Race Horses to the Poets of Nashville: Friday on the Road

Pulling out of Waverly, we headed through rolling wooded roadsides and small towns to the Belle Meade Plantation from which the blood lines of most of the Derby winners can be traced. We toured the house and grounds, once again getting a glimpse of the history of Tennessee. Walking around the grounds we looked in the dairy, the slave quarters, and the cabin in which the people lived while the big house was being built. Every so often, a line of kids with their blue and grey caps would cross our path as they participated in day camp.
We fought the late morning Nashville traffic to our next stop, lunch at Hog Heaven, supposedly Nashville's best bar-be-cue. To describe it as rustic would be an embellishment.

Located near the Centennial Park and Vanderbilt, it was doing a thriving lunch trade. We ate on a bench of a table and chatted with a local woman. After sandwiches, we circled by the Parthenon and found our way to the Upper Room Museum and chapel where we viewed wonderful stained glass depicting Pentecost and a large wood carving covering the front of the sanctuary of Di Vinci's Last Supper.








It was a moving piece of art work.
In the Agape garden is a wonderful sculpture of Jesus and the woman at the well.<

Our next stop was the Country Music Hall of Fame. After we mortgaged the farm to pay the parking fee, we spent a couple of hours enjoying the exhibits and reliving the music of a century of country artists. The museum has three floors and is well done with a good mix of media and memorabilia. We were somewhat bemused by the fact that we remembered most of the artists and things featured in the Hall.

Hotel Indigo, our pricelined choice of accommodations, was next on our itinerary. We unloaded and the valet parked our car. Unfortunately, we could not priceline parking! We accept this as the cost of spending time in a city. Our room is on the ninth floor and is quite comfortable.

Our last activity for the day was The Bluebird Cafe.
Our navigational device took us by way of I-40 and I-440, not something I would recommend during rush hour. What awaited us made the harrowing trip worthwhile. We were treated to two hours of back to back songs sung by the poets who wrote them. Some have been recorded; some, not. But there was not a bad song in the entire evening.

The performance was in the round with Barbara Cloyd (http://barbaracloyd.com) leading off. Her introduction to her first song was, "Good judgement comes from experience which comes from bad judgement." She sang about love gone wrong. Tommy Karlas opened with a song full of good images including the line, "Dream a little dream, sitting by a stream," a slow ballad. Will Nance, who seemed to have had the most songs recorded, opened with "Where Have I Been All My Life" which is on the new George Strait album. Jeremy Spillman opened with a song that began with "I was 14 when my daddy's old man caught me half way through my first beer" whose refrain was "I come from a long line of sinners like me."

These people had their guitars, their voices, and their words. That was more than enough for a wonderful evening. There is such a purity to hear the songs sung by their actual creators. It is so much more pure than what comes out of the studios today.

We drove back to the center of town through busy evening traffic, marveling at the number of people on the streets. The lights of Nashville lit the evening as we closed the drapes and called it a night.

Flatlands to Rolling Woodlands: Crossing Western Tennessee

With the sparkling farmlands washed clean, we headed East under a clear blue sky to Jackson, Tennessee where we left highway 70 to explore. Our first find was a State Farmer's Market where folks had set up their home grown bounty for sale. Squash, beans, okra, tomatoes (Green and ripe), peppers, egg plant (black and white), onions, corn, blue berries, plums, and black berries all created displays rivaling art. We enjoyed chatting with the sellers and Klep left, eating a bag full of black berries, fresh and sweet.

Our next stop is one of the top ten tourists destinations in Tennessee, The Casey Jones Museum and Ole Country Store. We both love trains, so this was a hit with us. The movie filled us in on the facts of who Casey Jones was and what had really happened to him. The exhibits were another good history lesson. The video of the reenactment of the hearings following his death was a reminder that spin is not a new concept. The replica of old engine number 382 brought back memories of the pre-diesel trains. We enjoyed climbing up into it and looking around and imagining what it would have been like to ride up there, speeding down from Memphis to New Orleans.
The house that Jones lived in has been preserved and is on the site.

