Southern--Fried Rock ‘n’ Roll

Many people have heard about Cleveland’s great Rock ‘n’ Roll Museum, set in a contemporary music temple designed by I. M. Pei. But my husband, Harry Basch, and I didn’t know about the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in Tuscumbia on the Tennessee River, the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in Birmingham, the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in Macon and a whole raft of other tuneful discoveries until we ran across them all last summer on our RV trek back to my southern roots.

Now, those roots include country music, rhythm and blues, rock ‘n’ roll and, incidentally, anything barbecued or deep-fried, while Harry’s are in urban-most New York and New Jersey, tied up around any ballroom where big bands played or a spindly young Frank Sinatra sang--but that’s another story.

Since we carry our own bedroom, bathroom and kitchen along with us in the RV (not to mention Harry’s collection of Artie Shaw and Mel Torme tapes), we don’t have to worry about No Vacancy signs or getting hunger pangs miles from a restaurant.

Last summer we took the RV on a southern route cross-country from Los Angeles to my parents’ country cabin off Virginia’s Blue Ridge Parkway, returning to L.A. a slightly more northern way. A trip such as ours could, with serendipitous zigzags, last most or all of a summer.

If one had far less time, a good option would be to make a shorter circle out of New Orleans, following Interstate 55 north to Memphis; then east on I-40 to Nashville; south on I-24 and I-75 to Macon, Ga.; west on U.S. 80 to Montgomery, Ala.; north to Birmingham; then southwest on I-59 through Meridian, Miss., and back to New Orleans.

We ran across one of the highlights of our trip (about the 12th time Harry was playing “Frenesi”) in the northwestern corner of Alabama. We were headed for Helen Keller’s childhood home, Ivy Green, in Tuscumbia when we noticed the big music museum, the Alabama Music Hall of Fame, on the outskirts of town and, across the road, the Rocking Chair Restaurant with a marquee advertising the daily special of roast turkey with corn bread dressing.

Since it was noon on Sunday and the museum wasn’t open yet (Southern blue laws dictate that virtually everything but churches is closed Sunday mornings), we stopped first at the restaurant, where what looked like the entire town had come straight from church. Since there was a queue for tables, we got our meals to go, one turkey special with mashed potatoes and green beans and one four-vegetable plate with black-eyed peas, yams, white beans with ham, fried okra, hot biscuits and corn bread, all for about $10. (This was the day we learned that one Southern meal to go was, as my grandmother used to say, “a generous sufficiency” for the two of us. We had leftovers for days.)

The music museum was easily as evocative as lunch. Most of the new music halls of fame we found are interactive, and popular with school groups who don headsets to listen to performances. In my pre-Beatles years, a passion for Hank Williams gradually gave way to Nat King Cole, long before the rise of Elvis. Both Williams and Cole were Alabama natives, immortalized in the museum along with the 1920s father of country music, Jimmie Rodgers, Margaritaville’s Jimmy Buffett, Tammy Wynette, jazz innovator Sun Ra, Big Mama Thornton, Odetta, Lionel Richie, Toni Tennille and Wilson Pickett. In one room, we trooped through the first motor home used by the country/rock group Alabama on their early road tours and noted smugly that ours was much nicer.

Another display told us why the museum was located here in Colbert County, away from any major urban area--because in the 1960s and ‘70s nearby Muscle Shoals housed great recording studios where Percy Sledge recorded the rhythm and blues classic “When a Man Loves a Woman,” Aretha Franklin cut early soul records and a young Duane Allman was a studio guitarist.

In still another room we were inspired to continue our museum tour with a drive a few miles north to Florence, and the two-room log cabin where blues legend W. C. Handy was born in 1873.

From Colbert County we headed due south along U.S. 43 to Tuscaloosa, home of Alabama’s iconic “best barbecued ribs,” the original Dreamland Bar-B-Que Drive-Inn. Located on a back-country lane called Jug Factory Road, the raffish spot looked like a Southern country roadhouse from the 1950s, which it is. The only thing they cook is ribs, with a choice of a rib sandwich, a rib plate or a rack of ribs. The meaty ribs are tender and delicious, especially dipped into Dreamland’s thin, peppery, vinegary sauce free of any trace of sugar.

In Birmingham, less than an hour east of Tuscaloosa, we made a beeline for the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, which is tucked inside the former Carver Theatre in the historic Fourth Avenue black business district. Fourth Avenue grew up after the turn of the century when white merchants enforced restrictive Jim Crow laws. There were exhibits on Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Lionel Hampton, Sun Ra and Birmingham-born composer Erskine Hawkins, whose 1939 jazz composition “Tuxedo Junction” celebrated the streetcar crossing at nearby Tuxedo Park, site of a 1920s dance hall where black society congregated. A major display on jazz tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins drew us and a very attentive group of teenagers.

Then it was south to Montgomery and east to Macon, Ga., where the very simple H&H; Restaurant, still operated by “Miz” Hill and her family, dates back to the 1950s. The whole restaurant is one big room, with the kitchen in back and Formica-topped tables and a counter up front. Orders are dished up from pots bubbling away on an eclectic collection of old stoves, and the decor consists of fading autographed glossies of recording stars such as homeboys the Allman Brothers and Otis Redding, who ate here when they recorded next door at Capricorn Records. The studio was subsequently torn down for a new medical center.

