Mississippi road safari

Southern Living, Spring 2002 by Murphy, Morgan

Take a road trip back in time to the birthplace of the blues.

America's love affair with the car runs deep and constant. But like all love affairs, our affinity for fourwheeled travel is occasionally besotted by a bad case of the blues. It's easy to be blue about most modern road trips. Gasoline is expensive; interstate scenery has been McDonaldized; and droves of homogeneous, functional, and painfully practical cars buzz hither and thither.

But harken, ye blacktop denizens. There are still great American road trips out there, where the road is a story, a drive is novel, and a left turn is pure adventure. My favorite drive runs out of Memphis, south on U.S. 61. Here the roadway shimmers, time ebbs between 2002 and 1955. This is where the blues came to life and met with rock 'n' roll. It is the crossroads of American music.

My tour guide to The Mississippi Delta is a man named Tad Pierson, inventor of the American Dream Safari. "Africa has its safaris with lions and jungles," he says. "I thought I could create a tour ofAmerica that has every bit of that romantic excitement."

In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I am a complete car nut. Fortunately for me, Tad's tour bus is no lumbering Econoline van with a PA. system and tinted windows. Nay, nay. Mr. Pierson drives a 1955 two-tone Cadillac named "Mansfield," after the fifties bombshell.

Mansfield is big and flashy, a glittering behemoth that snorts up tarmac and shames little foreign cars out of its way. "In this car you are part of Memphis and The Delta. You're not just a tourist staring out a window. You become a part of what it means to be here," Tad says to me as college students piled in a Toyota holler, "What year is it?"

Our American Dream Safari begins in the lobby of The Peabody Hotel, built by cotton wealth from The Delta and sustained by a horde of ducks that make a twice-daily appearance in the hotel's fountain. Tad parks Mansfield out front, and by 8:30 a.m. we're on the road, headed to a local coffee shop to plan the day.

For $175 per person, Tad will take you on his Delta Day Trip. He starts by asking your favorite blues singers and then maps the road trip around your tastes. He's an excellent tour guide in that way, and in addition to all meals, he pays for gas as well-- not a small sum when it comes to operating a 5,000-pound car.

On the way out of town, Tad gives a quick rundown of the three kings of Memphis: Martin Luther King, Jr.; Elvis; and B.B. King. We lumber by B.B. King's Blues Club and swing around the shuttered housing projects Elvis left behind for Graceland. We quietly pass the Lorraine Motel and room 306, where Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot. Tad doesn't try to hide the juke joints, liquor stores, and checkered past of Memphis. Actually, he kind of revels in it. "As a traveler, I'm assuming that you don't want to go to a sanitized, whitewashed town," he remarks.

We take Third Street out of town, which melds into U.S. 61. Amid Memphis' stop-and-go traffic, Tad tells me and my wife, Amy, about his five other 1955 Cadillacs rusting in a Kansas barn. We talk Elvis. We discuss music, politics, hubcaps, and a voodoo village on the edge of town.

Then suddenly the road flattens, and the foothills on the left meet the levee on the right. "The saying is that The Delta starts in the fountain at The Peabody, but this; '" Tad intones, "is where The Delta really begins."

Here the topsoil is said to go 50 feet down, and cotton and the blues grow in tandem. We pass the stomping grounds of Hound Dog Taylor, Robert Johnson, Rufus Thomas, Floyd Dixon, Wilson Pickett, and many others. Meandering through Mississippi, we stop in the plantation town of Robinsonville and inspect The Hollywood, an old juke joint memorialized in song by Marc Color. Minutes later we pass the giant postmodern casinos of Tunica and the lonely town of Dundee,

Right after noon, we cross the state line and head into Helena, Arkansas (town motto: "Long Ago is Not So Far Away"). Tad tunes the radio to KFFA, 1360 AM, and we listen to the staccato voice of "Sunshine" Sonny Payne, arbiter of the blues show made famous by the King Biscuit Flour Co. The flour company is long gone, but like many of the stops on this American Dream Safari, its legend lives on.

MORGAN MURPHY

For more information: American Dream Safari, P.O. Box 3129, Memphis, TN 38173; (901) 527-8870 or www.americandreamsafari.com.