If you ever regarded Sunday as a day of rest, then do not stroll down Nashville’s Broadway which, at just after 9am, I discovered was - as they like to say there – livelier than a rattlesnake chewing a power cable.
Indeed, at the heart of the walkable downtown, even early on the Sabbath, Broadway’s dozens of honky-tonk bars are packed with Stetson-wearing, whooping and line-dancing tourists enjoying classy, all-day country bands as fans pour in for a rare glimpse of their celebrity owners, from Alan Jackson and Jason Aldean to Miranda Lambert and Lainey Wilson.
But, let’s be fair, even on a Sunday, you don’t come to America’s ‘Smashville’ to lie on a hotel rooftop sunbed, sipping Tennessee Mules, when you have wall-to-wall bands and country music history to devour, as well as oodles of Deep South food to experience.
For offbeat action, I decided to risk being the only guy (apart from the driver) among a busload of very lively elderly American ladies on one of the most gossipy trips in town, the ‘Homes of the Stars’ guided tour. What great fun we had poking our noses and cameras at the swanky suburban mansions of such Country luminaries as Taylor Swift, Luke Combs, Tammy Wynette and Sheryl Crow.
Such memorable moments were a regular feature of my 10-day-1000-mile road trip through America’s Deep South in which I explored the music, food and civil rights history but, most of all, discovered if the region’s reputation for hospitality and friendliness has survived the arrival of Trumpian politics to this great nation.
With my starting point being ‘Nash Vegas’, the city offered its mesmerizing mix of music, absorbing museums (my favourites were the highly interactive National African American Music centre and the former home of Country’s Grand Ole Opry, the Ryman Auditorium, where shamed President Nixon once played the piano) as well as stacks of that Southern Barbecue.
After three all-action big city days, I nosed my hired Chevvy Equinox a couple of hours southward along Highway 43 across the Tennessee state line into Alabama, where family, food and faith matter most in the folksy small towns where the South shows its true heart and soul.
First stop was pretty Florence, where I was soon at the iconic Muscle Shoals Recording Studios, staring at the cramped toilet cubicle in which Keith Richards had locked himself for peace and quiet in 1969 to sit and finish off the ‘Wild Horses’ track for the Rolling Stones multi-million-selling Sticky Fingers album – one of their best.
Next day, I was heading two hours south to Alabama’s former iron and steel boom town, Birmingham (named in 1871 after England’s second city) which will forever be burned into the world’s consciousness as the place in 1963 where four Black girls – aged 11 to 14 years - were blown up and killed on a warm and rainy morning by a 15-stick dynamite timebomb planted by Ku Klux Klan members at the 16th Street Baptist Church. The church and the nearby civil rights centre offer memorable insights.
After another 90-minute drive further south down the relatively quiet interstate, I arrived at another former flashpoint centre, Alabama’s state capital, Montgomery, which was at the heart of the fight for Black voting rights.
Here I stood at the statue of Rosa Parks, the Black activist who refused to give up her bus seat to a White man there in 1955 and helped start an unstoppable juggernaut of change on the road to equality.
Most of her achievements and those of Dr Martin Luther King and others were captured over the next few days, as I viewed the huge and moving slavery memorial pieces in Montgomery’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park and took an eerie early morning walk across the mist-shrouded and rusting Edmund Pettus Bridge, at Selma, which was the scene of the ‘Bloody Sunday’ violence by police and White power supporters against peaceful marchers.
Nowadays the South is littered with conscience-jarring museums and memorials to those distant times when Black people couldn’t eat, sleep, ride a bus or even go the same toilet as Whites, let alone vote or be educated.
Some sites, like the Medgar Evers bungalow in Jackson, Mississippi, gave me a shiver of disbelief when I was shown the bullet hole still in a kitchen wall and the steel bath where the peaceful campaigner’s children sheltered, shaking in fear, on the night he was shot dead outside by a White assassin in 1963.
There were times when I was left wondering how the profound cruelty of slavery was sanctioned by apparently God-fearing people in Europe and Africa, as well as the USA.
That issue aside, I was encouraged by the friendliness I met in so many places on this journey. Perhaps the most touching moment came in oak-shaded Oxford, the home of the late, great author William Faulkner, where I felt Southern charm at its best.
As I photographed the pretty 19th century town square early one morning, an elderly White man stopped to inquire about my camera before telling me he was also a photographer and a fine arts printer. He then invited me to his lovely home, introduced me to his wife and showed me round his studio. Indeed, lunch with them both would have followed if I had had the time.
Similar spontaneous moments happened almost every day, confirming that the warmth and hospitality shown to visitors still shines brightly in America’s Deep South, despite those less-than-inviting clouds hanging over the White House. It’s still a case of: “Welcome, y’all come on in.”
Deep South trip details:
Flights: You can fly direct from to Nashville with British Airways. Aer Lingus also operates a new direct link with four flights per week from Dublin and quick connections from several UK regional airports. For information on fares and schedules and to book, visit www.aerlingus.com
Packages: You can try a variety of itineraries with American Sky. These include direct return flights, car rental, hotels and driving instructions. Go to www.americansky.co.uk or call 01342 395531. Try other itineraries, including the Self Drive Discover the Deep South Tour at: www.deep-south-usa.com For individual states, go to: Alabama: www.alabama.travel ; Mississippi: www.visitmississippi.org ; Tennessee: www.TNVacation.com
For cut-price airport parking and hotels, try Holiday Extras: Go to www.holidayextras.com or call 0800 316 5678.
3. Contributed
A slave family cotton field sculpture at Montgomery Freedom Monument Sculpture Park Photo: Submitted
4. Contributed
Early morning at the Bloody Sunday Edmund Pettus bridge at Selma Photo: Submitted