different route. Having actually seen a couple of the Blues Trail signs, my sister started to check the website to see what else we’d been missing. There actually weren’t many more sites along our route, but one was the notorious Parchman Farm, site of the Mississippi State Penitentiary. My sister recognized Parchman from a book she’d read (though I’m not sure which one — it’s been mentioned in several) and also the Mose Allison version of the song, I think. I would have been inclined to stop for a photo but there were several imposing signs warning against picking up hitchhikers in case of escaped prisoners. That does make it tough to support a tourist industry in the vicinity.

After Parchman, there were three more markers where we could have stopped but we decided to simply read about them instead: W.C. Handy Encounters the Blues, John Lee Hooker, and Sunnyland Slim. It is indeed remarkable that such a number of notable musicians hail from this relatively small slice of geography, and many more from the general region within 100 miles or so of Memphis. The Mississippi Blues Trail is a commendable effort to catalog the people and places, and while it’s difficult to stop for each marker, I’m glad we took the day to track down a few of the sites and pass through the cradle of so much of American music.

We decided to dine that night in Memphis at Flying Fish because they had something other than BBQ. The restaurant turned out to be a seafood-oriented meat-and-three with a counter where you placed your order. We stood in line for a while which gave us time to consider and reconsider our orders. The fish was good but the accompanying beans and rice were the best. The restaurant seemed to have a good mix of locals and tourists; a pretty enjoyable final meal in Memphis.

Monday, March 21 – Memphis to Muscle Shoals to Chattanooga

I gave ourselves two days to drive to Asheville to our niece and her brood. I wanted to stop along the way in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, home of several important recording studios and a distinct sound in the 1960s-1980s. I would have like to see both FAME Studio and the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio but we found out that the latter was closed on Mondays and FAME only did tours early in the morning and late afternoon as it was still a working studio. We had no real alternative to visit Muscle Shoals on a different day or time, so we figured we’d take our chances and see what we could see.

The drive through northern Mississippi was long, straight, and mostly countryside. There were not a lot of sights but the road was good and not very crowded which made it an easy, pleasant drive. We stopped briefly in Corinth for a bathroom break and liquids; not much was happening there but the two Corinthian columns entering and leaving the town were cute. The other notable thing about Corinth was that we didn’t see much activity in the town until we passed a large Chik-fil-A with its parking lot packed and a long line of cars waiting for its double-barrelled drive thru. Turns out it had opened a few days earlier. The good citizens of Corinth were very excited.

FAME Studios

After several hours we made it to Muscle Shoals. The main drag into town was one big strip mall which was distressing. We came upon FAME Studios in a very nondescript building located between a CVS and Walgreens. We poked our heads in the small lobby/gift shop and learned there were no tours as the studio was in use. We could vaguely hear a thumping hip hop track coming from the back but they wouldn’t say who was recording. We lingered a while and eventually the lady in the office came out and started offering advice about places to see. It turned out she was Linda Hall, widow of FAME founder Rick Hall.

Mrs. Hall was very friendly and suggested in lieu of music studios we might go see the long stacked wall built outside of town by a man in honor of his Cherokee ancestor. Or maybe the Coon Hound Cemetery where Rick took her on their first date. She told us a little history of Muscle Shoals involving Henry Ford. She was very nice and it was fun talking to her, perhaps our closest brush with celebrity on the journey.

Since we didn’t really get to see either the FAME or Muscle Shoals Sound studios, it seems a little unfair to dwell on their stories. Suffice to say it’s a fascinating mix of personalities, talents, groundbreaking recordings and musical legacies that continue through a new generation of players, all taking place in this unlikely corner of northwest Alabama. The 2013 documentary, Muscle Shoals, does a good job recapping the highlights (it was playing on a continuous loop in the FAME lobby), and we’d seen bits a pieces of the Muscle Shoals legacy in several of the other museums we’d visited in Nashville and Memphis. The Alabama Music Hall of Fame in Tuscumbia, just outside Muscle Shoals might have been a good place to get more of the story, but it too was closed on Mondays. Oh well.

