Home of the blues!
The day started with a bit of drama llama. We were all just about ready to leave when it emerged that one of our group members wasn’t back from the night before. They had stayed out all night and failed to turn up at 9 am the next day. The very thought of staying up all night makes us feel old. Anyway, after a lot of phone calls and plenty of waiting around, she rocked up and we got underway.
The drive was pretty ordinary to be honest, we’re all getting used to the long drives, mostly just sleeping. We did have to cross the absolutely massive Mississippi River which took forever. The further East we are going the more green and leafy the scenery is becoming. A lot of the drive looked like the English countryside, very different from the vast open spaces and dry heat of Arizona.
(in front of the Mississippi River)
Not really sure what we expected from Memphis, but the city was lovely. ‘The strip’ is known as Beale Street and after checking in to our surprisingly fancy hotel, we had a wander along. Turns out it is only 2 blocks long, but plenty was happening; every bar had a live band, much like Austin, there was plenty of bikers, and street bars were selling 100 oz hurricanes. In case you didn’t know, hurricanes are a VERY strong drink and 100 oz is a lot of it. No-one stepped forward to have a go but that was probably for the best as that would undoubtedly be the last thing they’d remember!
Wandering along Beale Street we came to a park with some live musicians in. We started dancing along and much to Alice’s embarrassment, she got pulled up to the front to dance in front of everyone with a very enthusiastic lead dancer! Unfortunately Gillian felt the need to film the whole thing making Alice look like the biggest loser ever, just dancing on her own with everyone watching. It was absolutely hilarious.
After making a swift getaway, we found a place to eat at this awesome (yeah, American slang is starting to slip in to everyday conversation now!) restaurant called BB Kings. I’m sure you’re all much more educated in Blues music than we are, but BB King was a huge Memphis-based musician. There was a live band, good food and some intense air con (felt cold for the first time in weeks- still managed to moan about it though! ).
After dinner we wandered down Beale street again ‘soaking up the atmosphere’ and checking out a few souvenir shops. We also sneaked into a small blues club where a man was playing the harmonica remarkably well, but soon got kicked out when they realised we were underage. Managed to watch most of it through the window though!
At the end of the night, Gillian had gone back so it was only Bessie, Alice and a few other who found themselves back at BB Kings. We managed to commission an ‘over 21’ to buy us some Jack Daniels and Coke which worked surprisingly well. It’s not every day you sit in a bar in Memphis drinking Tennessee whisky and listening to a brilliant band! Not sure if it was the whisky, but the band was absolutely amazing! A mixture of Country, Blues and Rock. Definitely one of the best live performances we’ve seen!
16th June Thursday*WALKING IN MEMPHIS WALKING WITH MY FEET 10 FEET OFF OF BEALE* (that is a song)
Had a totally free day today to explore the city. The three of us teamed up with Sas and headed for the Peabody hotel for 11am. Fun facts: the Peabody hotel was built in the 1920s for the grand old sum of $2.5 million and it supposedly on the site of the Mississippi delta. It’s also famous for the ducks that swim in its fountain. The story goes that some guests were shooting one day and used real duck decoys. After a fair afternoon of this and a generous helping of Tennessee whisky they came back late to the hotel and put the ducks in the fountain as a practical joke. The next morning, probably feeling rather worse for wear, they came down to the lobby to find the ducks still there and a bunch of people crowding round. The tradition stuck from there- so now at 11am every day, the ducks are ‘marched’ from their enclosure on the roof of the hotel, down the elevator, and along the red carpet into the fountain (accompanied by a nice brass band). Seeing a niche in the job market, the Peabody hotel created a position called the ‘duck master’ whose job it is to care for these ducks’ every need. True to form, today the 4 ducks waddled out of the elevator at 11am and into the fountain.
(waiting for the ducks...)
(us with John, Sas, and the DUCK MASTER!)
To continue our cultural submersion into the Memphis way of life we walked (or rather waded through the dense heat) to the National Civil Rights Museum. Memphis was the city where Martin Luther King was killed and the museum was the site of his assassination. You could see the balcony of the motel he was shot. The museum was all about the struggle African Americans went through to gain equality in the southern States of America. It was important to learn about it, and incredibly moving, with anecdotes from ending slavery, racial attacks, and the Ku Klux Klan to the struggles they had in registering to vote. All four of us were in tears by the end- it would have been enormously difficult not to be. They showed a documentary about the life and death of Martin Luther King and you couldn’t help but be drawn in to his emotional fight for freedom.