We finished our morning at the Old Country Store which is actually old and has several food options for lunch. We are avoiding buffets, so we opted for the hot line where Klep chose a vegetable plate and I had some fried chicken, green beans, and mashed potatoes. Their food was good, Southern fare. They had fresh fried peach pies, one of which we shared.

We left, still humming Casey Jones, in the noon heat and headed up the road listening to a m radio to Milan to find the West Tennessee Agricultural Museum that our friend Judy had told us about. The museum has just about every agricultural tool on display that was used to change the wilderness into farmland and then farm it through two centuries. An old log cabin, complete with furnishings and an honest to goodness outhouse, complete with corn cobs, sit next to the museum building. We were the only people in the building which we explored for an hour or so. The farm wife's tools were there, too and we enjoyed looking at the old ice boxes, quilts, and other things.

We reconnected with highway 70 for our next stop in Huntingdon, where we explored The Dixie. We watched a children's pottery class and were allowed to go in the museum dedicated to Dixie Carter and Hal Holbrook which is in the basement of the building housing the performance center. We found more classes going on here with one area dedicated to summer programs in creative writing.

The square around the courthouse in Huntingdon was beautiful and busy. It looked like a good place to live and raise a family. We left and headed toward Camden which was sprawling and full of the usual fast food restaurants and other things we find common. Huge clouds were building by this time and a place to stop was on our mind. The winds picked up as we headed toward Waverly and the drops were falling when we started looking for a B & B which we did not find. We settled for a motel on the western side of Waverly, checked in, and watched the storm play out.

After the rain, we headed down Highway 13 in the Hurricane Creek area which was heavily wooded and beautifully rolling. I could tell my Tennessee boy was starting to enjoy the curves. We found an unremarkable restaurant geared to the tourists who come to this area for the Loretta Lynn Ranch. We had an unremarkable supper where Klep enjoyed another bowl of beans, onions, and cornbread, and headed back to call it a night.

Today we head into Nashville for the weekend.

Soul of the City; Soul of the Countryside: Headed East on 70

"Shout your memories" is one of the lessons at the Civil Rights Museum. If generations do not pass along the stories, they will be forgotten. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, a group got the money to save the Lorraine Motel from demolition and it is now the National Civil Rights Museum. We spent Wednesday morning in an intense history lesson about the struggles our country went through and is going through so that every man, every woman in our country has the same rights under the law. Much of what we viewed, we lived through. Maturity and more experience with diverse people gave us a different view from what we were getting as white children in the south. We shared the journey through the years with a diverse group of people at the museum. I heard one older woman standing in front of the motel room murmur, "Oh, Lord! Why did they hate us so!"

The final part of the museum is across the street at the rooming house from where James Earl Ray fired the shot across the street that was a pivotal point in our history. There is a great deal of doubt that he was the only one involved in this, but I will leave that to the theorists. There are a great many things in our history about which we may never know the truth.






Our last stop in Memphis was Alcenia's for lunch. The menu tells the patron that "Alcenia's was founded on Grandma Alcenia's dishes prepared from those unreachable roots of the soul that only a tried and true soul food cook can read. Baby Alcenia provides the inspiration to deliver the soul from our hearts to your stomach." We knew that we would be greeted with a hug and the owner-creator of Alcenia's(BJ Chester-Tamayo) did not disappoint. I felt more like I was having lunch in her home than in a commercial place. The place is in an old building at North Main Street. Colors, a bright orange, surrounded us as soon as we entered with purple, green, and yellow table cloths. A large painting of an older woman holding a child is on one wall, and other paintings and bright objects circle the room. We were the first customers and by the time we left most of the other ten or so tables had someone siting at them. The food is fresh and is prepared after it is ordered, so this is not a quick food place. It is tasty. We ordered the fried chicken and vegetables which included yams, green beans(fresh), cabbage, and hot water corn bread. There are spices and seasonings in the vegetables that I can't identify, but they were very, very tasty.

After we reluctantly (I think Klep really wanted dessert even though he had no room for it} left Alcenia's, we turned ourselves around, drove by the huge St. Jude's Hospital complex and headed north on Highway 51 to Henning to see the new Alex Hailey Museum and Interpretative Center which doesn't officially open until August. We drove through a summer early afternoon passing a sign that told us it was 102 degrees at 1:08 p.m. Blue chicory, golden daisies, orange native day lilies lined roadways and we passed fields of young soybeans. Henning was on the old road and we drove into a small neat town and found the house where the author of Roots spent much of his childhood listening to the tales of his grandmother.