We decided not to chase down the stacked wall (though I might have had I known we could have notched visits to both a Trail of Tears and Natchez Trace Parkway site) or the cemetery (good thing because it was 45 minutes away in the wrong direction), but we did head over to City Hall and the small museum to learn more about the town’s history. 

We found City Hall and a small set of displays about the town’s history including the Henry Ford bit which turned out to be an interesting little sidebar. During World War I, to bolster the national supply of nitrates for ammunition, the Federal government very hastily built two large plants and a started a dam for electricity near what would become Muscle Shoals. The plants opened mere weeks after the end of the war and were suddenly no longer needed. Rather than continue as federally funded projects, the government began looking for private-sector alternatives to take advantage of the millions already invested. In 1921, Ford and buddies including Thomas Edison unveiled an elaborate plan to build a new model city for one million workers stretching 75 miles along the valley. The scheme tackled a number of societal ills including a balanced approach to urban/rural life but its funding was based on the gold standard and a fiat currency to skirt commercial Wall Street financing. Speculation drove interest in the nascent city of Muscle Shoals which incorporated in 1923. Within a year, however, Ford withdrew his plans in the face of Congressional resistance. The million workers never came but the dam was eventually finished in 1924 and became a forerunner of the Tennessee Valley Authority project. The founding of Muscle Shoals is an early case study of public vs. private financing of infrastructure, capitalist vs. socialist approaches to nation building, the power of personalities, fame, speculation, alternative realities, racial and antisemitic prejudice…a stew of issues we find ourselves still soaking in today.

There was a display at the “museum” focused on FAME Studio and Rick Hall but, oddly, there was no mention of the Memphis Sound Studio which arguably was the source of more famous recordings. History is like that sometimes, depending on who writes it (so they say).

It was time for lunch so we followed advice from Yelp and TripAdvisor to seek out Champy’s, a small local chain of ersatz road houses that also served “world famous fried chicken.” Theirs turned out to have a more plausible claim than Gus’s in Memphis, in my opinion – the chicken came out very fresh, steaming hot and nicely spicy. The large plates were way more than we needed but we ate nearly all of it.

We drove onward to Chattanooga. The landscape got more hilly and a little more interesting to drive through. We passed through Huntsville which is a big city in these parts: big highways, lots of traffic, lots of technology and manufacturing, most especially the NASA rocket facility and Space Camp. Huntsville was far more spread out than I thought it might be. I didn’t realize until later that Huntsville was Number One in the most recent U.S. News survey of Best Places to Live.

Chattanooga

We drove another hour or so to Chattanooga and found our hotel. We didn’t think about there being a time change to Eastern Time, so by the time we arrived it was nearly 8pm and we had to hurry up and find a spot for dinner, even though we weren’t especially hungry. We went into downtown Chattanooga and first sought out the Chattanooga Whiskey Experimental Distillery, the number one thing to do in Chattanooga, according to TripAdvisor. We didn’t have time for a tour and though the woman in the shop offered us tastings I just quickly selected a Rye which she assured us was the best choice. 

It just happened that the Distillery was across the street from the Chattanooga Choo-Choo hotel and former Terminal train station. We went in and found the trains. There was a small tour group listening to a guide. We edged around them to get a photo with the main Choo Choo engine which turns out to be a placeholder for a nonexistent train inspired by the song. As we were doing so, a lady in the group noticed us and said that my sister looked like a friend of hers. It turned out the tour was a Road Scholar group and the lady was the group leader. She knew Terrie, our group leader, and we had a nice conversation about Road Scholar and what we were doing. Small world.

