King and country: Following in the footsteps of Elvis, 40 years after his death
“Wise men say, only fools rush in…” We started the song a little tentatively, but by the chorus we were all belting it out with gusto: “Take my hand, take my whole life too, for I can’t help falling in love with you…”
There were 25 of us gathered around the microphone. Most of us had only just met and here we were recording an Elvis Presley classic in Nashville’s RCA Studio B – the exact spot where the singer had cut more than 40 of his best-known hits from the late Fifties to the Seventies. It seemed a timely tribute to Elvis, ahead of the 40th anniversary of his death on August 16 1977.
By the time we had all posed for photographs alongside his shiny black grand piano, in a corner of the scruffy, Formica-floored studio, our group was really starting to gel.
It was day one of a nine-day Southern Grace tour, a 650-mile journey through America’s southern states of Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana with escorted tour specialist Luxury Gold. We were staying two nights in Nashville, two in Memphis, and one in Natchez, before New Orleans and a three-night finale. There would be a lot of unpacking and repacking and a tight schedule, but we were in the hands of a savvy tour guide, Ann, who started as she meant to continue.
“Please call me 'Miss Ann’ – it’s the southern way of showing respect.”
Elegant and in control, she rewarded our punctuality with southern treats, including goo-goo bars and moon pie, and tolerated our occasional lateness with patience and good humour.
Miss Ann’s way to brief us on the history, geography and culture of the region included handing around quizzes, playing us southern music and, on longer journeys, regaling us with local anecdotes.
First stop was Nashville, the capital of Tennessee and of country music, celebrated in the airport arrivals hall with guitar-patterned carpets, honky-tonk muzak and hillbilly rocking chairs. At the city’s Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum was another of Presley’s grand pianos. This one was far more showy, a first wedding anniversary present from his wife, Priscilla, in 1968 and finished in 24-carat gold. It was part of the museum’s treasure trove of country kitsch – including the inevitable tasselled suits and spangled dresses – and archive films. By contrast, the Hall of Fame turned out to be a vast circular space, more a shrine, dedicated to great names of country music such as Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Kenny Rogers, Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton and, in tribute to his musical roots, Presley himself.
What I found fascinating was the backstory behind these big names, the pioneering 18th and 19th-century Irish, Scottish and English settlers who moved west across the American continent and over the Great Smoky Mountains, bringing with them the reels, ballads and folk songs from the homeland they had left behind.
USA most epic
African Americans, taken to the country as slaves, added their own sounds and musicianship to the mix, and the museum’s flickery footage showed these tough-faced fiddle and banjo players thrashing out their tunes, with young and old in checked shirts and dungarees, kicking their heels to the catchy sounds.
Here was love, loss, dislocation and the petty pleasures and sorrows of everyday life, and the music – performed on front porches, at barn dances, in the barrelhouses, in churches and in the sharecropped cotton fields – was a constant background beat to the desperately hard rural life. It was also the bridge that the otherwise divided black and white southern communities didn’t officially have in their daily lives until segregation laws were fully overturned in the mid-Sixties.
More than anything, it was radio that helped create this bridge, and scheduled into our tour was an evening watching a live broadcast of the Grand Ole Opry, launched in 1925 and America’s longest-running country music radio show, followed by a visit to the buzzing honky-tonk bars of downtown Nashville.
“Bless your heart,” drawled Miss Ann as the last late-night diehards of the group staggered up the coach steps the following morning, half an hour late for the 210-mile journey to Memphis. It’s a much-used southern phrase which equates to raising a critical eyebrow, roughly translated as “How foolish can you be?”
First stop in Memphis was the National Civil Rights Museum charting the history of slavery, Jim Crow segregation laws and the continuing battle for equality in the South and across the country. It is housed at the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King was shot on April 4 1968. The balcony where he fell, outside Room 306, has been preserved, and although the grimy bathroom of the boarding house across the street, from where James Earl Ray fired the fatal shot, is a reconstruction, it was still shocking to see.
The museum’s exhibits chart more than three centuries of American history leading up to that fateful day: the impact of the 1860s Civil War on the region and the poverty and chaos that ensued, and which, in parts of Mississippi, still has a hold. It was the 1790s invention of the cotton gin, a machine used to remove seeds from the fluffy white plant, that escalated the levels of captivity, cruelty and abuse in the South. Far more cotton could be produced but more cheap labour was required to keep costs down, and that demand fuelled the slave trade.
Elvis Presley: his 20 greatest songs
Fast forward 150 years, and we found ourselves following in the footsteps of a shy and unremarkable 19-year-old truck driver who spent his spare time absorbing the sounds of Beale Street’s predominantly black music bars. In the summer of 1953, Elvis Aaron Presley walked into Sun Studio, a small recording venue at 706 Union Avenue in the city’s suburbs. He paid $4 to record a take of My Happiness, and it was a strangely moving experience to hear that youthful but familiar voice replayed in the original location, unchanged since that day. Within four years he’d revolutionised popular music and had earned enough money to buy the Thirties mansion Graceland for just over $100,000.
Graceland was our next stop, a private after-hours visit to his colonial-style home and final resting place in the company of George Klein, a friend and fixer of Presley’s from eighth grade and a coffin bearer at his funeral. We were also to dine inside Graceland’s on-site car museum, a new itinerary highlight for Luxury Gold… even Miss Ann was excited; it was a first for her, too.
Graceland is hardly subtle. The “Jungle Room” has a green, Seventies shag-pile carpet, plastic plants and animal prints. The basement party den has a mirrored ceiling, bright yellow walls and three television screens; Elvis’s private jet, parked in the grounds, contains a double bed and gold-plated seat buckles; and his flared jumpsuits studded with rhinestones are reminders of his sartorial excesses.
But there was plenty to like about Graceland, too, especially the more down-to-earth side of his life – the family photographs, the pink 1955 Cadillac he gave to his mother and a set of swings for daughter Lisa Marie. Our tour guide, Klein, focused on this homelier theme – Presley’s love of Christmas and opening presents around the tree, dinners where he would order more burgers with his secret call button under the table, and the parties fuelled by Pepsi-Cola (Elvis was a strict teetotaller).
We left Graceland to head south for New Orleans, stopping overnight in Natchez, where the grand antebellum mansions were symbols of the huge wealth of the 19th-century cotton planters. The mansions, churches and simple reconstructed slave and sharecropping cabins at Frogmore Cotton Plantation in Louisiana were the last pieces in the musical jigsaw. It was in these cotton fields and churches of the Mississippi Delta that the African and Celtic gospel and folk traditions blended to create the palette of jazz, blues, bluegrass, country, rock, soul and r&b that spread through the region and around the world.
Our whistle-stop journey had traced those roots from the recording studios of Nashville to the jazz bars of New Orleans. At our last-night dinner of gulf shrimp bisque and chicken gumbo at Arnaud’s Restaurant in New Orleans, Miss Ann handed each of us a copy of the souvenir CD we’d recorded on our first day. We had certainly rushed in, and now we were rushing out again, but we couldn’t help falling in love with the extraordinary musical history of America’s Deep South.
The essentials
This nine-day Southern Grace tour offered by Luxury Gold (0800 533 5622; luxurygoldvacations.com) visits Nashville, Memphis, Natchez and New Orleans, and costs from £3,450 per person.
The price is based on a twin share and includes return flights, eight nights of luxury accommodation, daily breakfasts and five additional signature dining experiences, plus sightseeing, luxury coach transport, transfers, VIP airport transfers in Britain and the services of a travelling concierge throughout. Departures until October 2017.
At a glance | Southern Grace tour review
