04 May 2024

The American South

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Magical musical tour

The birthplace of Elvis, and where he died, Dolly Parton’s studio and the Muscle Shoals Sound – Max Davidson discovers that America’s lyrical South never misses a beat

The American South - The famous French Quarter, New Orleans

The American South - Sun Studios where Elvis began recording

The American South - The neon stip in Memphis, Tennessee

1 The French Quarter, New Orleans 2 Sun Studios where Elvis began recording 3 The neon stip in Memphis, Tennessee

THE Mississippi stretch of Highway 61, aka the Blues highway, immortalised in a Bob Dylan album, may be an iconic route for music-lovers, but it would not qualify as picturesque.

This isn’t the wholesome America of cereal commercials, but a bleaker world: mile upon mile of flat highway, punctuated by petrol stations and fast-food outlets. A cemetery flashes past, then a Baptist church, then a tiny hardware store, then an enormous billboard promising Affordable Divorce.

On the car radio, someone is singing about feeling so lonesome he could cry. From the parched cotton fields of Mississippi to the grimy backstreets of downtown Memphis, little in this landscape spells happiness.

Only music offers an escape – whether it’s the twang of a guitar at a country music festival, or a man singing the blues in a juke joint, with his hat at an angle and his eyes half shut.

You are hooked, again and again. Some of the most influential figures in 20th-century recordings – Charley Patton, Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, Tammy Wynette, BB King – came from this unfashionable corner of America, where the states of Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi meet.

You feel a tingle of real excitement

As you start to connect with their human roots, and explore the cultural origins of their music, you feel a tingle of real excitement. No one embodied the rags-toriches American Dream more vividly than Elvis Presley, born in Tupelo, Mississippi, at the height of the Great Depression.

The little clapboard house where he was born is so tiny it brings a lump to your throat as you walk through the front door; just a 10ft x 10ft bedroom, with a copy of Kipling’s If on the wall, and an even smaller kitchen.

‘We were just ordinary kids,’ remembers Guy Harris, one of Elvis’s school friends, now a sprightly septuagenarian ‘We’d go fishing in the creek, then hang out by the cinema.’ The contrast with the nouveau riche excesses of Graceland, near Memphis, where Elvis met a wretched death in 1977, could hardly be starker.

At Graceland, conspicuous consumption soars to absurd levels, epitomised by the solid gold sink in the humungous private jet. Graceland, for all its schlock, is well worth a visit, and has rightly become a place of pilgrimage for rock ‘n’ roll fans.

But if you want to get the best out of this part of America, cast your net wider. The region may lack the glamour of Manhattan, or the swagger of New Orleans, but it is perfect for T a fly-drive holiday themed around music, with a host of great places in a comparatively small area.

All they cared about was making music

One of the most haunting sites is the street corner in Greenwood, Mississippi, where Robert Johnson, one of the early blues singers, died at the age of 27, poisoned by strychnine. The centenary of his birth falls this year, and his memory is kept alive in a lovingly tended museum.

The life of an itinerant blues singer, playing for tips on street corners, might have been precarious, but it was preferable to the back-breaking work of picking cotton for 16 hours a day on plantations that had hardly changed since the Civil War.

The spectre of racial segregation, ingrained in the history of the South, is never far away. Clarksdale, Mississippi – regarded as the home of the blues – is where Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues, met her death in 1937.

The singer was in a car crash and was treated in a blacks-only hospital; she couldn’t go to the much better- equipped whites-only hospital.

It is a depressing tale, and there are plenty like it. Memphis is where Martin Luther King was shot in 1968. The National Civil Rights Museum, on the site, is a monument to hate-filled times.

But if anything brought the races together, it was music. At the Stax Studio in Memphis – now a museum dedicated to soul music – black and white musicians worked alongside each other in the Sixties, without giving race a second thought.

You fall under the spell of the music

All they cared about was making music. The studio is in a scruffy part of town, with half the houses boarded up or falling down, but played its part in a glorious chapter in music. The Sun Studio, in another part of Memphis, is equally evocative.

Here, young Elvis walked in off the street and begged the woman at the front desk to let him do a demo recording.

You can still hear it when you visit the studio: raw, hesitant, but so rich in promise that it makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Other studios that music buffs will want to visit include the Fame studio in Florence, Alabama, where the Muscle Shoals Sound was born, and the RCA studio in Nashville, Tennessee, where, if you look closely, you can see the dent in the wall made by Dolly Parton’s car.

The more you explore the region, the more you fall under the spell of the music and the people who made it. You also understand the music better.

From the Gibson guitar factory in Nashville, where we marvelled at the sheer craftsmanship behind the instruments, to the Alabama Music Hall of Fame near Muscle Shoals, where we cut our own recording of Sweet Home Alabama, there was not a bum note all week.

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