We toured the house which is a well built house constructed near the beginning of the twentieth century by Hailey's maternal grandfather. One of the most interesting displays in the new museum is the replica of a slave ship built so that people can actually put themselves in the space that was provided for slaves being brought to this country. It is no surprise that so many died on the trip over.

A thunderstorm took us out of Henning and north to Ripley which is known for its delicious tomatoes and, in our family, as the place Klep spent a summer working on a surveying team during his years as an engineering student at UT. The old square is still in Ripley with a large brick courthouse in the center. The stores around the square are prosperous looking and the preservation efforts have been quite effective. We headed off to find the place where he rented a room and the beautiful old three storied brick home with its large inviting porch was still there.






We headed toward the river on highway 19 and a few miles out of town Klep showed me the bluffs which I describe as a mini-mountain range. And then....there was flat land to the right and left of the road. We rode for miles in between corn fields. After nearly twenty miles we glimpsed the river and then we were curving around and headed back through the flats to town. The elevation in the flats was around 300 feet above sea level; on the bluffs, 500.

We connected with Highway 70 in Brownsville, "A Good Place to Live," a neat town with well manicured lawns. We passed sunflower fields just beginning to bloom and passed through Nutbush the childhood home of Tina Turner.

With the day winding down, we found a clean motel, a little family restaurant, and settled down for the evening in an area which looks much like the farmlands of the Midwest.

Blues, Bar-b-cue, and Rock and Roll

The blues are still pouring out on to Beale Street, the carriages still carry tourists, and the lights are still bright, but we are ready to call it a day. Today was a delicious taste of Memphis from Graceland to the Sun Studios, and Stax Museum of American Soul Music.

The sun was marvelously bright when we awoke before seven at the Holiday Inn Express. At breakfast, I chatted with the woman in charge of the buffet, Maggie, an attractive woman about my age with a ready laugh and a happy smile. I could tell that she was a soul sister and we had a good visit. I asked her what two places she would recommend that we visit today and she said Graceland and the Lorraine Motel, two contrasting sites and both important to the Memphis experience. She also shared other things about Memphis and her family. Her good bye hug was a good way to get the day started.

Graceland was everything that we had expected. We got there at opening time and the crowd was already building. Rob had told us to get the platinum ticket and do the whole shebang instead of going for the mansion only. He knows our proclivity for pinching pennies well! By the time we got the senior and AAA discounts, the price wasn't much more than the regular ticket. We rode the shuttle over to the house and toured it and the grounds. The thing I found the most remarkable was the reverence that most of the people showed at the site. It was much quieter than most crowds were in the major cathedrals of Europe.

After we had been through all the house, grounds, memorial garden, little museums, and gift shops, we found ourselves washed down with sweat and more than a little ready for lunch. We found a bar-b-cue joint that was advertising a half price rib tip plate. A & R was a joint, but their lunch was outstanding. We really liked their sweet sauce and we enjoyed the combo of beef and pork ribs served with a side of fried okra, slaw, and bread. We shared a plate and there was more than enough food for both of us. There was a steady stream of customers in and out, picking up orders.

We were disappointed when we got to the Civil Rights Museum that it was closed today. We met a helpful young man as we were looking for the entrance who asked us to come back tomorrow and ask for him. We headed next to Sun Records where we had the tour of the studio where Rock and Roll was born. It wasn't fancy, but when we left, we had a good understanding of the history. As we waited for the tour to begin, I collected another person, Vic who was manning the cash register and "holding forth."

By this time, I was getting a little cranky, but Klep pushed us forward and we headed down to another part of town to the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. The tour started with an excellent movie filled with information and good music. After that a self-guided tour took us through the exhibits, including Issac Hayes' 1972 Caddy. I was glad that Klep had persisted. We had the museum pretty much to ourselves. It was the least crowded of all the venues.

