Day 21

 Day 21-Tuesday, May 11

For anyone worried that we might be getting soft and wanting to spend more time in a hotel, have no fear, we were on the road by 7:15 AM, heading for our 9:00 AM tour of the FAME recording studios in Muscle Shoals.  (FAME=Florence Alabama Musical Enterprise).   

The FAME studios were created 60 years ago by Rick Hall and they are regarding as one of the top recording studios in the U.S. along with Motown, Sun, & Stax.  Their list of artists who’ve recorded there is endless and includes:  the Allman Brothers, the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Picket, Percy Sledge, Rod Stewart, Elton John, Dixie Chicks, Vince Gill, the Osmonds, Sonny & Cher, Bobby Gentry….  Almost any big name you can think of has recorded here.   Their in-house rhythm section, the Swampers, has added the distinctive Muscle Shoals sound to so many classic albums.

We did.

The studio is almost unrecognizable; surrounded by strip malls, CVS, and Pizza Hut.  There are two recording rooms, and during our tour, studio A was being set up for a live broadcast today in celebration of their 60^th year of operation.  The small lounge in between the two studios had a big circular cake that was ready to eat, and the walls were covered in gold records and photos of all the all the acts that have worked there.

Leaving FAME, we drove by the nearby birthplaces of Helen Keller and W.C. Handy.  The Keller home, Ivy Green, was in Tuscumbia.  It was beautiful and originally included over 600 acres.  Handy’s home in Florence was a simple log cabin.  Our last home visit in Florence was a Frank Lloyd Wright creation referred to as the Rosenbaum home.   Like all his other designs, this was very simple one story home that clearly reflected his human scale.

Ivy Green

Leaving the Florence area our next stop was in Hamilton, Alabama, where Joni toured the pottery shop & studio of Gerry Brown, a tenth generation potter that has been highlighted on the Today Show.  Joni couldn’t resist one of his “face jugs” which were used originally to store poisonous liquids and moonshine too.

From Hamilton we crossed into Mississippi and stopped in Tupelo, the home of Elvis.  His father built their simple two room shot-gun style home in 1935 which still stands on it’s original location.  The Presley’s were very poor and had to give up the home when Elvis was ten, when his dad, Aaron, was arrested for check fraud and sent to prison. Tupelo was surprisingly a thriving, lively town; unlike so many in Alabama like Selma or Fort Payne that visited this week.  Also visited two National Park Battlefield Parks in the Tupelo area, but both were disappointing.  No visitors centers, no informative brochures, just small plaques.

The Presley family car, a 1939 Plymouth, which they loaded up with all their possession and moved to Memphis

from the Tupelo battlefield

From Tupelo we then drove to Corinth that played a significant role in the western theatre of the Civil War.  Corinth sits on the crossroads of the two major railroad lines in the South.  Controlling Corinth was critical to the Confederacy in order to supply their armies, and accordingly a key target of the Union army led by U.S. Grant.  The carnage from battles at Corinth and nearby Shiloh, which we will visit tomorrow, was devastating.

Before reaching our final destination, the Pickwick Dam State Campground in Tennessee, we had a delicious barbecue dinner in Corinth that included pulled pork, fried ochre, home cut French fries, and beans.

We arrived at our campground at 7:15 PM.  A long day for sure, with 295 miles of driving, but this campground was spectacular.   It’s brand new and right on the Tennessee River.  It’ll be our home for the next two nights; had we realized it was so nice we’d have stayed longer!