Chicago on a rainy Wednesday night. We've eaten hotdogs at a joint on North Clark Street where a "chocolate milkshake" costs $20 and the cashier gets topless. We've downed Old Style beers at a great old dive bar, the L&L Tavern (3207 North Clark Street), where you can buy a legal spirit made from distilled coca leaves, the raw ingredient for cocaine. We're revving ourselves up for a 1,000-mile road trip through the "wheelhouse of American music", as my travel companion Rev Timmy James puts it; starting here in Frank Sinatra's kind of town, and swinging down through Louisville and Nashville to Memphis.
We intend to stay drenched in regionally appropriate music and our hope is to find a good live show every night. Chicago, where the blues got electrified, Curtis Mayfield honed his funky soul, and house music was invented, is proving tricky. At the normally reliable Cubby Bear (1059 West Addison), we walk out on a lame indie pop band. I say no to demon-infected thrash metal and the Rev doesn't like hip-hop, which rules out a visit to the South Side clubs where Kanye West and Lupe Fiasco got started – that and the 40-odd murders down there in the last month.
So we fall back on the blues. We're about 60 years late for the best, when Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf were in charge, and Otis Rush was roaring and groaning on the West Side. But the tradition runs deep here, and city still has at least 10 functioning blues clubs. They cater mostly for tourists these days, which the purists don't like, but the alternative is a lot of unemployed musicians and the final death of a great American art form.
We step out of a taxi at Kingston Mines (2548 North Halsted), a family-run club with live blues on seven nights a week. We shuffle past the bouncers, pay $12 apiece, and enter a big low-slung building with two stages, and a kitchen serving ribs and Cajun food. The blues can sound stale and dated in the wrong hands, but that won't be a problem tonight. White-haired Carl Weathersby complains about his sciatic nerve but, once he gets limbered up, he has 40 years of stagecraft and musicianship to draw on, a smoking-hot band, and a powerful voice full of aching soul. When live music is this good, you lose track of yourself, and maybe that's a kind of freedom.
The next morning, with the afterglow shining through our hangovers, we spend more money than we were intending at Dusty Groove (1120 North Ashland Avenue), a wonderful emporium specialising in soul, funk, jazz and hip-hop, mostly on vinyl. After a fortifying Italian beef sandwich at Mr. Beef (666 North Orleans), we make a pilgrimage to the old Chess Records recording studio (2120 South Michigan Avenue), where Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and many others cut their best stuff.
The tour guide is Keith Dixon, grandson of legendary bluesman Willie Dixon, and he regales us with stories he heard growing up. The Rolling Stones wrote a song about the building and when they recorded an album here (12 x 5), Mick Jagger was so overcome by nerves and feelings of inadequacy that he stood facing the back wall and asked for Chuck Berry to be removed from the building. "You can't tell my grandmother this one," begins another story. Keith invites us to a free show that night, but it's time to hit the road.
Rev Timmy James, who performs blues and country under that name in New York, delves into his iPod, and comes up with Jesus Just Left Chicago by ZZ Top. "Drive like Jesus," he says, as we cross a big iron bridge with views across Lake Michigan. He lets the album play out and then it's Dwight Yoakam and bluegrass all the way to Kentucky.
Louisville, birthplace of Muhammad Ali and Hunter S Thompson, is an elegant, charming, bourbon-enthused city on the Ohio river. Bluegrass has long been a part of the city's soundscape, although its heartland is in eastern Kentucky and, since the early 80s, punk and indie have thrived here. Slint and My Morning Jacket are its biggest stars, along with cult singer Will Oldham, aka Bonnie "Prince" Billie, who plays around town regularly.-songwriter
We catch the Ritchie White Orchestra at a dependable indie rock club called the New Vintage (2126 South Preston Street). The spirits menu at the bar lists only bourbons, so we get some Buffalo Trace and Pappy Van Winkle as the building reverberates with driving rhythms, dissonant noise and weird harmonies. Ritchie White looks like Uday Hussein, Saddam's depraved younger brother, and he has stage presence to burn.
