On this day: free at last?

A couple of years ago, around this time, I visited the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis - built on to the Lorraine Motel, on whose steps Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

The museum is a moving, fascinating and, at times, shocking experience, telling a never comfortable story. For me, however, what stood out on the museum tour was the opportunity to listen, in full, to the speech given, 50 years ago today, by King at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

With the Treyvon Martin case still fresh and controversially so in the American consciousness, King's "I have a dream" speech is as pertinent today as it was on August 28, 1963. And it's every bit as compelling to read, in full. From beginning to end.

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"I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon of hope to millions of slaves, who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, the colored America is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the colored American is still sadly crippled by the manacle of segregation and the chains of discrimination.

One hundred years later, the colored American lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the colored American is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we have come to our Nation's Capital to cash a check. When the architects of our great republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed to the inalienable rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given its colored people a bad check, a check that has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and security of justice.

We have also come to his hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is not time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy.

Now it the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.

Now it the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

Now is the time to make justice a reality to all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of its colored citizens. This sweltering summer of the colored people's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end but a beginning. Those who hope that the colored Americans needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.

There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the colored citizen is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.

We cannot be satisfied as long as the colored person's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one.

We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating "for white only."

We cannot be satisfied as long as a colored person in Mississippi cannot vote and a colored person in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.

No, we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of your trials and tribulations. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by storms of persecutions and staggered by the winds of police brutality.

You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our modern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you, my friends, we have the difficulties of today and tomorrow.

I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

I have a dream that one day out in the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interpostion and nullification; that one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be engulfed, every hill shall be exalted and every mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plains and the crooked places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I will go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.

With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to climb up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning "My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my father's died, land of the Pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!"

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that, let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi and every mountainside.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old spiritual,

'Free at last, free at last. 

Thank God Almighty. 

We are free at last.' "

Two nations separated by dentistry

Well would you look at that. Barely two weeks after returning from a wedding in Atlanta, I'm back in the land of the free, the land where queuing for an hour to clear immigration is just what makes this great land of theirs so great and so free.

I have come to Chicago, America's 'Second City', "that toddlin' town", as Frank Sinatra eulogised.

It's my first time here, a long-held ambition to seek out where blues music went when it migrated north from the South, discovered amplification and became something which can trace its heritage in the soul, funk, house and hip-hop that came later out of the city. More of this in the days to come.

Chicago is my base camp for another long-held ambition, to drive Route 66 - Chicago to LA - 'the Mother Road', doing the diner'n'motel thing, and seeing the real America. And, no, I won't be doing it on a Harley-Davidson. This is not some mid-life crisis. Simply a trip to embrace the American heartland, a brief series of conjoined snapshots of a country that inspires such journeys like no other.

American culture fascinates me and always has. But the more I've embraced its musical heritage, the more I've wanted to explore the roots of popular music that became the dominant culture of the latter half of the 20th century, that came to Britain in the 1950s and 60s and inspired the British Invasion of bands who brought it all the way back to America. Even now I find it weird to see Americans citing The Beatles and the Stones as the epitome of rock'n'roll when it started here. But then that's what Americans do best: here success is to be cherished, to be hailed, to be encouraged.

It's what divides Britain and America. America is an overwhelmingly positive, can-do place. People seek out opportunity. Britain - and indeed Europe - at times feels like the glass is half-empty, that it is easier to find ten ways to say no to something than the one way to say yes.

Someone asked me the other day why I keep coming back to America when, living in Paris, I have a vast and beautiful country at my disposal, and beyond it countries like Italy, Spain and Greece, the cradles of modern civilisation, each with breathtaking vistas, real history by the bucketload, and the beaches of the Mediterranean. The answer - which took time to form - was that, yes, I could take holidays in those places and I do. But there are times when I need to breathe in America again to feel good. It's a drug, but a good one.