We decided to just get a drink and appetizer for dinner. We chose Stir because it was adjacent to the hotel and seemed friendly. Their claim to fame was a big, active bar and “artisanal ice” which sounded dubious even when the waiter explained it. I didn’t realize artisanal ice was even a thing but I found it has been for so long that Mother Jones urged to pull the plug on it back in 2014. The word hadn’t gotten to Chattanooga, evidently…nor to me. Stir had a big selection of whiskies; I chose a Kentucky one that was fine with the cube of fancy ice (it had no appreciable effect other than inflating the price). We shared a fish taco appetizer and that was plenty for the two of us. Slowly we were learning to order less.

I can’t say we gave Chattanooga much of a shot in our brief wander around downtown on a quiet Monday evening, but I was mildly impressed by the town. Its geography along the Tennessee River, nestled among foothills including Lookout Mountain is pleasant. It’s more or less two hours from Atlanta, Nashville, Knoxville or Huntsville — take your pick — far enough away to have an identity of its own but close enough for a day trip if one was so inclined. There’s a lot of Civil War and Native American history in the region, and lots of alternatives for outdoor recreation if one were likewise inclined. It seems like a place worth exploring further if I ever get back to this corner of the world.

The next day we had a nice drive through the Oconee Scenic Byway, Nantahela National Forest and Great Smoky Mountain National Park en route to Asheville. The music portion of the trip was put in abeyance for a few days as we visited with our niece and her family in Asheville. Though there is plenty of music to be had in and around Asheville, we wanted to take a few days of rest and family time.

Friday, March 25 – Asheville to Bristol

We bid adieu to our niece and her family after a fine, restful visit. We headed north with one more music stop on our agenda. Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia, is the home of country music’s “big bang” moment. We were heading to the Birthplace of Country Music Museum to learn more.

Bristol is only 90 minutes north of Asheville on Interstate 26 but we wanted to take a more scenic route on the Blue Ridge Parkway for a good part of the journey. Unfortunately, after only a few miles on the Parkway we learned the road was closed ahead due to downed trees. We backtracked and found our way to I-26 after all. We made it to Bristol in the early afternoon headed over to the museum.

Birthplace of Country Music Museum

Another Smithsonian affiliate, the Birthplace of Country Music Museum is quite impressive and well laid out. The introductory movie sets the stage, explaining the basics of the 1927 Bristol Sessions organized by Ralph Peer, sessions which featured the first recordings of the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers and about a dozen others. The exhibits let you listen to the recordings in some depth; I hadn’t realized there were so many other artists and songs, a total of 76 songs recorded by 19 performers. Five of those songs were from the Carter Family and two from Jimmie Rogers.

One can quibble with the historic significance of the music recorded over those two weeks in 1927, as pointed out by Encyclopedia Virginia. Country or hillbilly music had been popular since at least 1924 and Ralph Peer was playing catch-up for his new bosses at Victor when he brought his recording equipment to Bristol. The templates for new market genres of “country music” and “race records” were already formed, segregating music styles that sprang from the same roots. While the Carter Family and Jimmie Rogers were “discovered” at the Bristol Sessions, it was years of further, more famous recordings and performances that cemented their Hall of Fame status. But these recordings were done in Bristol and Bristol now lays emphatic claim to being country music’s birthplace. So be it. It makes for a good tourist promotion — we wouldn’t have come to town otherwise.

The museum rounds out its displays with a survey of other artists from the region and a nod to the wide expansion of country music in the decades that followed, but there’s not a lot of cohesion to the grab bag of ground it tries to cover. There was a fun special exhibit on the origins of Mountain Dew that was interesting but not very closely tied to the world of music.

The museum is also home to Radio Bristol with a DJ broadcasting live from a glass-walled booth. It was interesting to watch and listen for a while, though there’s no more spinning of disks or playing tapes — just hunts and pecks on a computer keyboard. I downloaded the Radio Bristol app and we enjoyed listening to it on our ride the next day, but I haven’t made it a regular habit. There was also a nice, small concert venue that showed an endless stream of recent performances recorded on site, also available on the museum’s YouTube page.

State Street in Bristol straddles the Virginia/Tennessee border which makes a nice gimmick and a photo opportunity that we passed up. We got back in the car and drove a little bit around town but our exploring juices were just about run dry so we headed back to the hotel for an early evening. This road trip had just about run its course. The next day was one last drive to get back to my home.

