I pulled up at the barrier and handed my documents to the man in the car-hire booth. He looked at my seven-seater, five-metre-long Dodge Caravan, empty but for me, my bright yellow suitcase and a violin. "Have you lost your friends?" he asked, peering into the cavernous interior. "Oh no," I replied. "I just haven't met them yet."

It was only when I was describing the incident to someone later, and remembering the car-hire guy's pitying look, that I realised how this must have sounded: like a lonely hippy hoping to pick up hitch-hikers. In reality, I was about to transport three musicians, a music writer and a banjo-maker between Nashville, Tennessee, and Denver, Colorado, 1,700 miles away. We had three days to make the trip (we were shuttling between festivals), at an average of 10 hours' driving per day. With that much in-car time – not to mention two banjos, a fiddle and a ukelele – I figured we would need our space.

The shortest route between Tennessee and Colorado is the I-70 through Missouri and Kansas. But the I-40 would take us via Jackson and Amarillo, and our first stop would be Memphis. Think of the playlist opportunities! And while we hadn't time to visit Graceland, we had heard a whisper of a joint that served the best barbecue in the city.

With a tight schedule, we called ahead to reserve a table – which was embarrassing when the Interstate BBQ turned out to be, as the name suggested, a truck stop by the freeway. But it lived up to the hype: our plates were soon full of sticky ribs the length of our forearms, not to mention the house speciality, BBQ spaghetti – sweet and rich, concealing huge hunks of meat in its wriggly depths. We returned to the car with four hours still to travel and a pact that we would keep the windows open.

The glory of an American road trip is its evolving landscape. Tennessee offered its lush green hills and, at night, the dark immensity of the Mississippi, so black that no one could say for sure when we had finally crossed it. Arkansas lightened the mood with its pentecostal churches – tiered like wedding cakes and lit up like Vegas casinos – and its signs directing us toward the Clinton Presidential Library one moment, and an Adult Superstore the next. Oklahoma's cornfields, splayed out either side of the freeway, seemed benign in the next day's sunlight – until we saw the mangled billboards and trees sheared by June's tornado and, later, passed a ruin of a trailer park, the upturned metal cabins flung like toys after a toddler's tantrum.

With so many musicians in the car, two things were inevitable. One, that we would sing our way through Oklahoma! (after all, there was a bright golden haze on the meadow). The other, that we would stop in Oklahoma City to visit the American Banjo Museum. The instrument still gives many the screaming heebie jeebies, but its history is fascinatingly intertwined with that of the United States, and many of the exhibits, decorated, inlaid and veneered, are pure artworks in themselves.

The I-40 crosses north Texas at the panhandle, its narrowest point, although its extraordinary ranchland rolls out, people-free, to horizons that seem further away than you've ever travelled. By the roadside, the Big Texan, a shamelessly imitation wild-west steak house, advertises its "free 72oz steak" for many miles and only reveals the catch on arrival: you have to eat the entire thing, and multiple accompanying dishes, within an hour. We paled at the challenge, although not at the generous helpings of beer, served in plastic cowboy boots that they let us take as souvenirs.

Unfortunately, only one of our group had remained sober to drive us to our hotel, several hours away, and it was the one whose other car is a Mustang. Around midnight, I woke to hear this driver declaring that she would try a shortcut down an old, unpopulated country road. She also announced that our fuel was running dangerously low, and that she hadn't seen a gas station in a long while. As we lurched off the freeway, cutting up exactly the kind of lorry that hunted down Dennis Weaver in Duel, I reached for my notebook and wrote, in a shaky hand: "We are going to die."

Travelling through New Mexico by night would have been eerie even if we hadn't been writing ourselves into a horror movie – a full moon picked out its rocky outcrops in spooky silhouettes and by the time we reached our hotel, a light hysteria had taken hold. Luckily, we had booked into a rather smart lodge rather than pitching up at a dodgy motel. If I had two pieces of advice for driving the States, they would be these – everywhere will take you three hours longer to drive than Google Maps suggests, and a junior suite that sleeps five can be surprisingly economical. You'll be thankful for it at 3am.

What else did I learn on the road trip? Well, the drive between New Mexico and Colorado is one of the most otherworldly experiences you can have without booking a flight to Mars. "Is this the way to Amarillo?" will bomb in a carful of Americans (it wasn't a hit over there). But you can, just, perform a banjo/ukulele/fiddle trio in a moving car. If you're careful where you aim your bow.

Essentials

Emma's flights and car hire were provided by netflights.com, which offers return flights to Nashville from London with Delta Air Lines from £517 per person including taxes. Netflights.com also offers fully inclusive car hire in over 550 locations across the USA from £18 per day.

A junior suite at the Lodge at Santa Fe starts from $123 (lodgeatsantafe.com)

Interstate BBQ is at 2265 S Third Street, Memphis (interstatebarbecue.com)

The American Banjo Museum is at 9 E Sheridan Ave, Oklahoma City (americanbanjomuseum.com)