8 to 12 November 2025

The election result and the Civil Rights Trail, particularly the Legacy Sites of Montgomery, had weighed heavily on us and we were in need of some escape. Selma was as far into the Deep South as we were going to go and it was time to head north for some light entertainment.

From the Black Belt we made our way into Mississippi through endless farmland, towards a tiny college town that in any other circumstances we would have driven on passed. Starkville had become a familiar place to me from the social media feeds of two of my friends from University, Megan and Ben. I had last visited them at home when they lived in Beverley Hills, LA more than 20 years ago and it was time to pay them another visit in their not so new home.

It was a very welcome break from the road. We had a personal walking tour of the town and I got to visit the campus on which both Megan and Ben have worked since they moved to Mississippi. The clock tower was not so dissimilar to Old Joe at our mutual alma mater, the University of Birmingham.

Leaving Starkville, we were heading to Tennessee and the capital of country music, Nashville but before leaving Mississippi we couldn’t not pay our respects to perhaps the State’s most famous son, Elvis Presley. In the drizzle we stopped in Tupelo at the tiny house in which he was born and which was his home for his early years. These narrow houses, common in the South, with rooms lined one behind the other, are known as shotgun shacks because it is said that you can shoot a shotgun through the front door and the bullet will go straight through and out the back door.

Leaving Tupelo in search of the Natchez Trace Parkway our path was temporarily blocked by one of the longest trains we’ve seen since we were in Port Augusta, South Australia!

From Tupelo, we found the Parkway, a scenic drive along a historic travel route through Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. For 10,000 years the trace was used by Native Americans, European colonists, slave traders and Civil War soldiers. Along the tree-lined road we saw several mysterious mounds built to house ceremonial temples by the indigenous people of the Americas, but much like our day on the not dissimilar Skyline Drive the inclement weather did not invite us to wander the walking trails or even lunch at its picnic spots so we kept on driving until we found ourselves in the suburbs of Music City.

When the sun came out again we explored the immediate area around our lovely Air BnB. The neighbourhood of 12 South was full of murals, cute boutiques and every kind of eatery and there was no escaping that music was big here.

Nashville felt very walkable to us and we decided to give the car a rest and visit downtown by foot. The route took us the length of Music Row, a district packed full of music studios, labels and agents. This seemed like the whole of the music industry was there.

Even the plastic surgeons and therapists had musical names!

On reaching the centre and a coffee stop we were greeted by some of the legends that have made music in the city. Refreshed, we had a choice between the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum or the National Museum of African American Music. And it turned out that we had not quite put the Civil Rights trail behind us because we chose the latter.

The National Museum of African American Music is an audio visual spectacle which celebrates the country’s Black music legends very loudly.

It provides an immersive, in depth and hands on dive into music of Back origin through spirituals, blues, jazz, gospel to R&B and hip hop.

We got to write our own blues song, create a hip hop track, trace the influences of modern artists and marvel at how tiny Whitney Houston was.

Back outside on the streets we bumped into 7th President of the US, Andrew Jackson, outside the Tennesse State Capitol and another branch of Woolworth that had been the scene of another civil rights sit-in.

But amongst all these streets, Broadway is really the main event in Nashville. Jam-packed with honky tonks and country music bars, its bright signs each one with live music over often multiple floors

We stopped for lunch in one of the bars because it would have been rude not to see some live music in Music City.

We loved Nashville so much that we decided to extend our stay by another day. Someone had mysteriously told us to be sure to visit the Parthenon so before we left the city and intrigued by this left field suggestion we set the sat nav to a spot high above the city.

And there, bizarrely, we found the world’s only scale replica of the the Parthenon in Athens. Built, incongruously, to celebrate Tennessee’s 100th year as a State. It’s original temporary brick and plaster were later preserved for greater posterity in a then new fangled concrete, giving it a very less than authentic air. All the same, it was an unexpected but welcome throw back to our visit to Athens with Pintail back in 2018.

We also took the opportunity to visit Fort Negley, the largest inland stone fortification built during early in the Civil War when Union troops captured Nashville from the Confederate forces. Like the Parthenon, it sits, unsurprisingly, high above the city. Not much remains but it served as a reminder to us that we had somewhat neglected our studies of the war that literally divided the nation in the 1860s. We resolved to put that right on our onward travels…