It truly is the land of possibility. Even in the depths of economic despair, Americans plough on. They work hard for their recognition. That "have a nice day!" waitress may be gratingly OTT to the foreign tourist - especially the Brits used to increasingly dismal customer service and can't-be-arsed attitudes back home - but she is part of the glass half full that I love to drink from in this country.

Attitude, then, clearly divides these two country cousins. And language. George Bernard Shaw famously described Britain and America as "two countries separated by a common language", something Eddie Izzard later explored with this forensic comparison:



However, I have only recently come to the conclusion that, if you really want to examine the differences between America and Britain, just ask an American and a Brit to stand next to each other and smile.

Yes, teeth. At risk of pandering to the cliché that all Brits have medievally poor dentistry,  Americans simply have better teeth (with the exception of the country's swolen community of meth-heads and anyone in rural Alabama, apparently).

Whenever I had my photograph taken at the Atlanta wedding, my smile resembled that of a bulldog chewing a wasp. This is because I am British and we don't show off our teeth, especially to Americans, for fear of sparking a panic that The Plague, boils and Victorian syphilis are all back in fashion. My American friends, however, routinely flashed their gnashers like smiling sharks (a concept the Discovery Channel really should look into for its next Shark Week).  You only had to produce a camera and row after row of pristine, pearl-white tombstones would be framed by a smile. Time after time, picture after picture.

If you have any American friends go now to Facebook and look up any group shots of them at weddings and social gatherings. You'd think the entire country was sponsored by Signal.

Dentistry is a part of the American way. Teeth - shining white teeth, perfect choppers for devouring 100% American-reared cows, hot dogs at ball games and shrimp at barbecues - should be included in the long list of American icons.

It is no surprise, then, to discover that the world's first dentistry association was formed in this country, and that the American Dental Association is located right here in Chicago. That's right - and you thought I'd veered off topic...?

That's All Right

Until relatively recently I had struggled to understand what it was about Elvis Presley.

Why did some people devote themselves to him as others do religious figures? Why were there people who fetishistically dressed like him, copying any one of a number of looks from his 24-year career, less out of homage as lifestyle? Like transvestism without the cross dressing. You don't see many people with long hair, beards and sandals dressed so out of devotion to Jesus, now do you?

It has, slowly, dawned on me that those people are, in their own eccentric way, keeping alive the flame of the world's most charismatic and, in influence and bearing, enduring pop star ever.

Last night more than 70,000 fans held their annual candle-lit vigil at Graceland, the Presley family home in Memphis, in honour of the King's death, 35 years ago today. Presley's widow, Priscilla and his only daughter, Lisa Marie were, for the first time since the vigil tradition began, amongst the fans.

Like most aspects of Presley's post-mortem existence, the vigil has been part of an organized week of events to commemorate his death, which has included shopelvis.com, the online memorabilia store, doing a good trade in 35th anniversary goods.

The trouble I have with this is that Presley's memory these days seems to be only good for image exploitation. Unlike other icons who died too soon - Lennon, Hendrix, Cobain - Elvis has been turned into a caricature represented by anyone and anything in a white jumpsuit, gold-framed sunglasses and stick-on sideburns.

In Las Vegas, where the Presley's career descended into the mediocrity of cabaret, his legacy is maintained by the opportunity of you and your beloved (or new acquaintance) being married by an Elvis lookalike at a drive-through wedding chapel. And to sweeten the deal, you'll get $200 of gambling chips for your trouble. It's Vegas. It's just part of that city's gaudy schtick.

Unfortunately its exactly that sort of tackiness that helped drive my indifference towards Elvis. He'd become a cartoon. What changed my opinion was my first visit to Memphis four years ago. Part of a driving pilgrimage to The South, this was - if you'll excuse another religious reference - a visit to my musical Holy Land: Clarksdale's crossroads is Manger Square, Beale Street the Via Dolorosa.

Memphis has a unique place in musical history, being the meeting point and melting pot for blues, soul and R&B, drawing on country and gospel in their genetics. It was these influences that put the fire into Elvis Presley's belly when he first turned up at the Sun Studio on Union Avenue as a teenager to record an acetate disc to give to his mother Gladys for her birthday.

