We slowed down a bit this week, but there was some birthday fun and I have details on our trip through the Mississippi Delta and on to Ohio. This is a long post, covering almost three weeks of a busy road trip, so if you just want the bullet points, read the first bit. For the down and dirty details, read on.
Highlights:
Last day of New Orleans with Whitney Plantation and Airboat ride with Alligators and a bit more yummy food and good jazz.
Road Trip up Route 61, following “The Blues Highway” and The Natchez Trace. We stopped at blues museums, indian mounds, Sunken Trace, battlefields, and historical locations. We overnighted in Vicksburg and Clarksdale.
A Bit of Science amidst all the music–overnight in Huntsville, AL and a morning at the US Space and Rocket Center.
Nashville, to see our friend Adam and wade into the music and history there. A really fun long weekend touring around during the day and chasing down music at night. We actually went to the Grand Ole Opry!
Driving through a snowstorm to get to our kiddos in West Virginia and spend a birthday hanging out with some of our loves. Another trip on the sternwheeler, a favorite restaurant and a party (in a box).
The Details:
New Orleans
On our last day in New Orleans, we did two outings. The first was to Whitney Plantation. Unlike other plantation tours, this one is focused on the experience of the enslaved people and not the glory of the antebellum period. It was very interesting and educational. We learned about how the enslaved were chosen because of their knowledge and skills from their previous life. We saw some of the equipment they would have been using to raise and process sugar cane. We had a really informative tour, and because it was off season, we were the only two people on the tour. Just as it is in Europe, you can’t learn more about history without confronting the more painful and shameful parts of that history. But the next leg of our trip would help us see how that pain could be turned into something new.
The other outing was a tour of the swamp on an airboat. Sometimes, we avoid the tourist things. But sometimes the tourist things are great! We were two of four people on a sixteen passenger airboat piloted by Dewey. If you’ve never been on one of these vessels, it is a trip! Since they are propelled by a giant fan and they aren’t very deep into the water, you can go right over mud and plants and whatever else with no problem. We learned about the different habitats and some various birds. We also got up close and personal with the alligators. Since it had been so cold and the big ones were still warming up, they were very chill (pun!) and we could get a nice close look. Dewey even surprised us by pulling a baby gator out of his pocket so we could hold it. The ride was fast and thrilling and the scenery was beautiful. We ended the night with more great food (jambalya pizza!) and a bit more jazz.
We loved our first trip to New Orleans years ago, but we left this time with a greater love of the city and all it has to offer.
The Blues Highway, History, and The Natchez Trace
Nathan has been a student of several things about the Mississippi Delta in the last little bit. He has been learning more about the blues and civil rights. We have also been interested a bit more in the ancient inhabitants of North America. Great! All those things were in the neighborhood. I don’t like visiting battlefields. Too bad! Those are also in the neighborhood. We started northward.
The Blues and Rock History
As formerly enslaved people changed to sharecropping, they were still confined to poverty and working hard in the difficult environment of the delta. Different musical traditions melded together to form new musical forms:–zydeco, jazz, gospel, and the blues among them. We headed up highway 61, dubbed “The Blues Highway” because it was the route that migrants took toward the north as they left the farms after mechanization took over. We’ve vistited the places where this music ended up to the north: Memphis, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit. Many pioneers of the blues were born in the Mississippi Delta region and now there are little museums and historical markers all over commemorating their contributions to our culture.
We stopped at music museums in:
Ferriday, Louisiana (Delta Music Museum): a fun little free museum in an old post office. It focuses a lot on Jerry Lee Lewis, Mickey Gilley, and Jimmy Swaggart, since they are natives of the area and happen to be cousins. There are plenty of other musicians from the area who are also honored there.
Indianola, Mississippi (BB King Museum & Delta Interpretive Center): a really nice museum dedicated to the life of BB King. Well worth the stop.
Clarksdale, Mississippi (Delta Blues Museum): great museum in an old train depot with displays for lots of different blues musicians. It is also the home to the remnants of Muddy Waters’ old house (in the museum) and the guitar that ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons had made from part of that house to raise money for the museum. Cool place.
Muscle Shoals, Alabama (Muscle Shoals Sound Studios): Not really a museum, since it is still a working recording studio. But we took a tour and heard some cool things about the musicians who recorded there and the music history that was made there.
We also made various stops along the road to read the historical markers at Robert Johnson’s gravesite, Dockery Farms, the famous “crossroads” where Robert Johnson legendarily sold his soul to the devil for the ability to play the guitar, and Elvis Presley’s birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi. We were able to catch some live jazz at a restaurant in Jackson, MS.
