Mud Island

Just along the Tennessee side of the Mississippi River at Memphis is Mud Island, one of the many small islands that have traditionally formed and then disappeared as the Mississippi River erodes its banks and changes its shape over the decades. Mud Island has become somewhat more permanent in the last half of the 20th century through efforts of the Army Corps of Engineers in their attempts to control the river for commerce,  providing a more or less stable platform for a community park and civic area. A monorail system takes you from the west end of Beale Street across a small channel to the island upon which is located the Mississippi River Museum.

This is a rather large Museum covering two floors telling the story of the river from pre-Columbian times up until the modern era. The first Europeans to see the Mississippi River were in the expedition of Hernandez De Soto in 1541. He was so excited at the prospect that he died right on the spot. Well, actually he died of a tropical fever. In order to make it easier to deal with the locals, Hernandez had kind of let on that he was a god and the remaining members of his party had some difficulty figuring out how to explain his inconvenient demise to the natives. Remembering what happened to Sean Connery in "The Man Who Would Be King", they decided the best course was to wrap his body up in a blanket with a bunch of rocks and sink it in the Mississippi in the middle of the night when nobody was looking. Then they made up some excuse and hot footed it back to Mexico, but not before claiming the river and all of its tributaries in the name of Spain.

As Mark Twain pointed out in "Life on the Mississippi", the significance of a major waterway in the middle of the North American continent so impressed the Europeans that nobody bothered to go peek at it again for well over 100 years. Finally Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette led an expedition from the western Great Lakes region which stumbled onto the Mississippi River again in 1673 . They explored the river  in canoes nearly to the Gulf of Mexico, desperately hoping that it would lead them to the Pacific Ocean but, alas, such was not to be the case. While the French explorers were disappointed that they had not found the elusive Northwest passage, free land is free land and, figuring the Spanish claim had long since exceded the statute of limitations, they turned around and claimed the whole area for France. The French and the Spanish wrangled over the river for 100 years without either side ever actually doing much with it. The only people that actually settled along the river were Americans. By the beginning of the 19th century, Napoleon was gearing up to take over Europe and needed funds way more urgently than some backwater bayou in the Americas, so after once again winning the Louisiana territory back from Spain in 1800, he turned around in 1803 and offered the whole kebab to Thomas Jefferson for the bargain sale price of three cents per acre. Jefferson accepted, although the only part he was really interested in was New Orleans.  The rest was just gravey, though it ended up being the smartest real estate deal since the Dutch bought Manhatten.

Raft, flat bottom and keel boat

If you'll recall, the Americans had finally started moving west of the Appalachian Mountains at about this time and were busy growing crops and wiping out the Buffalo and inventing Bourbon and whatnot and wanted to get their goods out to exchange them for hard cash along the Eastern seaboard. Carting everything by pack mule back over the Appalachians wasn't that appealing but the Mississippi River allowed them to transport their goods downstream to New Orleans and then back up to the eastern cities by boat. Initially this was done on rafts and barges. They would build these along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, load them up with goods and float them down to the Gulf where they would sell the goods, break up the rafts and sell the lumbar and then walk back north along the Natchez trace. Finally, the cost of throwing away the boats got to be prohibitive and they begin using keelboats which could be turned around and hauled back upriver to be reused. Pushing or pulling a keelboat upstream for 1000 miles was no piece of cake, so the boatmen were happy when Robert Fulton solved the problem by inventing the steamboat and creating work for Mark Twain.


The museum devotes a fair amount of space to paddlewheel steamboats as the iconic representation of Mississippi history. There are a lot of small models and a full-size mockup of the front half of a steamer along with a full-size mockup of Mark Twain himself, mostly for atmosphere. This brings

Ironclad gunboat

you to the Civil War era when the union managed to control the River using ironclad steam powered gunboats which they also had a full-size replica of. This being Memphis, they moved directly from the Civil War to the birth of the Mississippi blues in the early 1900s. No one really cares what happened in Mississippi between 1865 and 1910 anyway. The museum tour ends with a tiny segment covering modern-day river traffic just for completeness sake. Overall we found the museum interesting and reasonably priced and if you're going to spend a few days in Memphis, one of them should probably be spent here.

The River Walk from the second floor of the museum

Outside the museum running up and down the rest of Mud Island is the Mississippi River Walk. This is essentially a relief map, a 2112:1 scale model of  the Lower Mississippi River, covering 1,000 miles from Cairo, Illinois to New Orleans. It's hard to make out much detail about the River but it's a great place for kids to jump back and forth across the Mississippi for an afternoon. Strolling the River Walk park we also enjoyed the view of one of the few remaining paddlewheel boats taking tourists up the river. Not a steam vessel, they've all been converted to diesel engines which have significantly less tendency to blow up unexpectedly. We took a dinner cruise on one of these boats but didn't think it through very well. It's gotten so late in the year that the whole cruise was in the dark. But the dinner was pretty good and, what the heck, here's a picture of Memphis in the dark.