My own visit to Sun transformed my view of Elvis forever. For the first time in my life I saw him not as the jump-suited king of high camp, but as an earnest young singer who had something that no singer had then, or has had since.

It was, then, logical to start my Elvis tour at Sun. Most Memphis visitors make straight for Graceland as soon as they can. So, knowing that Sam Phillips' studio was where the whole Elvis thing began, and with my deep-seated aversion towards tourist excess, I chose to skip the Presley mansion until I was in the mood.

Anyone visiting Memphis should do the same. Graceland represents the Elvis that he became. The Sun Studio represents the raw talent of an 18-year-old truck driver, called back by Sam Phillips almost two years after he'd cut the disc for his mother, to team him with guitarist Scotty Moore and bass player Bill Black ro record the Arthur Crudip blues standard That's All Right.

It became a hit across the segregated South (many couldn't believe they were listening to a white man singing a black song...and sounding black), making Presley a regional star. That drew the attention of 'Colonel' Tom Parker and eventually RCA records, who in turn released Hound Dog which, when performed for the first time on The Ed Sullivan Show caused havoc in living rooms across America.

All of that - and much of the pop and rock music that has followed - can be traced back to that tiny studio on Union Avenue in Memphis, which I went back to last year. The other effect of visiting Sun is that after virtually breathing the same air filled Presley's lungs as he made his recording debut,  it becomes impossible not to visit Graceland.

Eight miles separates it from Sun, but it's a distance as significant as the Mississippi Delta is from Chicago. Modest, as mansions go, it was Presley's principle home from 1958 until he died there in 1977.

It was his Camelot, his seat and a magnet for family members as well as the 'Memphis Mafia' that surrounded Presley for much of his life after success took a hold. In the TV room, for example, Elvis would sit for hours watching three TV sets simultaneously, like a nightwatchman monitoring CCTV screens.

The oddest place in Graceland, though, has to be The Racquetball Room. Presley had it built in the early 70s to actually play racquetball, that odd cousin of squash.

The building was another of Presley's hangouts, furnished with a bar, a very comfy lounge, pinball machines and a piano. It was at this piano he sat playing Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain in the early hours of August 16, 1977.

It was the last thing he ever played, closing the piano lid before going back to the main house, where he was later found dead in the upstairs bathroom, having suffered a fatal heart attack, most likely the result of his addiction to prescription medicines. He had died alone, aged just 42.

The irony is that Elvis had rarely been alone in years. In the brilliant Beatles Anthology series, Ringo Starr talks of the somewhat odd atmosphere the Fabs encountered when they were invited to an audience with Presley at his Los Angeles home in July 1965. The band were on tour just a year after they'd made their own breakthrough appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, prompting the so-called British Invasion.

The opportunity to visit Elvis at his Bel Air mansion was seen as keeping protocol, like state diplomacy. In principle it was The Beatles Meet Elvis, but with the Liverpudlians in the ascendancy it had become Elvis Meets The Beatles. Starr noticed an unease about the King during their encounter, which he spent idly strumming a bass guitar. The "weird" atmosphere was not helped by Presley being surrounded by guffawing sycophants. These were the so-called Memphis Mafia, his hangers-on who can also be heard on Presley's 1968 'comeback' TV special, laughing on his every ad-lib like the hyped-up studio "posse" of a zoo-format radio DJ.

Though The Beatles have mostly spoken positively of the meeting, the uneasy atmosphere can be explained by the fact British band were, at the time, succeeding in enjoying critical as well as commercial success, while Elvis had been reduced to Las Vegas cabaret and making cheesy movies, a status, sadly, that would arguably change very little until his death.