The Georgia Music Hall of Fame in Macon, just off I-16 by the Otis Redding Memorial Bridge, includes “Tune Town,” a stage set-like village of buildings including a movie theater playing vintage music videos, a jazz and swing club, gospel chapel, drugstore and soda fountain, the Skillet Licker Cafe and a Vintage Vinyl record store. Each venue salutes a different music ilk and era--the swing of Georgians such as Lena Horne, the rhythm and blues of Gladys Knight and the Pips, a rock roster headed by “Little Richard” Penniman, the country classics of the likes of Travis Tritt and Ronnie Milsap.

We detoured a few blocks away to see the recently restored Douglass Theatre, built in 1921 as a music and vaudeville house that played to black audiences with stars such as Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. Today it plays IMAX big-screen films and hosts concerts.

On the Mississippi loop of our trip, we managed to visit both the Delta Cultural Center Museum in Helena, Ark., and the Delta Blues Museum across the river in Clarksdale, Miss., and still make it to our favorite steakhouse, Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville, Miss., in time for an early dinner.

The free-admission Delta Cultural Center, in a restored 1913 train depot by the levee, delves into, among other things, cotton growing and the unique Delta blues. While we waited for its 10 a.m. opening, we walked up to the top of the levee and looked down on barges moving along the Mississippi.

Just half an hour east of Helena, Clarksdale is the birthplace of legendary blues singers Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, along with rhythm and blues performers Ike Turner and Sam Cooke. En route to the Delta Blues Museum we picked up lunch to go at Abe’s Barbecue, whose ribs and Mississippi tamales have been lauded in more than one set of blues lyrics. We ordered barbecue sandwiches, which are made from a heap of thin-sliced barbecued pork sizzled on a hot grill until the edges are crisp.

The free museum, upstairs over the public library, has a small but impressive display on Delta blues history, including a life-size wax figure of blues singer Muddy Waters.

We had plenty of time to drive 70 miles south to Greenville for an early dinner reservation at Doe’s Eat Place. While the exterior is a bit off-putting--it’s a neighborhood storefront on the wrong side of the tracks that used to be an Italian-run grocery store, then a bootlegger honky-tonk--this is one of the best steakhouses in America. You enter through a huge kitchen with large black wood stoves and open ovens, with empty coffee cans waiting to be filled with takeout orders for “hot tamales,” a local specialty. There is no printed menu; if you want to know the price of a dish or order something besides steak, you’ll have to ask.

Our dinner ($65 plus tip) was a 2 1/2-pound grilled T-bone for two, with French fries, green salad and six tamales for appetizers, plus another two dozen to go. We carried our own bottle of wine, wineglasses and wine opener. There is no corkage fee. In fact, nobody in Doe’s could remember where the corkscrew had last been seen (beer, soda pop and iced tea are the usual drinks).

Anyhow, that was last summer. Topping our itinerary for this summer: Cleveland’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Museum, where I hope Harry can learn to appreciate alternative sounds from the 1960s and even beyond.

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GUIDEBOOK

Rockin’ Roots

Museums: Alabama Music Hall of Fame, Highway 72 West, Tuscumbia; telephone (800) 239-2643. Closed Sunday mornings. Adults $6, children to 12 $3, students and seniors $5.

W. C. Handy’s Alabama birthplace cabin, 620 W. College St., Florence.

Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, 1631 4th Ave. N., Birmingham; tel. (205) 254- 2731. Closed Monday, Sunday mornings; free.

Jimmie Rodgers Museum, Highland Park, Meridian, Miss.; tel. (601) 485-1808. Closed Sunday mornings; adults $2.

Georgia Music Hall of Fame, 200 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Macon; tel. (888) GA ROCKS. Closed Sunday mornings; adults $7.50, seniors and students $5-$5.50.

Douglass Theatre, 355 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Macon; tel. (912) 742-2000. Tuesday-Friday; $2.

Delta Cultural Center, 95 Missouri St., Helena, Ark.; tel. (870) 338-4350. Closed Sunday mornings; free.

Delta Blues Museum, 114 Delta Ave., Clarksdale, Miss.; tel. (601) 627-6820. Monday-Saturday; free.

Where to eat: Rocking Chair Restaurant, Route 72 West, Tuscumbia, Ala.; tel. (256) 381-6105. Open daily.

Dreamland Bar-B-Que Drive-Inn, 5535 15th Ave. E., Tuscaloosa, Ala.; tel. (205) 758-8135. Open daily.

H & H Restaurant, 807 Forsyth St., Macon, Ga.; tel. (912) 742-9810. Open Tuesday-Saturday.

Abe’s Barbecue, 616 State St., Clarksdale, Miss.; tel. (601) 624-9947. Open daily; lunch, dinner.

Doe’s Eat Place, 502 Nelson St., Greenville, Miss.; tel. (601) 334-3315. Monday-Saturday dinner (reservations advisable).