Music On the Road and Kiva Beach, Lake Tahoe

What am I listening to as I travel, you ask? The Jetta came with SiriusXM, I have a 6-CD changer, AM and FM and and an iPod connection that charges it while it plays. Need I say more? The hard part is choosing and the easiest choice is satellite radio. I have 24 presets and I motivate around them a lot, although The Loft is my absolute fave. On that station I kept hearing this new song from Marc Cohn. Well, it's a cover actually, from the Dead.... New Speedway Boogie with Jim Lauderdale, who I am totally a crazy fan for. So then I'm in a Starbucks in Tahoe and there's Cohn's CD..... all of the songs are from 1970 and, naturally, I bought it. Pretty darn good, although Speedway Boogie sort of turned out to be different from everything else and Lauderdale is only on that cut.
In Nashville, I visited Ernest Tubb's Record Shop and picked up some bargain bin oldies of Emmy Lou, Rodney Crowell, Rosanne Cash and John Hartford. I'm pretty sure we don't have them at home but Bill buys so many CD's I may have a double.
In Memphis I got King & Queen, a duet album of Otis Redding and Carla Thomas and some very nice, young ladies gave me free CD's at the Folk Alliance center - to my surprise, a friend from Eugene was on it!
I started out the trip with one CD: Darrell Scott's Crooked Road. I saw him at The Bluebird Cafe in Nashville and told him I drove the Crooked Road of SW Virginia listening to The Crooked Road and it was transcendent. He signed my TShirt that I had gotten for Bill when I got Scott's CD but it fit me.
that Buster guy from NYC has a really ecelctic show on The Loft on Sundays and I heard Mahler's Death In Venice and Neil Young's Fork In the Road back to back. I was just driving into a big, black thunderstorm near Flagstaff. Again, transcendent.
Hope all of you are listening to some good sounds. My next post will be from San Francisco, where I am attending Travelin' Light, a dance performance in the SF Mint that one of Katy's friends is performing in. I scored a hotel on Priceline that is right across the street. Sweet.

Stuck in Memphis with the Delta Blues, Amen

I have checked out of my hotel, which I thought would get me motivated to drive West but then I was so torn over heading to Little Rock, which is the correct direction, and taking Hwy 61 south to the Crossroads and Clarkston, MS that I just stopped the car in the South Main Arts District so I could contemplate my next move. That was around noon and now it is almost 3:00. I discovered a whole different neighborhood from downtown and Beale Street even though Main Street runs throughout. There is a trolley that runs up and down Main and over to the Bluff, where you can walk on the river.

This neighborhood has the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Hotel, where Dr. King was shot so that was powerful to walk around. I am already torn up over seeing some of the ghetto neighborhoods here in Memphis (where Stax is) so I decided to not go inside the museum. I had lunch at Beignet's, around the corner. Yum.... gator bites, fried green tomatoes and steamed shrimp with green salad. The Bloody Mary just seemed the right thing to do. Hey, people, I am on vacation here!

I leave Memphis this afternoon with a long list of what I did not get to see: the Gibson factory, Mud Island park, walking the Bluffs, Graceland, the Center for Southern Folklore, the Cotton Museum, the Underground Railroad museum, a photo exhibit at the art museum called Who Shot Rock. Here is what I did see:
Rock and Soul Museum - spent over 3 hours inside with an iPod to go along with the exhibits
Stax Museum - was there at least two hours. Isaac Hayes gold cadillac is worth the admission
Sun Recording Studios - more of a guided tour but the collection of instruments was awesome

I also did things like drive across town to a camera shop for some repair work, walk around Overton Park hoping to see the rock photography exhibit but the museum was closed, and, this morning, search for my phone somewhere on Beale Street. Good news is.... I found it!

Beale Street is so much better than the music strips in Nashville or New Orleans. I don't know how many blues muscians live in Memphis but it's got to be in the hundreds. There are bands in all of the clubs every night and most of what I heard was very good. I was told that the really top players won't show up until Thursday or Friday. Everyone thought I should stick around. Everyone being a small group of locals, some being guitar players in a band called Delta Time that I listened to two nights in a row at Rum Boogie. I am now friends with a man whose cousins played on Love and Happiness with Al Green at Hi Recording Studio. Now those are credentials!

I know that my friends in DC are suffering a heat wave, but it isn't exactly cool here. 90 degrees and thunderheads means it is very sticky. Maybe that's a good thing, because if it was cooler I would go walk on the river right now instead of getting in the car and motivating. I'm pretty sure Hwy 61 is out of the question if I want to make Fayetteville by dark.

Oh, yes. I stuck my head in a Folk Alliance non-profit shop and had a delightful conversation with two young women who filled me in on an entirely different music scene here in Memphis plus told me where to get good coffee in Fayetteville. Get this, they gave me a free sampler CD and who should be on it but Chico Schwall.... an old friend from Eugene. Get out of here! He's part of some big festival they have in Memphis in the winter. There is also a big blues congregation in January that sound interesting.

Signing off for now. Oh, yes. Beignet's may be on the food channel for their Mac and Cheese balls. They basically freeze it and then make balls, roll in crumbs and fry them up. Not on my diet but they sounded pretty darn good. Traveling with South Beach is the topic of another blog.

Take care and as absoutely everyone says to me.... be safe.