I was nine-years-old that Tuesday. I remember it distinctly. I was on a family holiday in Wales, staying in a quaint slate-roofed cottage with a pretty little garden. Coming back from a day's excursion somewhere, I remember rushing into my bedroom, being a Tuesday, to hear the new Top 40 being read out on the 5 o'clock bulletin of Radio 1's Newsbeat. Instead it was relaying the news: "The King Is Dead".

Being nine, I can't say it had a profound impact. It was news. It was someone famous that I had heard of and had probably heard. I certainly had no idea of cultural significance. In 1977 I was undergoing my own musical awakening, the result of immersive chart radio listening rather than educated taste. Hound Dog, Heartbreak Hotel and even Blue Suede Shoes - written by fellow Million Dollar Quartet member Carl Perkins and drenched in the Delta Blues that I would come to love - may as well have been novelty records from the wind-up gramophone era.

Memphis, Sun Studio and Graceland all opened up the cult of Elvis for me by exposing his roots. It opened my eyes to the God-given talent that was completed by the personality and charisma.
Seeing black and white clips of Presley's first appearance on American TV, swinging his hips and rasping "You ain't nothing but a hound dog", with his greased-up hair and kiss curl, explained the revolution that he brought.

John Lennon claimed that he was kicked out of school for growing sideburns like Presley's, and indeed all four Beatles have cited Elvis as one of their main influences. Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Jim Morrison, Robert Plant, Michael Hutchence - all have Elvis to thank, too.

The difference is that Elvis did it by the accident of simply being Elvis.

American Dreaming - tales about the Southland

Alex Demyan and NewOrleansOnline.com

Exactly one month ago today I was setting off for a brief excursion through what Paul Simon called "the cradle of the Civil War", indulging in the music, culture, history and hospitality of the American South.

The trip - though criminally short - was nevertheless long enough to reinforce my belief that for all the exotic, fascinating and culturally diverse destinations the world has to offer, I am still drawn to - no, absorbed by - the United States, its people and its places.

A week earlier What Would David Bowie Do? had been on American soil for a business trip, and between this visit and the journey down south, spent an inordinate amount of time arriving at, passing through or departing from various US airports. It was an experience which served only to demonstrate what fascinating observatories of local life they are.

New Orleans' delightfully named Louis Armstrong International Airport (known locally as “Satchmo”) provided a perfect sample of the rich potpourri of the resident and the transitory, its waiting areas, walkways and lounges like a microcosmic fishtank sourced from the greater ocean of American life.

Amid all the usual departure gate hub-bub was a regular fixture at any US departure lounge: the Willy Loman. Conspicuously pacing up and down, feverishly pitching his wares via an apparently invisible Bluetooth headset, he appeared insanely animated in front of an indifferent audience. Next to me sat the sweet old gran heading home to visit the grandkids; across the divide, the single mum struggling with children and luggage; and - yes, fans of Airplane! - elsewhere at that departure gate was the obligatory nun. Can anyone remember the last time they saw a nun anywhere other than an airport?

I've been an annual visitor to the United States for almost 20 years, and lived there for two of them. I'm sure some will regard me as being of the barnyard for lacking breadth of horizon, that I should be spending my vacations backpacking through the Himalaya, exploring Mayan temples by kayak or in-line skating up the Ho-Chi Minh Trail. And while it's true that American travel doesn't present any greater challenge than deciding between the bewildering choice of drive-throughs and motel chains, the country isn't any less rewarding, enriching or invigorating a visit.

America has never failed to live up to expectations: my first ever visit took me to Los Angeles where - like Stevie Wonder's "hard town Mississippi" rural refugee - I couldn't help saying to myself, "Yeah, just like I pictured it".

You have to remember that I grew up in gloomy, grey 1970s Britain. LA - represented by Charlie's Angels and CHiPs - was America: a blue-skied paradise populated by big cars, perfect teeth and flawless beauty. Jaclyn Smith was her name.

