Posted inTravels

Reflecting on My Road Scholar Music Cities USA Tour: Nashville to Memphis

June 9, 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 The backbone of the trip was built on the Road Scholar Music Cities USA Tour; this post focuses on my impressions from that tour.

For a more detailed look at our complete trip, see Music Roots Road Trip: Nashville, Memphis and More. I’ve also done two companion posts: Memphis Music Education and National Museum of African American Music Playlists.

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 Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia.

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 very centrally located Hyatt Place Nashville Downtown, which was our Nashville base for the Road Scholar tour. I thought the Musicians’ Hall of Fame Museum would be a good place to start because it featured music and musicians from Nashville, Memphis, Muscle Shoals and elsewhere.

Musicians’ Hall of Fame Museum

We walked 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. As recommended on the museum’s website, we 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 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 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 faceless 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.

Sunday, March 13 – Nashville

National Museum of African American Music

Our focus this day was the National Museum of African American Music (museum website). The museum controls the number of visitors per hour which means you need a timed reservation; we’d made ours online a few days before. If you are willing to give them an email address when you enter, 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.

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 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. 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.

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, a new upscale food hall with lots of dining options. We figured we should try a Nashville Hot Chicken sandwich from Prince’s Hot Chicken which had an outpost in the Hall.

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 and met our tour guide for the afternoon, Ron Harman.

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.

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 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 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.

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 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 obliged 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

We met in the hotel 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.

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 ordinary lunch. But the view was nice and the music pleasant enough. 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 the 20-minute jaunt 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 of the Opry 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. 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 found 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. I’m sorry to say none of the songs or performers were especially memorable for me. 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 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.

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 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 Luhrmann’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. 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. 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.

Beyond giving a better grounding in history, I wish that Road Scholar 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.  

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. 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. If you are interested in a more detailed look at our complete trip, including stops on the Mississippi Blues Trail, Muscle Shoals and Bristol, see Music Roots Road Trip: Nashville, Memphis and More.

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Last updated on April 9, 2023