Memphis in the dark

Balcony of the Lorraine Motel

While we were in Memphis, we also went through the National Civil Rights Museum which is spread out in several buildings around the site where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968. We have been through a lot of museums in the last few months but there is usually a comfortable buffer of one or two centuries shielding us from the implications of our history. It's an odd feeling going through a Museum dedicated to events that took place during your own lifetime. I realize there are still racial issues in this country but it's astonishing to realize how things have changed since I was in high school.  I wonder if Dr. King would be more impressed with how far we have come or with how far we have yet to go?

Making the Music

In Memphis we stayed at the Tom Sawyer RV Park which is on the Arkansas side in West Memphis and sits right on the Mississippi. I mean Right On. This is the view out our windshield. That water in front of you is the Mississippi River, about a half-mile across at this point. We were supposed to have a back-in camp site in the woods a couple of hundred yards away from the river, but when Vicki signed in she could not control herself and upgraded us to a riverfront slot for an extra five bucks a day. It was nice. Barge traffic moseys past at a leisurely pace at all hours of the day and night. Generally the barges are spaced out at about 20-30 min. intervals but occasionally we would have them pass each other going opposite directions just outside our front window. We would take our chairs down to the river bank and read and relax in the evenings with the puppies, who seemed to enjoy it though I doubt it had the same aesthetic effect on them as it did on us.

Schnoodles lazily lounging at the river's edge.

Beale Street

Our first day in town we wandered down to Beale Street, which is the Memphis equivalent of Broadway in Nashville. But in Memphis, the musical style is the southern blues. Instead of honky-tonk bars, they have blues bars, cafés and restaurants and the music doesn't usually start until about 6 PM. We wandered around the area to get a feel for the place but the truth is, neither of us is particularly enthralled with southern blues. I can appreciate Beale Street from a music history standpoint but as far as actually going in and listening, neither of us was that interested.


There was something nearby, however, that I was quite interested in. A large Gibson guitar factory sits just a block over from Beale Street. Gibson currently has five or six guitar factories scattered around the country. The big acoustic dreadnought style guitars are all made in Montana. What they make in Memphis are hollow body and semi-solid body electric guitars. The solid body electrics, like the standard Les Pauls, are made at several sites, the main one being in Nashville. But the Memphis factory is the only one you can get a tour of so I took what I could get.

No photographs are allowed inside the factory. In fact, they make you put your camera in an opaque plastic bag and if you take it out they will escort you off the premises. I couldn't really understand this given that they not only show you the entire process but explain it in great detail and will happily answer any questions you may have about how the guitars are made, so it can hardly be a proprietary information issue. Maybe it is an issue of privacy for their workers, I don't know. In any event, we saw the complete assembly line from the arrival of the wood at the factory door to the polishing and testing of the completed instruments at the far end of the line. There is no robotic equipment involved, nor a mechanized assembly-line like you would see an auto plant. The guitars are hand carried from station to station and the most interesting thing about the whole process is what a huge percentage of it is still done free hand by people who simply know what they are doing. The tour takes about an hour but making a guitar takes 2-3 weeks. The factory covers about 1.5-2 acres and looked like it had 50 or 60 people working which resulted in a production rate of about 50-60 guitars a day.

The last station in the production process is where they install the electrical pickups, string the instrument and take it for a test drive. This is the only place in the factory where you have to actually be able to play guitar in order to work there. The guy that puts the strings on plays the instrument for five or 10 min., then it goes to a second level of inspection in some quieter room where they can get a better feel for the guitar's performance. If either of these guys is not completely happy with the instrument, it gets tossed. They said this applies to about 8% of the guitars that they produce. The problem may be fairly minor but if a guitar is not up to their standards, they don't want it appearing on the street where it may damage their reputation. So they don't sell "seconds". A guitar that doesn't come up to snuff goes into the shredder.

Pretty maids all in a row

I don't know if there is anywhere else in the country you can take this kind of tour, so if you have $10 to spare, any interest at all in guitars and you are anywhere in the area then by all means go by the Gibson factory. And if you have another $3000 burning a hole in your pocket, they will happily sell you a guitar while you are there. Reservations are recommended and we had called and gotten a reservation a couple days ahead of time. But we got stuck in traffic trying to get across the Mississippi had to call and reschedule for the next tour which turned out to be a non-issue so I would say that, at least in October, signing up at the last minute is not a huge problem.