I knew this was somewhere I wanted to visit, even be part of, and I eventually got my wish. Subsequently, and exhaustively, I've explored the better two-thirds of California - from San Diego to San Francisco, Venice Beach and Carmel on the coast east into and out of the deserts to the majestic Sierras, the jaw-droppingly beautiful Yosemite and the glorious tranquility of Lake Tahoe. I even know the taxi back-doubles to reach Los Angeles International Airport.

California was only the beginning: I branched into the Pacific Northwest - once known for Twin Peaks, Nirvana and Big Foot, and now, dreadfully fey vampires - coming across a bizarre mock Bavarian village in the Cascade Mountains and Greenpeace chasing Indian whale hunters around Neah Bay, the remotest tip of the 'lower 49 states'; I've been bitten to death in South Carolina and bored to death in southern Texas; I've hiked the steel canyons of Manhattan and barrelled through the sandstone canyons of Utah in a 4x4, blaring out The Clash, just in case an Osmond was lurking behind a tree. I've covered a lot of ground, but in truth I've barely scratched the surface.

Ever since Christopher Columbus misprogrammed his GPS and discovered India to be closer to Cuba than expected, America has been about aspiration. On my recent trip from Memphis to New Orleans, however, I received a timely reminder that aspiration continues to duel with adversity.

The South, today, may not be as dirt-poor as it was when share croppers came in from the fields to Memphis to find their fortunes - or the sanctuary of a Beale Street juke joint - but it still struggles. Mississippi and its southern neighbour Louisiana boast the poorest communities in the United States. Downtown Memphis, in particular, is marked by its vacant storefronts, its homeless and a noticeable lethargy, even in the middle of a normal working day.

And yet this is the corner of America from which pop music as we know it today was founded. The rhythms that emerged from its cotton plantations to fuse with gospel and folk, evolving, in Darwinian fashion, into blues and jazz, became the rock and roll that established music as the predominant youth culture of the last 60 years.

At risk of committing Lennonesque blasphemy - dangerous sport when it comes to the Bible Belt - there are parallels between the South and the Holy Land. To visit the original haunts of Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Son House, BB King and Robert Johnson (the founding member of the 27 Club) carries the same sensation of walking amid mythic history as visiting Nazareth, Galilee and other places of biblical history in Israel, as I was fortunate to do last year.

Memphis is Jerusalem and Clarksdale - a long, straight, hour-long drive away down Highway 61 (yes, that Highway 61) and into Mississippi, is Bethlehem. The crossroads where Highways 61 and 49 meet is Manger Square. Here, the story goes, Robert Johnson made a deal with the Devil for the ability to play the guitar. I won't dwell on the symbolism of the crossed guitars which now marks this junction, save to say it's a dilapidated symbol at an intersection few would want to linger at.

The blues spawned by the Mississippi Delta may have eventually found its way into British bedrooms in the 1960s, where it was indulged by white, suburban middle class boys, but the region bears little benefit today of the excess and opulence it gave rise to. Apart from the Delta Blues Museum and an arts center co-founded by local resident Morgan Freeman, Clarksdale has little else. Down at that crossroads you become conscious that time has scarcely moved on in the 80 years since Johnson's apocryphal satanic encounter.

As it was for those early blues pioneers, Memphis remains the area's aspirational magnet. Beale Street today might be a theme park version of the street it once was, but amid the bachelor and bachelorette parties staggering up and down its main drag of an evening, authentic, live blues can still be heard.

BB King's, at the corner of Beale and 2nd, is now part of a franchised chain, but the Memphis original is a must-see, if only for the quality of live acts it hosts every night, but also out of homage to its patron, who does still make appearances when, at the age of 86, he has time while remarkably still touring.

King, born in share-cropping farmland 130 miles away in Indianola, Mississippi, came to Memphis as a 21-year-old and picked up guitar-playing sessions on the legendary local radio station WDIA. It was while DJing and playing blues for WDIA that he acquired the nickname 'Beale Street Blues Boy' - B.B.