We walked back downtown, grabbed some lunch:
walked to Sun Studios. Much more of a mission than first anticipated; every step was focused on the air con at the end. (We’ve noticed we spend a lot of time talking about air con, sorry about that but maybe it’ll give you an idea of the crazy heat!).
As I’m sure you’re all aware, Sun Studios is where Elvis Presley was discovered, and boy do they like to tell you about it. We heard all about his first recording, his call back a year later, and his exponential rise to superstardom. He was discovered when he was 19 and by the time he was 21 he bought Graceland for a cool $100,000. We even got to stand on the ACTUAL spot in the ACTUAL studio holding the ACTUAL microphone he sang into. I think some old ladies on our tour teared up a little at this point. We were encouraged to hold the microphone in the iconic Elvis pose, but as you can see we chickened out because we felt far too self conscious in front of the rest of the tour.
Little known to some, there are other stars who bought Sun Studios to fame, names such as Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, U2, Ringo Star, and Roy Orbison also recorded in this space. The studio had examples of the earliest record makers and memorabilia from Blues musicians like BB King, Ike Turner, and The Howling Wolf.
According to our tour guide, the earliest form of Rock and Roll was created when one of the speakers broke so some bright spark put newspaper inside to prop something up, the noise produced was crackly and rock and roll was formed.
Anyway we finished the tour feeling slightly more knowledgeable about the Blues and Rock and Roll (although, if we learnt anything, it would have been more than we knew before). Next we hoped on the Elvis-mobile (free shuttle) back to Beale Street and couched in the hotel for a bit.
After complaining so much about the heat, tonight it actually started raining. So we complained a bit more about that. I think it’s the whole culture of being British and always having something to say about the weather- either that, or we’re just enormous moaners! In America they don’t seem to do anything by halves (subways, alcoholic drinks, cars-obviously I don’t mean half a car, they are just all very big!) and the weather is no exception. When it rained it really rained; thunder, lightning, the whole works. That night we made a mad dash for a Chinese called Wang’s (no, really) for eats. Gilza, after stuffing herself with French toast for breakfast, chicken for lunch, and a milkshake at Sun Studios, ordered just a single spring roll, much to the waiter’s (and everyone else’s) amusement. But with a gesture towards Chinese cuisine, she continued to eat the whole thing with chopsticks- quite an accomplishment.
That evening we wandered about a bit avoiding the rain and ended up back at BB Kings. The house band was playing. Without the intention of being hugely stereotypical, they were all black and looked like they should be in a gang. Instead, several of them were tooting away merrily on trumpets, one was rocking the guitar and the lead singer was a great fan of the jazz hands. They were brilliant! A great end to our ‘Memphis experience’.
17th June Friday Memphis to Nashville
*NOTHING LIKE A NASHVILLE PARTY* -Miley Cyrus
Quote of the day happened at breakfast. Alice was failing to make waffles and was scrapping the burnt bits of waffle off the metal plates with a plastic knife when the waitress says: “Don’t y’all burnt ya-self wid that lil’ thang” This is how that actually speak, can’t help but love people from the South.
A relatively short drive today, only 3 hours. Found out incidentally that so far we’ve driven the equivalent of 2 and a bit times around the circumference of the UK. MADNESS. Nashville, apart from being home to numerous country singers, is America’s music city. We were staying in the ‘Music City Hostel’ that comes with guitar-strumming, tattooed receptionists and wall murals everywhere. All of us were staying in a little house thing with 4 in a room, and one shower between 16. After a brief dash for the shower we hit downtown Nashville. When in country music’s capital it seemed to make perfect sense to eat at the Hard Rock Cafe. We had a few cocktails (they were virgin- don’t worry!) made by an enthusiastic barman practising his flaring skills then proceeded to eat ourselves into a coma.
Our hippy-friendly hostel had kindly given us free admission to the Wild Horse Saloon restaurant/club. We were branded with the big permanent blue cross on our hands- a sign of being underage and entered into a huge space with a live band and dance floor (although some of us decided to ask instead for smiley faces to be drawn instead of the crosses). It turned out to be cowboy spotting central. Cowboy boots and hats were flying everywhere on the huge dance floor moving along to country music. The venue is famed for its’ line dancing lessons and we happily obliged.
Line dancing is not as easy as it looks. In fact it’s quite an unforgiving sport. If you step the wrong way or have a small pause, you will get trampled on by enthusiastic cowgirls and men wearing heeled boots, and be spotted by everyone ogling at us on the balconies. After not very long we soon retired to the safety of the pool tables where we spectacularly lost to everyone else in our group. By the end of the night we were still enthusiastic enough to walk back to the hostel.
(we're tired and are going off to bed- the rest of the photos will be put in tomorrow!) x
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