In March 2022, Laurie and I embarked on a pilgrimage of sorts to learn more about the roots of American music. Our destinations included Nashville, Memphis, Muscle Shoals, Asheville and Bristol. This was a long-imagined trip for me and I was delighted that Laurie agreed to join me. Barb was happier that I went with someone rather than go alone — she was never a candidate for this journey — though I’m sure she would have preferred (on many levels) I didn’t go at all.
Here is my account of the trip in gory detail, in three parts: Nashville, Memphis, and Asheville/Bristol. I’ve also done companion posts, including my Memphis Music Education, National Museum of African American Music Playlists. I’ve posted a condensed summary of the trip (with no photos) for public viewing, along with public versions of my Memphis Music Education, National Museum of African American Music Playlists on Billzdaze.com.
- Wednesday, March 16 – Nashville to Memphis – Tina Turner Museum, Peabody Ducks, B.B. King’s Blues Club
- Thursday, March 17 – Memphis – Civil Rights Museum, Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum, Sun Studios
- Friday, March 18 – Memphis – Graceland, Beethoven Club
- Saturday, March 19 – Memphis – Civil Rights Museum, Walking in Memphis
- Sunday, March 20 – Memphis & Mississippi Delta – Mississippi Blues Trail, Grammy Museum
- Monday, March 21 – Memphis to Muscle Shoals to Chattanooga
Wednesday, March 16 – Nashville to Memphis
Our bus trip from Nashville to Memphis continued after our morning visit to Belle Meade Plantation. For the rest of the 3-hour trip, we had the option of watching documentaries on Elvis and B.B. King that Terrie played on the bus video system. I’d seen them both so mostly opted to watch the countryside roll by while listening to my Memphis playlist. Terrie hinted that we had a surprise stop planned about two hours away as a bathroom break.
After a couple of hours Terrie said we would be stopping 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 nearly nothing. 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.
We got to Memphis in time to quickly check into our hotel, the Hampton Inn & Suites Memphis – Beale Street, then walked over to see 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 never did go up to see their rooftop digs, but evidently for a duck it’s quite palatial.
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 in to reserved tables right near the bandstand. There was a good quasi-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. Laurie 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 any 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.
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.
I moved slightly faster than Laurie but 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, much 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.
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.
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 for 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. 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. Laurie thought we might find a pub with traditional Irish music but that didn’t seem very likely to me…especially since on the busride back to the hotel we passed what was probably the only Irish pub in town and it looked pretty packed with people already soaking up the suds.
Upon further deliberation Laurie and I decided to get some 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. We got a dip selection of pimento cheese and a sour cream/onion dip with pita slices, then each got soup – mushroom bisque for Laurie and She Crab soup for me in honor of Mom.
Laurie reminded me of Mom’s She Crab Soup episode involving Maggie and her transgender friend Alex who visited in Florida while Maggie was in college. They had lunch together and Mom ordered She Crab Soup, then got very flustered, saying “She crab…I mean He Crab…I mean, what does it matter? Why do they have to call it that?” Dad was perfectly nonflustered through the dinner but later Dad said, “There’s something wrong with that boy. He was talking about shaving but his face had never seen a razor,” to which Mom replied, “Oh Howard! You know what’s going on.” But clearly he didn’t.
Our server was a strikingly tall, thin, elegant black man who took care of us attentively. He reminded Laurie of a colleague of hers when she taught in Brazil; he became her best friend there, which launched her into a long, winding story involving the most memorable thing that ever happened to her on a beach. I can’t begin to capture it all without her input again, but it included a stolen wallet, a trip to Club Med in Martinique, meeting a very successful gay architect who was at Club Med as a dry-out location from his sex addictions in NY (because where else would a gay guy go to not have sex but a Club Med?), a journey to a spiritual/sex retreat in Pune, India (run by the same cult featured on Netlfix’s Wild, Wild Country documentary), a 48-hour 3rd-class Indian train ride, and a visit with the architect friend who then abandoned his young Indian companion and Laurie in Pune (or was it Mumbai?). Somehow it all made some convoluted sense in the moment but I can’t do it full justice. Laurie has led a far more interesting life than I have; I continue to encourage her to write more or record these stories in one way or another.
After the soups, which probably should have been enough, the waiter brought a BBQ shrimp appetizer I had ordered and a BLT salad for Laurie. The shrimp were sublime, the best thing I’ve eaten in a long time. They were swimming in a spicy BBQ sauce made with Abita beer and other secret ingredients – we’re guessing Pickapeppa Sauce – and a homemade Abita Beer Bread that was like a well-soaked cornbread. It was magical. Laurie’s salad was excellent but she was too full to have more than a few bites. We brought it home and it sat in my hotel room fridge for a few days before we sorrowfully put it to rest. We had such a good time at Itta Bena we stayed for one more round of wine, which in the end was way too many calories. I was stuffed but slept pretty well, but I wasn’t interested in breakfast the next day. Laurie reported that she felt overfed and overindulged and had a hard time sleeping. Nevertheless, it was a fine evening capping a good day.
Friday, March 18 – Memphis
Laurie and I skipped breakfast but made it to the bus on 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 check in with Barb later and read other 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. Why couldn’t there have been a passing mention of her? Others? There was Nancy Rooks, a maid who wrote a book about her experiences with Elvis. At least at Belle Meade they 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 at first 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. 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.
