21 hours ago
Forget Route 66 and Highway 1, this is the greatest road trip in America
Highway 61. Route 66. Ventura Highway. Legendary freeways across the North American continent they may be, but there is more to a great American road trip than names on a song sheet. For me, there is one drive that beats them all, mainly because it meanders through small towns, allows time just to hang around and, most important, engage with the locals. So, if you throw in Southern music and southern cuisine, you pretty much have the best of the USA. Follow me, y'all.
My drive started in Nashville, the glistening, glittering showpiece southern city that I have long regarded as one of the most pleasant places on earth. Its success has meant it's getting rather overcrowded, with tourists and arrivistes, but there remains a thrill about the place that other American cities just don't have. The live music is sensational and the nouvelle Nashville cuisine is brilliant.
In my most recent short stay there I saw some pretty good bar bands on Lower Broadway, sensational country/bluegrass (Larry Cordle, Carl Douglas et al) at the Station Inn, had a great night at the Grand Ole Opry, and then one of the concerts of my life – Paul Simon at the Ryman Auditorium, the mother church of live country music. I also ate at two of the best restaurants in the South, 888 Japanese Restaurant & Vinyl Lounge, and Deb Paquette's Etch, among the founders and leaders of the city's culinary movement. What's not to like?
So far, so Nashville. But this is about the drive, the best road trip in America. It would take me south along the I-65 and then the I-59, to Muscle Shoals and Florence, Alabama, the source of the great southern music of the 60s and 70s; then west to Tupelo, Mississippi, the birthplace of Elvis, and then west again to Clarksdale, Mississippi, the birthplace of the blues. The return leg would bring me back to Tupelo, and then along the Natchez Trace Parkway, one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful, scenic drives in the country, back to Nashville.
A certain choreography was required. I needed to see live music in Florence, get time to wander around Oxford, Mississippi (home of Southern literary greats and a bookshop that opens at 9am, even on Sundays) and Tupelo (birthplace of Elvis), and still get to Clarksdale early on a Sunday morning in time for the service at the Union Grove Missionary Baptist Church. You can't travel through the South without attending a Baptist church on a Sunday morning.
Florence is the up-and-coming town in the Shoals area, and I arrived in good time to check into the Renaissance Shoals Hotel & Spa and head into town for a live music session at FloBama Music Hall, which is just a large space with food, long bar, pool tables and incredible Southern Rock. Last time I was here, I heard Fathers and Sons (Will McFarlane, ex-Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section and Bonnie Raitt Band, and Kelvin Holly, ex Little Richard band) in full flow. This being Florence, it was just another Saturday night.
When I wandered in this time, there were couples draped over bar stools, men in cowboy hats, women in satin, hats, boas. The Chad Bradford Band was playing, working their way through a Southern rock directory from Tush to Freebird. And the two-steppers were out there, gliding across the dance floor in cowboy boots and Stetsons, looking like cut-outs from the 1950s.
The following morning, it was a two-hour drive to Tupelo, which meant crossing from Alabama into Mississippi, and falling into a small Southern city which trades on being the birthplace of Elvis, and succeeds in being a far more profound experience than Disneyfied Graceland. Here is the Gospel church where the boy Elvis first heard heavenly voices, listened to firebrand preachers and hung out with young black kids who taught him about their music. By the time the family emigrated to Memphis, Elvis was already formed.
From Tupelo, the last outward leg is the 115-mile drive to Clarksdale via Oxford Mississippi, the pretty university town that is home to many great Southern writers – most famously William Faulkner, but also Barry Hannah, John Grisham and many others. It is a delightful town that architecturally and spiritually reflects the bookish culture it is known for.
After Oxford, one passes through Batesville and at that moment you drop into the Delta. The landscape changes, from forested hill country, to the flat endless alluvial plain that has been for more than a century the landscape of the Mississippi cotton fields. Even the music on the car radio changes – from country and Southern rock to the blues.
I arrived in Clarksdale on a Sunday morning, in time to meet up with an old friend, and attend the morning service at the local Baptist church. I've been visiting this blues city for 20 years and so find it at once familiar and at the same time surprising and exhilarating. Clarksdale's music legacy – starting with Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Ike Turner – remains, and you'll see the younger pretenders at Morgan Freeman's Ground Zero Blues Club, or any of the juke joints downtown if you're prepared to hang around. You'll also get to meet the engaging locals, often migrants from the northern states seeking the blues.
Finally, it was time to head back to Nashville. The Natchez Trace Parkway is a 440-mile roadway that winds through the wildlands and forests of three states – Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee – and is the wild untamed South writ large. I picked 'the Trace' up outside Tupelo and cruised blissfully at 50mph (the well-observed and well-policed limit) for several hours. It is scattered with historic monuments that celebrate 19th-century adventurers, soldiers and explorers like Meriweather Lewis, who died on the Trace, Andrew Jackson, Jefferson Davis and Ulysses Grant.
The Trace emerges near Franklin, the neatly-clipped Nashville suburb that is Norman Rockwell on steroids. It seems like an appropriate end to a brief but profound journey through the South – and America's greatest road trip.
How to do it
One of the reasons this is the best drive in America is that each leg between destinations is short. Nashville to Florence, along a combination of freeways and minor roads, is just 130 miles (taking two to three hours). The other legs are equally manageable: Florence to Tupelo is 115 miles (two hours), Tupelo to Clarksdale is also 115 miles. The return along the Natchez Trace Parkway to Nashville is the longest leg (220 miles, so three to four hours). For hotels in Nashville, see our guide. British Airways offers daily non-stop flights from Heathrow.