Officially a dive

After the tour, we went to eat at another "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives" place, a BBQ joint just outside of the downtown area. It was not a diner, nor was it a drive in but it definitely qualified in the dive category. This is a place where, just driving by, you would not even consider stopping to eat. In fact, once you get inside there is still a fairly strong temptation to turn around and walk out again. But the food was pretty good. I had a half a rack of ribs and they were delicious. The side items were good too. Vicki had a Cornish game hen but complained that it was a little dry. I took her word for it.

Good ribs on paper plates

Then it was back to Tom Sawyer's to relax by the riverside and enjoy the stately progression of commerce. I ordered Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi" for my Kindle since the copyright is expired and it's free. Christopher didn't particularly like it when he read it for school but I have rather enjoyed it and it's fun to read about the places that we are visiting from the vantage point of 140 years ago. So while there are no stern wheelers to be seen, we did sit out and watch the river traffic while I read my book and had a nice cold beer. Life is good.

Moonlight on the Mississippi

Music City

We packed up in Gatlinburg, David and Jamie turned in their "fun" Jeep and we all piled into the motorhome to drive to Nashville for the last part of the week. David and Jamie had booked a room at Gaylord's Grand Ole Opry Hotel while we were staying a few blocks down at the Two Rivers RV campground, which was not cheap but was way cheaper than staying at Gaylord's Grand Ole Opry Hotel. That night, we had dinner at the hotel. It was an excellent dinner but we did pay what, on normal rations, would have been enough to keep us comfortably fed for 4-5 days. Part of that cost is attributable to the consumption of "Tennessee Tea", an alcoholic beverage built around Johnny Walker whiskey that raised our spirits significantly but also left us incapable of tracking how much money we were lavashing on dinner.

Broadway at night.  We never saw this.

Now I have to admit to a somewhat distressing truth. We finished dinner shortly after nine o'clock at which time Jamie and David, as they did every night while we were in Nashville, headed downtown to Broadway to party the night away listening to music. At the same time Vicki and I, as we did every night while we were in Nashville, went back to our motorhome and sat in our chairs like slugs. It is disturbing to realize what old fuddy-duddies we have become, but no matter how good the music is we are no longer capable of barhopping and drinking and listening until the wee small hours of the morning. (To be totally honest, I would've been willing to bar hop for an hour or two. Vicki is a bigger fuddy-duddy than I am.)

Vickie and Jamie on Broadway

After closing the bars down, Jamie and David did not crawl, bleary-eyed, out of bed until about lunchtime, at which point their dearest desire for the day was to go back to Broadway and bar hop some more. With the sun directly overhead, Vicki was willing to go along and so we went off to Broadway for lunch. Broadway in Nashville is an amazing place.  The relevant section is about three blocks long and has, I don't know, maybe a dozen honky-tonk type bars, most of which also serve some form of solid calories. And they have live music. Some of them are three stories high and have a different band or performer on each floor. The music starts at 10 o'clock the morning and doesn't stop until 3 AM. There is no cover charge, all you have to do is sit there and enjoy the music and order an occasional drink or a sandwich or something. And these musicians are good.

Think about it. Nashville is the Mecca of country music. If you live in Huntsville, Kentucky, or Athens, Tennessee or Martinez, Georgia and you are the best damn musician in

Rippey's on the corner

town, you probably think you have a future in the country music business and the way you pursue that is to go to Nashville. So the place is absolutely packed full of the best damn musician in town from every town between the Rocky Mountains and the southeastern coast, all of them looking for someplace to perform and be discovered.  The publicans along Broadway have their pick of

Live entertainment

these lost souls who range from being merely really good to positively brilliant musicians and are willing to work for audience tips and no benefits, keeping down the establishment's expenditures on personnel and providing the customers with an experience difficult to replicate anywhere else on the planet. The downside, of course, is that after six months or a year the vast majority of these performers probably end up going back to Tyler, Texas or wherever to find paying jobs.

We had lunch at Rippey's and listened to about an hour or 90 min. of pretty good music. One of the performers rattled off a list of things that you must do while in Nashville and one of them was to tour the Ryman Auditorium, which we could actually see out the front window of the bar from where we were sitting. So after a while, we all got up, threw a few bucks in the tip jar and headed up the block to do the Ryman tour.