We meet a Filipino-American with a broad Kentucky accent called Mike Bucayu. He's a musician, a fanatical collector of punk and bluegrass records, and the proud owner of a basement door signed by the Ramones and various bluegrass dignitaries. The next morning, we go to his house, sign the door, and ask him how punk rock led him to bluegrass. "When I heard those banjos, I heard the same driving rhythm, and I was looking for something new to get into," he says. "Punk is limited. It's about teenage angst. But everything is in bluegrass, the whole of life, and they sing about heaven and hell too."
If you want to hear the best of it, he says, you need to drive east to Pike County, and ask at a gas station where the music's happening. Some other time, because we're off to Nashville, aka Nashvegas and Music City USA. On the road, we listen to Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Johnny Paycheck, and Dolly Parton's immortal Jolene. Neither of us enjoy the country pop that Nashville is putting out today. The ache has gone out of the music, replaced by sing-song anthems of celebration.
Country used to be the only game in town, but Nashville these days has an exploding rock scene. Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys is living and recording here. So is Jack White, who's opened a typically quirky record shop and novelties lounge called Third Man Records (623 7th Avenue South), with a Tesla tower on top of the building.
Broadway is a long strip of bars, clubs and souvenir shops, and following good advice, we head straight for Robert's Western World (416B Broadway), an old honky tonk where you can still hear traditional country played live. The best venue to experience the hipper side of Nashville is probably the Mercy Lounge (1 Cannery Row), where we stumble upon a benefit show for a musician whose studio burned down. Local darlings Luella and the Sun are playing with Justin Townes Earle (Steve Earle's son), and Webb Wilder, who calls himself "The Last of the Full-Grown Men".
Justin Townes Earle, gangly and deeply stoned, plucks away at his acoustic guitar and croons winsomely – weak beer after high-octane Webb Wilder. Then the headliners take the stage. Luella is a gorgeous, freaky-looking art chick and clearly born for the stage. Her band plays dirty fractured blues and gospel, she's fierce and vulnerable, dreamy and screamy, and she changes tambourines many times. She's starting to get national recognition, and I suspect she'll go far.
Back on the Music Highway to Memphis, we have a dilemma. What should we listen to? Should it be Elvis? Rev Timmy has more than 700 of his songs. Should it be Johnny Cash, who walked into Sun Studio in 1955 as an appliance salesman? What about Al Green, who still preaches in his Memphis church, or Isaac Hayes and all those great soul artists on Stax Records? Then there's Memphis blues and gospel to consider, the garage rock bands, even Justin Timberlake and Three 6 Mafia. More than 1,000 songs have been written about Memphis, and nowhere else in America has a richer musical tradition.
We cruise into the city listening to the deep soul of James Carr and the horn-driven funk of the Bar-Kays. After the world's best barbecued ribs at the Rendezvous (52 South 2nd Street), we wander the bars and clubs of Beale Street, where Memphis has made a success of marketing its music to tourists. In search of more authentic surroundings, we head to a blues joint called Wild Bill's (1580 Vollintine Avenue, +1 901 726 5473) in the black part of town, only to find it closed for the night.
We end up at Memphis's favourite dive bar, the Buccaneer Lounge (1328 Monroe Avenue), where $5 gets you local music most nights of the week. We walk into the birthday party of Dan Montgomery, who sings and plays in the rock-folk-Americana tradition, and is generous with his birthday cake. Also performing is Lahna Deering of Deering and Down, who sings huskily and soulfully under a painting of a mermaid having sex with a pirate.
Next morning, we're pleasantly surprised to see her again behind the cash till at Sun Studio (706 Union Avenue). Then she changes her T-shirt and becomes the guide for the 12 o'clock tour. I had low hopes for the tour, but with storytelling and performing skills, and artfully chosen snippets of music and spoken-word recordings, she brings to life all the dramas and cliffhangers and happy accidents that attended the birth of rock'n'roll, and I was not the only one choking back tears in that shabby little room where the course of music changed forever.
Richard Grant is the author of Ghost Riders: Travels with American Nomads. His other books include Bandit Roads
• For more information on holidays in the USA, visit DiscoverAmerica.com
