Highway 61 Revisited

Much of this trip will be spent on US Highway 61, which is sometimes called The Blues Highway. It runs from the confusingly-named town of Wyoming, Minnesota, down to New Orleans. Until about 30 years ago the highway reached further north, passing through Duluth on its way to the Canadian border. Attentive readers (I’m looking at you, Peter D) will recall that I’d visited Duluth last May as I was traveling west across the country on US Route 2. While in Duluth I visited the boyhood home of one Robert Allen Zimmerman, who you and I would know today as Bob Dylan. Dylan famously released an album in 1965 called Highway 61 Revisited, an influential, landmark album with notable roots in the blues tradition. Dylan said this about that: “Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I began. I always felt like I’d started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere, even down in to the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors … It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.”

For this trip I’m going to travel the southern part of the Blues Highway, through Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana. But first I’m starting in Nashville (pop: 690,000), from which I’ll head due west to pick up Route 61 in Memphis. Why am I starting in Nashville? Because the Roadtripper guide told me to.

I arrived in Nashville about 9:15 am this morning and “promptly” picked up my rental car. (I put “promptly” in scare quotes because while I went directly to the Dollar counter, the “workers” didn’t share my sense of urgency. The line ahead of me took half an hour to clear, one hapless renter at a time.Then, after finally getting to the counter, I cooled my heels while the “worker” used a single index finger to re-type all the data I’d already filled out online. (Bottom line: Don’t patronize Dollar.) Anyway, by 10:30 I was in command of a Chevy Trailblazer, making my way to the downtown Nashville farmer’s market.

By now you know that these road trips of mine don’t normally linger in big cities. But given that a theme of this trip is music (especially blues), I figured I should pay a little homage to Nashville’s iconic music scene. And who better to help me do that than the Jugg Sisters??

For decades now, The Jugg Sisters have been doing a comedy bus tour of Nashville’s music history. They created, managed, and have starred in the “NashTrash tours” that present tourists with the irreverent musical highlights of downtown Nashville. Recently, however, they’ve been farming out some of the tour guide duties to a new duo: Hank and Jenny. Today was only their sixth time giving the tour. For two hours, driver Darron drove the big pink bus while Hank sang country songs accompanied by his guitar, and Jenny mainly told him “that’s enough now.” Still, they managed to point out literally dozens of music-related sites and share tons of music-related trivia. I confess that I didn’t realize how big the music industry looms in Nashville. There are recording studios, halls of fame, museums, statues, music venues, theme restaurants, and on and on. Nashville has claimed an association with Elvis, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Chet Atkins, Rosanne Cash, and a bunch of famous people I’ve never heard of. A person could easily spend a week here soaking up the music history.

My only complaint is that, as a country-music novice, I had a hard time separating the genuine factoids from the exaggerations and jokes. Still, the overall effect was to appreciate the musical importance of this city.

I should mention that today’s bus passengers were mainly just me and a group of 10 folks from Iowa. They let me take their picture, and when I asked them how I should identify the group in my blog, they said “Just call us the Iowa Shit Show.”

Hank and Jenny let us take a 10-minute break at lower Broadway’s honky tonk district to attend to our biological needs. I used the occasion to get my fortune told by one of those animatronic fortune teller booths. But instead of a Zoltar or a gypsy or whatever, this one had….Elvis. I took a video of it, just because I didn’t think you’d believe me.

One of the rare non-music-related sites Hank and Jenny pointed out was the Marathon Motor Works. You’d never heard of it either? Apparently for five brief years in the very early 20th Century, Nashville had its own automobile company. An engineer named William Henry Collier at the Southern Engine and Boiler works in nearby Jackson decided in 1909 to try his hand at a new technology called the motor car. For a few years thousands of the vehicles were produced, but the whole operation slowed and ultimately died about the time of World War I.

It’s an intriguing story, so after NashTrash I returned to the Marathon Motor Works on my own and puttered around for a couple of hours. I was entranced by this place. Notably, the century-old buildings are remarkably well-maintained and they house museums related to the marque as well as various independent, tourist-oriented shops. (One of them is the antique shop from the TV show American Pickers.)

There are said to be only eight surviving Marathon automobiles. (Their production just before World War I made them highly susceptible to scrap metal recycling as part of the war effort.) Impressively, five of those remaining cars are on display at the Motor Works. Numerous other artifacts are also displayed.

I’m not sure why this car plant resonated with me so much. Part of it is just the novelty of a short-lived, hundred-year-old automobile factory that’s still standing. This particular operation is not flashy like some museums can be, so you feel like the environment isn’t that different at all when workers were casting wheels and assembling frames.

After Marathon I made another transportation-related visit to Nashville’s Union Station. Surely you’re familiar with Union Stations in other cities (Washington DC, Chicago, Louisville, Los Angeles, etc. etc). There must have been scores of them back in the Golden Age of Railroading. Nashville’s Union Station was built in 1898 and was in operation until 1979. It was slated for demolition, but local preservationists and others managed to save it from the wrecking ball. Today it is a luxury hotel, retaining the main structure and many of the appointments from its heyday.

Finally it was time to leave Nashville. I got onto I-40 West toward Memphis, and made it to the halfway point at the town of Jackson, TN (pop: 68,000). Jackson has lots of music history in its own right. For example, it’s the birthplace of Big Maybelle and of Denise LaSalle. I’m spending the night here and will report more about Jackson in tomorrow’s post. But I did want to highlight the Greyhound station I saw on Main Street. Check it out:

It’s a beautiful art deco, streamlined structure built in 1938. It closed in 2018, but quickly was restored and maintained as a historic structure. There was a young lady cleaning the outside windows when I drove by, and she told me it recently became the third restaurant called Doe’s Eat Place. (Doe’s has its own interesting history dating back to the 1930s which you can read here.) Since it was dinner time I went in and had the best fried shrimp I’ve ever had. I also chatted with the employees, who were all friendly and seemed to love the idea of a down-home restaurant in a converted Greyhound station.

And thus we’re almost done with today’s blog post. All that’s left is the….

BREW OF THE DAY

For all its good points, Doe’s Eat Place has a boring beer menu. So after dinner I went to Hub City Brewing, which is just down the street. The bartender explained to me that Jackson is known as Hub City because of its strategic location halfway between Nashville and Memphis. It’s at the crossroads of I-40, US 45, US 70, US 412, and various state routes. It also was historically a railroad hub. (Alert readers will recall I visited Casey Jones’ home and his grave here in Jackson three years ago when I drove across the country on Route 70.)

Anyway, Hub City Brewing makes a healthy assortment of beers, including a few good porters and stouts. I chose the Snowplow Vanilla Porter. The first thing you notice about this beer is how dark it is, like a Starbucks cold brew. It has just enough foam to visually remind you it’s not a coffee but a beer. The nose is slightly sweet, with vanilla notes (as you’d expect) but also with a little molasses or brown sugar.

It’s incredibly drinkable. It’s malty without being cloying, and it’s roasty without any of the acidic sharpness a porter sometimes can have. The mouthfeel is meatier than your typical porter as well, reminding me a bit of a stout. With an ABV of 7.2 percent, this warms you a bit but it doesn’t kick your ass the way an imperial stout (my preferred beer) can. I give it 4 out of 5 stars.