Detour #90: Natchez Trace Parkway, Tennessee, USA
Beyond the honky-tonks of Music City – Nashville, Tennessee – a 444-mile ‘Recreational Road’ traces 10,000 years of American history, and the diverse soundtracks of the South, says Peter Grunert.
As the Birdsong Hollow Overlook segues into the looming double arches of the Natchez Trace Parkway Bridge, a quote from The Blues Brothers plays through my mind: “We have both kinds of music here. Country and Western.”
Sure enough, at the south-eastern tip of the Natchez Trace Parkway, the sprawling homes of Dolly Parton, Keith Urban, Billy Ray Cyrus and the late Johnny Cash lie close by. I Walk the Line is thumping out through my rented Chevy Impala’s speakers as a course is set for the distant city of Natchez, Mississippi. The smooth curves of the road ahead will host a relaxed meander there over the next couple of days.
Semis – AKA load-hauling articulated trucks – are banned from this road, its pristine surfaces reserved for cyclists, the occasional Harley-Davidson, and drivers in search of enlightening views across three of America’s ‘fly-over states’.
The oppressive heat of summer has given way to the intense colours of fall, the foliage of oak and hickory trees bursting in reds and golds to match equivalent scenes further east across New England. Among their roots wander white-tailed deer and wild turkeys, and already I’ve had to swerve around a nine-banded armadillo – a critter infamous to local drivers for its terrible eyesight.
Brief detour options soon arrive, first to the tiny town of Leiper’s Fork. The wilfully dishevelled Puckett’s Grocery brings a choice of fried chicken, catfish or BBQ pulled pork for lunch. This café and store also runs weekly open-mic sessions, with the aim of delivering some musical variety – Justin Timberlake and Robert Plant have been known to appear.
Well refuelled, I now settle in to the easy, winding rhythm of the Natchez Trace Parkway. My playlist pre-empts the destinations well ahead, with few straights in between. Muscle Shoals, Alabama, is where FAME Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound Studio witnessed iconic tracks being laid down by Etta James, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin and, most recently, Alicia Keys. And Tupelo, Mississippi, is where the whitewashed clapboard shack that Elvis Presley was born in remains well preserved, and Johnnie’s Drive-In still serves the out-sized beef ‘slug burgers’ The King once enjoyed.
Pulling over to stretch my legs along the way, I regularly spot stretches of the Old Trace that runs parallel to the road. This deeply sunken pathway was carved out by the footsteps of travellers from throughout American history: early European settlers heading west; Civil War soldiers marching east towards Nashville; and slave traders plying their dark commerce between the South’s plantations and the slave market once held at the Forks of the Road site in Natchez.
The Old Trace was also a key stretch of the early nineteenth century Trail of Tears, along which Native American tribes – including, local to the areas I’m now driving through, the Cherokee and Chickasaw – were forcibly relocated from their ancestral lands to Oklahoma in the distant west.
The landscapes along the latter half of the Natchez Trace Parkway begin to shift from deciduous forests and fields of corn to cypress-dotted swamplands, the home to snapping turtles and alligators. I pause by a series of mounds: first ahead of Tupelo, then at Milepost 10.3, as the route finally spills down towards the banks of the Mississippi River. These are ritual burial sites, some thousands of years old – evidence that America’s history stretches far beyond the familiar.
Words Peter Grunert Twitter | Instagram
Photography Shutterstock