- 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?” which includes 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. I’m of the opinion that Elvis should be remembered and his accomplishments put in context, but he should not be personally deified.
We departed Elvisland on our bus for one final tour activity, a visit to the grandly named Beethoven Club for a final 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 old 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 a black voice 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 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 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…fold into my Memphis Music Education. Memphis music has deeply intriguing stories from the 1920s through 1968 when MLK was killed. After that, the music scene shifted from Memphis towards Nashville 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 a little bit of a call to action for taking things forward. 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 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.
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 Laurie and 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.
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, Terrie, and driver Gary.
I can’t say that we made any lifelong friends 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 Laurie 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 would 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, in particular Laurie and Barb. 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 and our niece Susanna and her 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, I felt that Laurie and I 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 around 8:30. The wash was pretty quick but it took a couple of cycles for things to dry. Eventually Laurie 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 things dried and by 11:30 or so we headed out to Gus’s Famous Fried Chicken. Just before we left, I bought tickets for the Civil Rights Museum which they suggested buying online. After consulting with Laurie 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. We both ordered two-piece platters, white meat for Laurie and dark for me. 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.
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.
Once inside, we again had to wait in the initial section devoted to the “Culture of Resistance” dedicated to the rise of slavery in America. This gave me a chance to read more closely (and photograph) the display about the kingdoms of Africa. I know a good deal more about the Atlantic slave trade than I did a year ago, but still know next to nothing about what was happening in Africa at the time. What was the cultural environment that supported the supply of enslaved people? These few panels are the start for another avenue of investigation to get a clearer view of the whole story. Eventually I need to learn more of the histories of the Mandinka people, Songhai, Yoruba, Ashante and Kingdom of Benin.
Once past this section and the introductory movie, 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. I went faster than Laurie and 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 Laurie 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; Laurie and I 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. While waiting for a table, I did enjoy the missing light on the Peabody Hotel sign. Who wouldn’t want to stay at the Peabo?
Sunday, March 20 – Memphis & Mississippi Delta
After our 9am breakfast, Laurie and I checked for a Lyft to the airport where we were to rent our car and there were plenty for $25. By the time we were ready to leave 20 minutes later, there were no Lyfts nearby and the cost ballooned to $60+. I don’t really understand the dynamics of ridesharing. We ended up getting a regular old taxicab for $40. The 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.
We got our Alamo rental car (a Toyota Camry, just like I’m used to) 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 for Laurie. We listened to my Memphis 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 Laurie 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 in the afternoon. Our first target would be the famous “Crossroads” where Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the Devil. We would also be passing 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 Laurie 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’ll 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 Laurie 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 Laurie decided she wanted to look for stamps so she could send postcards to Spain. 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 Valdosta, then 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. Laurie 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 that Laurie found 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 this surprisingly nondescript intersection. The marker with the sign is stuck in the middle of a traffic island that is somewhat risky to reach. Laurie braved it but said there wasn’t much to see. 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. I had a chili cheese burger and Laurie had a grilled chicken sandwich; we shared some onion rings that were a little better than the sandwiches but not great. 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.
We headed onward 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. Rather like the Grammy awards themselves or MTV, it all reeked more of a publicity stunt and a tax writeoff than out of genuine respect for and education about the music of the Mississippi Delta.
I asked the fellow (or maybe it was actually one of the leaders with the high school group) 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 the 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, Laurie 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. Laurie 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 made good time all the way back to Memphis until three blocks from the hotel when we encountered near gridlock. The streets around Beale Street were closed and the road to our hotel was at a standstill. I wormed our way around downtown and eventually parked in the Peabody’s lot which was exorbitant for non-hotel guests. The guy at our hotel’s front desk encouraged me to try again to get to the Hampton Inn parking lot and by then the traffic started to flow at least a little bit, notwithstanding the dozens of bikers accumulated right below my hotel room window. We never figured out exactly why the traffic was so bad — folks seemed to treat it as a normal weekend thing. Despite the traffic and loud music blaring from every other vehicle, everyone seemed to take it all in stride.
We decided to dine that night 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. I ended up with grilled flounder and Laurie got fried shrimp. 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 see Susanna 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 just opened a few days earlier. The good citizens of Corinth were very excited.
After several hours we made it to Muscle Shoals. The main drag into town was one big strip mall which was distressing to Laurie. 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, especially to Laurie, 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.
We drove another hour or so to Chattanooga and found our hotel, another Hampton Inn (I was racking up those sweet Hilton Honors points). We didn’t think about there being a time change to Eastern Time, so by the time we got there 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 of Laurie 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 Laurie 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 Scholars and what we were doing. Small world. She eventually exchanged email addresses with Laurie (not me). We’ll see if anything develops from there (so far, not).
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.
While searching for restaurants on Yelp, I came across Cafe & Toast, a Vietnamese/Singapore restaurant that features Kaya Toast. Kaya is a coconut jam which they slather on white toast in Singapore for breakfast. Allie loved it when she studied in Singapore (I wasn’t a fan when I tried it, but to each his or her own). I sent the restaurant link to Allie and suggested she could open the Boston franchise. She replied that instead maybe she would buy them out someday. OK, that’s a plan.
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