If you happen across the angular building at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis, on the corner with Marshall Avenue, go in, do the tour, and get to squeeze into the recording studio where, on July 18, 1953, an 18-year-old local truck driver walked in off the street, paid $3.98 to record three songs. The songs included My Happiness - a gift for, it is claimed, his mother's birthday.

He walked out with a 10-inch acetate disc of the recordings and that may well have been that. Fate - and producer Sam Philips' receptionist - brought Elvis Presley back to Sun Studios, where he recorded and released That's All Right in 1954 and sparked a global cultural phenomenon of seismic proportions.

In 1957, at the age of just 22, Presley moved in to Graceland, just nine miles south-east of where Sun Studios still stands today. The first thing that strikes you about Graceland is just how modest this cod-colonial pile is by mansion standards. Newly-minted English football players would consider it tiny. It is as much a shrine to the King of Rock'n'Roll as it is to what passed for rock star interior design in the era Presley lived in it.

Visiting it today, one sees a house frozen in time, with 70s chintz and patterns which would, today, come with a health warning. Graceland's modest size is tempered by the fact that its estate boasts a large shed full of Presley's cars - a mix of the gaudy and the opulent - as well as not one but two airliners, which used to fly under the call sign 'Hound Dog One'.

Such arriviste trappings might be incongruous to the poverty around Memphis, but Graceland is a revered local money-spinner. A lesser known local attraction is the Stax studio. Rebuilt to perfection (the original was knocked down by a property developer), it plays another important role in the cultural heritage of Memphis, celebrating both a record label and the single neighbourhood that produced Isaac Hayes, Ike Turner, Booker T. Jones, Rufus Thomas, Steve Cropper and Donald 'Duck' Dunn.

This was the multicultural backbone of Stax Records: a fusion of rhythm, soul, blues and gospel influenced which, combined, challenged the still-segregated landscape of American society in the early 1960s - in the very city where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated, outside room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel.

Today the hotel is a part of the Civil Rights Museum, a fantastically curated, chronological exhibition of a period of American history few can be proud of, and which depicts a story that spans multiple centuries to within my lifetime.

Heading south of Memphis, following the curves of the Mississippi, you encounter more of the impoverished rural landscapes people have either aspired to break away from, or reluctantly accepted to be their lot and stayed put.

Challenging this is Natchez, a Miss Havershamesque town overlooking the Mississippi as it bends between Louisiana and the state named after it. When cotton was the currency on the Mississippi - and a lucrative one at that - Natchez, with its commanding view of the river, was a wealthy town. Today, its wealth has visibly faded, although the town centre retains a fabric of suburban respectability.

Natchez is a charming town, but hardly worthy of an overnight stay. If you do, two attractions make it worthwhile. Firstly, there is the Under-the-Hill Saloon on Silver Street. This slightly creaky riverside pub, with its - how do you say this politely? - eccentric barman, Harley-riding clientele and eclectic decor (yes, that was a real hand grenade we saw behind the bar) is a local institution.

Above it is the three-room Mark Twain Guest House, to which guests share a single bathroom and, for their $100 night, do without in-room televisions and telephones in order to preserve the "somewhat historic atmosphere of our rooms".

Whether Mark Twain ever stayed there for real remains to be proven. If he had have done, he'd have certainly eaten at The Magnolia Grill next door which - either through a paucity of anything better or, simply because of the atmosphere of the evening - served up arguably the best meal of the entire week spent south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

First timers, travel writers and more seasoned visitors to the United States find it near-impossible to avoid commenting on the enormity of the country - its places and its people - or on the absurdity of its excess. And yet, in Natchez, What Would David Bowie Do? encountered perhaps the most wasteful application of a natural resource on God's green: a petrol-driven truck employed just to transport patrons less then 50 feet up and down the causeway between the entrance of a Mississippi steamer casino boat and the roadway where shuttle buses drop them off. Having picked them up from the car park further up a hill. Let me go over that again: a truck, which transports people 50 feet up or down a landing ramp.