Afterword

It was, altogether, a very good journey. I’m very glad I took the trip, glad that the Road Scholar portion worked well, glad that we added extra days to see more of what the tour missed, and glad that I’ve had time for further research and to write up this summary. I’ve learned a lot and have a lot to learn. I hope this summary helps if you have interest in anything similar. This was a journey into America’s musical and historical roots that I highly recommend.

The trip mostly met my expectations in terms of learning more about the roots of American music — I was able to see most of what I wanted to see. It would have been nice to get a little more intimate exposure to actual musicians and music performances but that wasn’t really in the cards or on our itinerary. This was a trip grounded more in history and museums rather than current live performances.

The trip did little to support any grand illusions of “discovering America” or “taking the pulse of flyover country.” We stayed firmly within a tourist bubble and any “real Americans” we spoke with were at best in a service industry related to tourism. We didn’t make any great efforts to break out of that tourist bubble either. That said, I was pleasantly surprised that the parts of Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina and Virginia we saw did not feel at all foreign. We saw only a couple of Trump signs on the whole trip, balanced by a couple of Biden bumper stickers here and there. (For that matter, it’s worth noting that the Trump flag that flew for more than a year less than a mile from my house has finally come down. Phew!) There were lots of signs for local elections but none of them struck us as inflammatory or less than civil, nor were there any Confederate flags or other nonsense. What we saw was, for better of worse, pretty much your typical homogenized American sprawl amid a lot of green and pleasant countryside.

I haven’t yet drawn any grand conclusions about the unified sphere of American music. I’ve been exposed to a lot of older music I hadn’t known. I loved the database at the National Museum of African American Music that gave a little bio for each artist, their key songs, who influenced them, who were their peers, and who they in turn influenced. I’d love to have that available online. I’d also love a reference source for who played on what songs — a guide to the session players, studios and producers behind the scenes. The trip has deepened my knowledge and appreciation for American music of multiple genres, the connections between them and their links to locale and history.

The trip has spurred me to listen to a broader range of music and explore more music history. I’ve lately embarked on the podcast “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs” which I’m finding informative, if a little pretentious. It should keep me busy for a while — I’m on episode 12 of what will eventually be 500. I will keep listening and learning and will let you know when I arrive at any conclusions.

One of the things I was looking forward to in taking this trip was learning more about the ineffable connective tissue that makes music magic. What makes one song or performer connect with me (or anyone) when so many others don’t? It’s some combination of lyrics, stories, musicianship, rhythm, melody, harmony, performer…all of it has to come together in the right alchemy to make a memorable connection. When it does, it can shoot straight to my heart, raise goosebumps and make me weep. What is that?

I have to admit that during the trip itself I didn’t get very far down the road on that question. We saw few actual performances and though we listened to a lot of music it was mostly in snippets, not conducive to moments of transcendence, though I certainly enjoyed learning more of the interconnected relationships among many of my favorite songs, musicians and their historical contexts. However, two concert experiences in proximity to the trip did bring highly emotional moments, among the best musical experiences I’ve enjoyed in many years.

  • Just before the trip, my sister and I saw Allison Russell perform in support of her deeply personal and terrific debut album (after 20 years in the business), Outside Child. Her amazing and difficult life story deftly unfolded during the set and built to a happy and joyful present.
  • A few weeks after the trip, I saw Molly Tuttle in support of her excellent Crooked Tree album. The high quality musicianship and infectious, relatable songs made for a highly satisfying evening with several goosebump moments.

It’s still very hard for me to put a finger on what makes that magic happen with music. I’m delighted when it does, and this trip fostered a deeper appreciation for the musicians that commit their lives to delivering those moments. There is an alchemy to conjuring all the elements needed, and to being open to receive them at the right moment, but when it all happens it sparks joy and maybe even rewires a bit of our lives.

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Last updated on April 9, 2023