DESTINATIONS DEEP SOUTH ESCORTED TOURS LEFT:
Robert’s Western World
RIGHT:
The Ryman Auditorium
BELOW: Grand
Ole Opry
his quiff and checked shirt looks like he’s hopped out of a time machine from the 1950s. The tour brings to life the tales of Elvis Presley, Dolly Parton and the Everley Brothers, who all recorded unforgettable tracks here between 1957 and 1977, helping to establish Nashville’s identity as a recording centre and the birthplace of the Nashville Sound. The room remains almost as it was – clients can even play Elvis’s piano – and as Brad dims the lights, like Elvis used to, and plays a recording of Are You Lonesome T
The King is in the room with us. A block away from the honky
tonks is the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, a country music mecca that traces the
By the time the Grand Ole
As a recording of Are You Lonesome Tonight? plays, for a moment The King is in the room with us
onight?, for a moment
genre’s origins from its redneck roots to its modern guise. If this is the classroom of country music, then the nearby Ryman Auditorium is, quite literally, the church: the Mother Church of Country Music started life as the Union Gospel Tabernacle, built by riverboat captain Thomas G Ryman in the 1880s.
Opry radio show came to the Ryman in 1943, those sitting on the polished pews came for the music – Hank Williams used to sneak out across the road to Tootsies to drink in between sets, and Johnny Cash kicked the lights in during one performance. The show changed history by making country music famous and tying it inextricably to Nashville, and to the Ryman itself.
w MEMPHIS The city built on rock ’n’ roll swings to a decidedly different beat from its country-loving cousin. It might lack the music business-like gloss of Nashville but I fall in love with its soul, which we hear in the melodies of
Aretha Franklin, Isaac Hayes and Booker T Jones, who grew up here; and taste in the restaurants dishing out Memphis’s famed barbecue pork and dry ribs. Beale Street was a hub of the city’s blues movement in the 1940s, when stars such as BB King played in its bars. Today it’s a raucous, pedestrianised street where jazz, blues and rock ’n’ roll blare from speakers, local talents backflip for change, and tourists and locals flock to drink beer and dance. At Stax Museum of American Soul Music, we learn how former recording studio Stax Records was a major player in the creation of Southern soul and Memphis soul music in the 1960s and 70s, while politically it stood for
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travelweekly.co.uk 2 June 2016
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