Our navigational device brought us to the Crown Plaza (Priceline.com reservation) by the scenic route with a drive by the mighty Mississippi River. We took a rest before we ventured back out for dinner at Charlie Vergos' Rendezvous along with almost every other tourist and businessman in Memphis tonight. The restaurant is in the basement of an old building several blocks north of Beale. We rode the trolley down to near the restaurant, put our names on the list, and waited for over an hour. We killed time people watching. I definitely did not have to feel under dressed with the other people there. My casual tee and capri pants was a little formal compared to many of the patrons.

The food was delicious, charcoal ribs done with a good dry rub. The atmosphere was interesting with the old brick walls and the tin covered ceilings. The service, once we were seated, was friendly and quick.

Beale street, our after dinner destination was ablaze in neon. We found an older group playing some good blues, but there were no seats. When they took a break, we headed up the street and called the hotel shuttle.

This place by the big river has a rich past, as rich as the soil that lines the banks of the river. This city has had more than its share of talent pass through it over the years. Beautiful homes line the high bluffs facing the river and sad, sad houses in disrepair occupy other sections. By and large, the most beautiful thing we have found here are the people who are warm and friendly. We feel right at home with those who call Memphis home.

Evening: Day one

A small sliver of a moon hangs in a royal blue sky accompanied by one lone star as evening comes to us just south of the state line. We finished out the day at one of the Nealey's three Memphis area barbecue restaurants for a quick supper after twelve hours on the road.

Lush fields, Queen Anne's lace, puffy mimosa trees blooms, magnolia blooms, crepe myrtles, little towns and large, neat trimmed lawns have all flown by us as we traveled through Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. We crossed over the Tallahatchie River and it was all Klep could do not to break out in "The Ode to Billy Joe."

Late afternoon a dwindling supply of gas forced us off our limited access road, Highway 78 in northwest Alabama, to find a station. We also needed a WalMart for new clip on shades for me. We found both in a little town, Hamilton, Alabama. An added bonus was the Hamilton Drive-In where we got late afternoon dairy drinks. At WalMart we were thrilled to find a lovely, helpful woman Helen who helped me find the right kind of shades that would fit my glasses. We shared where we were headed and found that she has a sister in one of the little towns we will visit later this week.

Tonight at the Interstate Barbecue, our waitress Rachel made my day by asking if I were really old enough for the senior special. That girl will go places! She shared that her grandmother refuses to tell any of them how old she is, but wants the discount for the senior items.

Tomorrow after we rest our road weary bones, we will be heading into the city. Our tentative plan is to begin at Graceland and go from there.

Our hearts are sad tonight. Our dear Traci's father Sol passed away this morning. He was a unique man with a lovely spirit and keen sense of humor. I feel richer for having known him.

Day One: Dash to Memphis

Chirping birds woke me, an unusual event since I generally am up before them. The air still has a little evening coolness to it, the colors of the hydrangeas and crepe myrtles are brilliant, the house is painted, the bags are packed, and we are headed to Memphis. The months of anticipation are behind us. We have planned and researched as much as we want to. It is time to see where the trip takes us.

Today we will see parts of four states, more of Alabama than we really want to see, but there will be beauty. We will listen to a taped book while we roll through the early summer farmlands and small towns. I pray that the day goes well.

Tonight we will be just outside Memphis, ready to enter Tennessee from the west.

Painting the House: The Text

Sunday afternoon was a washout. While I watched mindless television in between satellite blackouts, Klep discovered how to add pictures to the blog. This is in preparation of our long awaited road trip across Tennessee the long way.

Painting the house has delayed this trip. It has also given us more time to plan, research, and fine tune what we want to do and see as we enter the Volunteer State in Memphis and take old highway 70 all way to North Carolina.

Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville will all be important stops, but what we most want to focus on are those small towns which dot the highway and the wonders of nature that will be right off the road. We want to avoid chain restaurants and motels. We are considering bed and breakfasts and even a "rustic" cabin for places to stay. We are searching out where we can find the music of the region and several good possibilities have come up.

We have also had a little additional time to tie things up here before we take off. The yards have to be mowed, mail has to be stopped, house watchers lined up, vegetable pickers invited to harvest, etc., etc., etc.

If the painter turns the last corner today, we will probably make it to the start line before the weekend. Otherwise, surely, I will be blogging about Graceland the first of next week!