06)02(05 its 620pm

Memphis. Elvis. BB King. Sultry Mississippi river blues clubs. Memphis, Tennessee.

Its one of those place that is nice to say out loud. It makes you feel good to know that you are in Memphis though you don’t know why. Here we are in a Super 8 motel, exhausted from the flurry of a week, relaxing before we head out to Beale Street for a bit of music.

In short, this week we headed from New Orleans to Memphis, roughly following the Mississippi River as it winded up and up. That in itself is poetic somehow.

New Orleans was difficult to let go of, hard to say goodbye to. It filled us both with sort of passionate feelings and a sense of place that was something like home, and made us want to unravel the knot of southern culture just a little bit, enough for us to squeeze through. New Orleans made me think of jazz and vampires, music, history and beauty through the ages. New Orleans introduced us to this swath of the earth that is so fertile and laden with a heavy and sometimes bitter past.

We drove across the shallow and vast Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans to a state park that sat on the opposite side, once the site of a sugar mill and plantation. We landed at Fountainebleu State Park on the eve of Memorial Day weekend and already the park was swarming with masses of Louisiana tourists all barbequeing and unloading their RV palaces. Our campsite was minimal and buzzing with mosquitoes but the nights we sat on the white sanded shore of the Lake were peaceful and made us talkative as the warm wind from across the lake blew steadily against us. The Louisiana sunsets were slow and mellow and we ate grilled shrimp and vegetables for dinner. The massive Live Oak trees that once shaded the plantation still drooped sadly in the pink rays of the evening sun, and in the days we walked around farmers markets in the tiny towns nearby and waded in the almost hot water amongst the hundreds of happy kids and parents, the never getting deep enough to actually swim in, even as we walked hundreds of feet off shore. The nights were so hot and the mornings humid too, and it was hard to wake and shake off the heavy feeling of sleep while already sweating in the morning sunshine.

Both my Dad and Kate’s Dad had off the cuff told us before the trip that Natchez, MS would be a great place to see. Its antebellum houses and old cobbled downtown sit on the banks of the Mississippi with a guilty grandeur that has worn just enough with time. Natchez was the first permanent settlement by Europeans along the Mississippi River, and its importance as the main trading port along the Mississippi from Saint Louis to New Orleans made it a powerhouse economically and politically in the days of slave trading and cotton exports. It was held by the Union toward the end of the Civil War, and Grant made his temporary home there in one of the many old and ridiculously grandiose Mansions that overlooked the river.

As we drove out to the Natchez Trace State Park, our radio broadcast was interrupted by the emergency broadcast system, which told us in a sort of frantic way that a tremendous and potentially dangerous thunderstorm was headed directly our way, in about 25 minutes time. We stood on the dock of a nice little Mississippi Lake while the fishermen out for the day obliviously cast their lines into the evening water, somehow the epitomy of Mississippi living to us. The sky above us was blackening steadily and the massive rumbles of thunder slowly echoed our way across the Lake. We decided that camping out wouldn’t do, albeit reluctantly, but as we headed back into Natchez it became clear that this was no subtle sprinkling of a storm. The sky quickly became a wall of water, with so much rain falling so quickly that it was nearly impossible to see the road through the thick film of rainfall that covered it in a matter of seconds. Lightning crashed all around us and the thunder rocked the truck with its intensity. We would be checking into a hotel it was decided, we would be checking into a hotel or be blown away by this storm. We were really fortunate to be in town on a Sunday, and out of desperation I checked with the downtown hotel, you know the grand old style hotel that sits prominently in most old American small towns with gold lettering and brick walls, and somehow the price was just low enough for us to take it. We had come really close to staying in the “Scottish Inn”, out on the freeway a few miles outside of town, whose parking lot was lined with drug dealer looking cars and whose neighborhood was less than pleasant. But now here we were checking into this enormously posh Hotel with marble statues, fountains lit by fire and painted gilded ceilings. I pushed it a little bit further and asked if we could have a room with a view, and the receptionist kindly upgraded us at no extra cost to a 6th floor suite with a balcony that looked out over the Mississippi. It was a grand feeling being up there on that deck with its little table and Southern Style outdoor fan, looking out over the fading light of the glorious river and peaceful Louisiana farmlands across it while thunderstorm after thunderstorm raced by, lighting up the horizon irregularly with streaks of lightning.

We wanted to at least catch a peek at one of the insides of the Mansions that dominated the history of Natchez, and so we shelled out for a guided tour of the Rosalie House, where Grant had holed up while the union controlled the Mississippi River traffic. The opulence was almost over the top, but it was a good departure point from which to view the troubled past of the region. This is the place where Southern women became Ladies, and men became Gentlemen, and black people became slaves. The almost strange part of all of the revery given nowadays toward the architecture of the area by tourists is that the whole issue of slavery, that the houses themselves were often built by slaves, is barely mentioned at all, almost succinctly avoided.

We just returned from Beale St., the heart of Memphis. This is the proclaimed birthplace of rock and roll, and it revels in its roots, even though the tourist aspect of the whole party is hard to miss. Live music streams out from every bar of the three block neon lit stretch that is the modern Beale Street. Musicians work their fingers to the bone on the sidewalk and in the bars, while folks of all ages and races meander around and through the spirit of it with legal beers in hand, partying while the cops surround it all. It all felt very safe, very easy, very clean, and it was a nice experience even so. I don’t even begin to think that anything we saw was ‘authentic’, as in, where it really all comes from, the blues, rock and roll…. but somewhere behind the facade is the birth, somewhere many years back is the root of the music that shaped my life so profoundly. Sometime way back then, in the heyday of the blues, in the 30’s and 40’s, underpaid working class musicians made music to make music, and they made music that felt right and felt good and made people dance and somehow changed the course of history. It makes me really humbled, the respect that I have for those musicians and the whatever it was that made it happened, and I don’t even claim to know what it was that made it… the depths of poverty? the struggle of being black in America? the honesty of good souls with no purpose, no cause, no bullshit reason, just music. I think that that is what it comes down to, just music, no rules, no reason. Now, its kind of recycled. Its music for the sanitized sake of the tourists that want to see it sans poverty, sans struggle, sans passion really. But that was me, the tourist, passing through, and I’m glad, I’m glad we’re in Memphis and that we saw it, whatever it was. I feel that as a musician it gives me something to live up to, and it forces me to remember, as hard as it is to put in to words, what its all about.

We left Natchez determined to camp, even though the weather was still looking pretty miserable. We headed Northeast up the Natchez Trace, which is, in short, one of the oldest roads in America, that was used by Native American tribes, traders and was the most important road in the pre civil war America up until the advent of the steamboat up and down the Mississippi. Parts of the trace are still walkable, and we ended up stomping along it quite by accident that night. The terrain was so swampy and dense, with vines hanging down over the ancient road, and we were walking as the sun was setting, out in the middle of nowhere while the rain started to fall. It was not the kind of place I would feel comfortable getting stuck in, and it was good to finally find our way back to our campsite. The rain was coming in strong, and we were forced to put up the tarps and set up a screen house around the truck. We sat underneath the brown and green tarp for hours that night while the fierce wind and thick rain pounded the landscape around us. It was strange to be sitting outside in such ferocious weather, but it was nice to say that we were in Mississippi, in a Mississippi storm, drinking cheap beer on the oldest road we’d ever been on.