One more fun thing to mention is the place we stayed at in Clarksdale. It’s called The Shack Up Inn and it’s built around a former cotton mill, which they have converted into rooms. But they’ve also moved old sharecropper’s home onto the property and fixed them up. They are all unique and old and dark and kinda fun. Staying there was a bit of time travel back about 100 years.
Other History in the Delta and Beyond
For part of our drive, we followed along the Natchez Trace Parkway. This road follows the historic path that was carved out over thousands of years by Native Americans and then by travelers and settlers. In some places were the delta soil was loose and soft, there are “sunken” places where the trail is 10 or 20 feet below the surrounding terrain. It’s now preserved by the National Park Service and it’s a beautiful slice through the south that reminded us a bit of the Shennandoah Parkway and the Blue Ridge Parkway.
We stopped in Natchez, MS and walked around there and we also spent the night in Vicksburg, MS. Both were sites of key battles on the Civil War. We spent one morning in the visitors’ center in Vicksburg and driving the route around the battlefield. Just as you can’t escape WWII history in Europe, you can’t get away from the Civil War in the south.
We visited the place where 14-year-old Emmett Till was visiting family when he was kidnapped and lynched. We also visited the courthouse where the men who murdered him were tried and acquitted. This injustice was one of the catalysts for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
A Side of Science
After all this music, it was time to do something a bit different. We stayed one night just outside of Huntsville, AL, a.k.a “Rocket City”. The next day, we spent hours at the US Space and Rocket Center checking out Mars rovers, learning some pretty in depth history of the quest for manned space flight, and being in awe of the enormous Saturn V rocket. We were a little nervous that it would be a repeat, since we have been to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but it was a good palette cleanser and such fun. I wanted to go to space camp when I was a kid, but now I want to go as an adult!
Nashville
The first time we visited Nashville was in November 2020. It was an eeire ghost town, feeling almost apocalyptic. There are hardly any places open and we wandered around town looking at some of the historic streets and buildings. We found one little place serving Mesican food that had a solo singer/guitarist and convinced ourselves that all this was probably ok, since we aren’t big into country music anyway. We knew we would probably return, though.
Well, we are so glad we did! I grew up in a country-music loving household, so it’s in my blood. And since we have been immersed in American music history, the borders between genres are blurrier and blurrier. We booked tickets at the last minute for the Grand Ole Opry for our first night in town. It’s their 100 year anniversary this year and it was a fun show. There were a couple of old guys that we didn’t recognize, but the rest of the audience seemed to appreciate. We really enjoyed a few of the acts, some we already knew and some that were new to us: Maggie Rose, The Old Crow Medicine Show, and the anchor, Vince Gill.
Nathan worked closely with Adam Overacker for years as Adam was the brain and work behind “String Love”, a string quartet group that did a lot of freelance weddings and events in Utah. Adam left to do some Broadway nationaly tours and eventually moved to Nashville to pursue music there. It was fun to meet up with him each night so that he could show us around and we could share a meal and hunt down some live music. We really enjoyed the rotating slate of bands at Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge, the bluegrass jam at The Station Inn, and Guthrie Trapp at The Underdog. Other memorable stops were the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum, Carter’s Vintage Guitars, and Gaylord Opryland Resort to walk around in the pretty gardens out of the rain. It was a delightful stop and we are so glad we were able to do it.
Onward to the North
This long road trip was our way of meandering toward the grandkids in West Virginia again. It was also our way of easing back into winter weather. We left Nashville in a rainstorm that was a snowstorm as we crossed into Kentucky. Nathan counted the cars that were casualties of slick roads, but for the most part the drive was wet but uneventful. We stopped in Lexington for brunch and then it was on to our AirBnB in Marietta. This time we skipped the “crazy house” and opted for a little place up on 7th street that’s a better size for just the two of us. So far we have been able to spend time tromping through the mud with the grandkids to visit their tapped maples and collect the sap for maple syrup. We took them on a special trip on the sternwheeler “Valley Gem” for a Valentine lunch. Nathan took me out to dinner at The Galley for my birthday and we saw a movie (a documentary about the beginnings of Led Zeppelin, because why not cram more music in?). And then we had a birthday bash at Lauren’s place with a dance party including glow sticks, tiaras, and light-up yo-yos care of my sister Jana. Lauren made delicious tacos and a delightful lemon cheesecake.
It’s really been a great couple of weeks. This kind of trip can be equal parts exhausting and exhilarating, but what a blessing it is that we can do this right now. It’s awesome! We learned so much and yet there is still so much more!