And so on further to the mouth of the Mighty Mississip' itself, New Orleans - the final destination of this brief road trip. Simply put, one of the most charming cities on the map, even though a clearly pissed off Mother Nature did her best to wipe it clean off that map in 2005 when she sent Hurricane Katrina spinning across the Gulf of Mexico.

When she struck, Katrina breached the delicate acquaintance The Big Easy had enjoyed with the Gulf since the port was founded by the French in 1718. Flooding caused by the city's levees breaking killed more than 1000 residents and displaced tens of thousands more. In fact, exactly how many were displaced is still not known, six years later. Census figures have shown that New Orleans - once America's third-largest city - lost almost a third of its population over the last decade. Today it is America's 52nd largest city.

Built, largely, over reclaimed swampland, New Orleans is a cocktail bar's shaker of influences. With its clearly French foundation, the infusion of Creole, Haitian, Spanish and other European elements give the city a flavour unlike any other I've visited in America with, perhaps, the exception of San Francisco.

Cosmo Condina/NewOrleansOnline.com

The jazz music is there, but the good stuff needs searching for. Bourbon Street, like Beale in Memphis, may be the star of the show, but it is a somewhat tacky thoroughfare.

It is loud and colourful, with no shortage of bars to tempt you in. Some even have authentic jazz and blues. Others, however, are just garish karaoke bars, catering to the culture clash of Mid-West sales reps attending conventions and Mid-West rednecks who all converge on the city at the same time.

At least it's easy to set the two crowds apart: the reps are all dressed in sports jackets, their mobile phones holstered at the hip, while the rednecks almost exclusively wearing baseball hats, facial hair and capped-sleeve T-shirts bearing logos of a motor oil brands.

New Orleans is not, of course, just one street. During the daytime, the French Quarter provides both respite from the aching sun as well as a charming and thoroughly walkable area in which to step in and out of bars for a cooling drink, or to sample some of the food delights, especially creole cooking and, for the totally indulgent, a local speciality known as a Po' Boy.

These are, essentially, very large sandwiches - what Americans will refer to as a "submarine", owing to them being made out of a French baguette, are the size of an actual submarine, and are loaded with so much unhealthy crap that they can be legitimately be described as weapons of mass destruction.

The Po' Boy originated in the Great Depression, when a pair of entrepreneurial brothers came up with the idea of selling foot-long sandwiches to poor families on the basis that each 'Poor Boy' would adequately provide a meal to an entire household. Today they are far from cheap, and given the propensity for over-indulgence, you are unlikely to see a Po' Boy eaten by either a single family, or anyone on a low income.

Here, in fact, lies a pillar of the American paradox: the United States is the world's wealthiest nation, and yet 15% of its 312 million inhabitants live below the poverty line. That's the equivalent of the entire population of Spain. America remains highly aspirational: TV advertising is about doing well, living healthier and aspiring to own that next-generation SUV, despite the fact you will not be able to afford its fuel or, come to think of it, the house to park it outside. This is a country with a gross domestic product - of almost $15 trillion, but where child poverty is twice as high as many European countries, and where more than half a million children are officially listed as homeless.

Driving through - or driving past - poverty like this makes no difference as to whether you're in the USA or the outskirts of Mumbai. Of course, it asks moral questions of the traveller, but as self-indulgent as this sounds, my curiosity for a part of America which has struggled for long enough, and will, sadly, struggle for a lot longer, is driven by a celebration of the culture and pleasure it has provided the world.

Lacking any real erudition, I'll leave more dexterous reflections on Americana in general to Kerouac and Bryson: I wouldn't even dare suggest this dog-and-pony show of mine would, in any case, offer anything deep. But for all of America's critics and cynics, who say it lacks culture, history, society, I say take a closer look. Look deeper and you will find a country that might surprise you and even enchant you in the way it did me before I'd even set foot there - and has continued enchanting me ever since. My own personal American road movie is not yet past the opening titles. There is plenty more to come.