The Ryman Auditorium, photo by Aubry Haynes

Now I am a California boy and in my formative years my musical tastes ran towards folk rock and singer songwriters like James Taylor and Jackson Browne. I have never been a big fan of country western music or any of its cousins. So the term "Ryman Auditorium" meant absolutely nothing to

Minnie Pearl and Roy Acuff greet visitors

me. If you are a country fan, this is probably old news to you and you should skip down and read about Andrew Jackson's house. For those who are ignorant, like me, this is the story. The Ryman Auditorium was built by steamboat captain Thomas Ryman and originally christened as the Union Gospel Tabernacle. He built it in 1892 specifically as a venue for revival meetings presented by a preacher named Samuel Porter Jones, who was the Billy Graham of his era. After Capt. Ryman died, the building was renamed the Ryman Auditorium in his honor.

The Grand Ole Opry was and is a weekly radio show on NBC affiliate WSM in Nashville, that began in 1925 and is widely credited with putting country music on the national map. It was initially broadcast from the radio station with a small live audience but as its popularity grew they had to find a larger space for the growing local fan base. As the show continued to climb in popularity they went through a half a dozen different locations, each larger than the last, before finally landing at the Ryman in June of 1943. There the show was broadcast until 1974 when they built the current Grand Ole Opry House along with a hotel and theme park on what was then the outskirts of town. During that 30 years the show hosted all of the biggest names in country music and in turn was hosted by the likes of Roy Acuff, Hank Williams, Webb Pierce, Faron Young, Martha Carson, Minnie Pearl, and many others. The theater witnessed the birth of bluegrass music when Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs became regulars. Elvis Presley performed there one time in 1954. The manager of the theater advised him to go back to truck driving.

The next big country duo

Those 31 years as home to the classic broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry have transformed the Ryman Auditorium into hallowed ground for country music performers and their fans. The auditorium itself holds about 3000, the seating being in the form of church pews as one might expect from the building's original purpose. We got there too late for a guided tour so we guided ourselves through the building and read about the country music artifacts on display. Vicki and I paid 10 bucks to go up and have our picture taken on the stage. Then we walked the block back down to Broadway and spent another hour drinking beer and listening to music in a

Bar and performer I don't recall the names of

little bar whose name I don't even remember. The female singer and her band of three were again really good and I would have happily stayed longer but the parking tab on my car was about to run out and I did not want to have it towed away. So Jamie and David stayed behind and closed up the town again while Vicki and I walked the three blocks back to the car and drove back to our fuddy-duddy motorhome lifestyle for the rest of the evening.

The following morning (well, afternoon actually) David wanted to go visit the battlefield at Murfreesboro but, guess what, it's run by the National Park Service and was all locked up. Instead of doing that, Vicki wanted to go see the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson's antebellum plantation and we dragged David and Jamie along. Andrew Jackson's political career was built upon his status as a military hero during the war of 1812

The Hermitage

after winning the Battle of New Orleans. He was a populist and unrepentant slave owner with a large plantation on the outskirts of Nashville. He is the reason Henry Clay gave his electoral college votes to John Quincy Adams in 1824 to prevent Jackson from reaching the White House. By 1828 however Jackson had the votes cold and served as our seventh president for eight years. His home has been

Back yard and former killing field

preserved as a museum since the late 1800s and has been kept in remarkably good shape (although it was narrowly missed by a tornado in 1998). The surrounding area is all ornamental trees and grassy lanes but we were told that during Jackson's lifetime this was a working farm and this whole area would have been dedicated to crops. There is also a lovely, large fenced backyard to the house which looks like a great place for kids to play but, in fact, was where they slaughtered the hogs and was apparently a bloody mess much of the time. It was a nice house with many preserved furnishings but this is the fifth antebellum estate we have toured since we entered Kentucky and the experience is frankly losing its luster. I think we will give it a rest for the remainder of the year at least.

Current Grand Ole Opry House

That night we attended the Grand Ole Opry, another item on the lists of things you have to do when you go to Nashville. It is a two-hour show, kept rigidly on schedule by the requirements of the radio broadcast. Each performer does exactly two songs before they move on. It seems a shame to have a performer travel from Austin or Atlanta just to do two numbers, but the status of the show apparently makes it worthwhile. The new Opry House continued the tradition of pew seating. Unfortunately, our pew had a couple of occupants only slightly smaller than I am resulting in their not really being enough room for all of us, so I eventually relocated to another seat and we enjoyed the show separately. Oh well.

The old custom house in Nashville, circa 1877

We said goodbye to David and Jamie in the parking lot after the show. They weren't scheduled to fly out until the following afternoon but after the Opry they were headed downtown again. We needed to be out of our motorhome Park by 11 AM and they did not expect to be up and around any earlier than that so we left them to enjoy their last half-day in Nashville on their own and headed on towards Memphis.