Nashville to New Orleans, by way of the blues

American popular music of the twentieth century owes an outsized debt to a corridor of the South running from Nashville down to New Orleans, a distance of perhaps four hundred miles that produced, within a few decades of each other, modern country music, Southern soul, the blues and jazz. None of these genres developed in isolation from the others, and travelling the route in sequence makes the overlaps considerably easier to hear than they are to explain in the abstract.

Nashville, and the industry that built around it

Nashville earned its "Music City" nickname honestly. The Grand Ole Opry, a radio programme launched in 1925, turned the city into the industry centre for country music, and the Ryman Auditorium, the Opry's home for more than three decades before its move to a purpose-built venue, still stands downtown, nicknamed the "Mother Church of Country Music" for the sheer volume of the genre's history conducted under its roof. What Nashville offers today is less a single landmark than an entire industry visible at street level: recording studios, publishing houses and live venues still doing, in large part, what they were doing seventy years ago.

Muscle Shoals, and the sound that came out of nowhere obvious

A few hours south, the small town of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, produced a wholly disproportionate amount of American soul and rock music through its recording studios in the 1960s and 70s, drawing artists including Aretha Franklin, whose 1967 session there produced some of the defining recordings of Southern soul. There is no obvious reason a town this size should have become a recording capital; it simply did, through a small group of session musicians whose particular sound studios elsewhere tried, and largely failed, to replicate.

Memphis, and the roots underneath it

Memphis sits at the meeting point of several traditions rather than the source of just one. Sun Studio, where Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and B.B. King all recorded in the 1950s, is the city's best-known music landmark, but Memphis's deeper claim runs through Beale Street and the blues traditions carried up the Mississippi from the Delta plantation country to its south, traditions built substantially by the descendants of enslaved people working the same land under sharecropping arrangements that replaced slavery in name more than in daily hardship. Tupelo, a short drive away, adds a smaller but well-known footnote as Elvis Presley's birthplace.

Further south, Natchez holds one of the largest concentrations of antebellum mansions in the American South, built on cotton wealth and, directly, on the labour of enslaved people who worked the plantations surrounding the town. The mansions themselves are striking architecture; the history behind them is inseparable from the same forced-labour economy that shaped Southern life, and from which the musical traditions further along this route, blues above all, eventually emerged as a response.

New Orleans, where several traditions became one

The route ends in New Orleans, where jazz took recognisable shape in the early twentieth century, drawing on brass band traditions, blues, ragtime and the musical practices of the city's free and enslaved Black communities, most visibly in Congo Square, where enslaved people were permitted to gather, trade and play music on Sundays under French and Spanish colonial rule. That history is still audible in the brass bands that play through the French Quarter today, a living continuation rather than a museum piece.

When to make the drive

Spring and autumn suit this route considerably better than midsummer, when heat and humidity across Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana can be genuinely draining for a day of walking city streets. March, April, October and November offer the most comfortable balance of warmth and manageable humidity.