838 Music Lover's Guide to North America; Loving the Opera

0:00So much great music was created in the past hundred years and you could log thousands of miles road tripping to all the sights of popular music legends. The authors of the new Music Lover's Guide to North America recommend you start down south. North America, especially the southeastern U.S., sits at the root of so much of the music that created the wallpaper of our lives. It's the blues that moves north into Chicago and becomes the basis for rock and roll. and it's rock and roll that conquers the world. Coming up, we'll look at the legends of country and Cajun, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll from Tupelo to Tulsa and beyond.

0:37And just in case you don't think opera's quite your thing, Fred Plotkin has tips to help you feel transported from the cares of everyday life at one of the world's great opera houses. People who go to the opera thinking they're supposed to follow the story in words are missing out on the main experience. Find music in your travels on today's Travel with Rick Steves. The invention of the record player and the birth of radio helped to popularize music, music that people were making from the back streets to the backwoods all over America in the early 20th century. In just a minute, we'll look at places you can visit to learn about these musicians and pay tribute to the giants and geniuses who helped to shape the music you grew up with.

1:22And a bit later on today's Travel with Rick Steves, we'll explore how even people who don't think they like it can appreciate the emotional power of a great opera. Fred Plotkin is a New Yorker with the soul of an Italian, and he'll help us know what to listen for to enjoy a sensory-filled night at the opera, at home or in your travels. One of America's most influential exports has got to be music. Think of it. Jazz, blues, rock and roll, country bluegrass, soul. These American sounds have gone global, but they're rooted in specific times and places right here. Recording studios, front porches, roadside clubs, plantations, churches, city neighborhoods where musical traditions and cultures cross-pollinated.

2:08For travelers who want to trace these stories, North America is full of music landmarks, both major and minor. Until now, though, there hasn't been a single guidebook to help connect them. And that's where Canadians Josephine Matthias and Craig Jones come in. In their book, The Music Lover's Guide to North America, this writer and musician duo explore the vast array of music museums and points of interest across the United States and Canada with a good dose of musical background and context thrown in. Wherever you are, you probably don't have to go far to find a place where music history comes to life.

2:44Joe and Craig, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us, Rick. Thank you. It's a pleasure. So, reading through your book, it is so clear that North America, dominated by the United States, but you guys are Canadian, so we include that, is sort of a uniquely diverse and dynamic cultural force. And it shows itself in music. People don't create art in a vacuum. It reflects the culture. And when you think about the diversity and the thriving nature of the music culture in our part of the world, what does that tell us about the culture from where it comes? Yeah, start with the easiest question first.

3:26Well, Rick, music is a very, very human expression. It's found in every culture. And I think there's something about North America that the people who populated it initially came from oppressive environments where they were trying to escape. And that's very important. So they brought their culture and traditions with them, but they also created new cultures and traditions out of the fusion of these different cultures coming together and blending. So there, I mean, not that another place might be boring, but relatively speaking, we being a melting pot place, being a land where until recently immigrants were welcome and people who were downtrodden found a refuge, that really made the cultural compost pile from where different slices of the culture, like music, can blossom, quite fertile.

4:18Yeah, I'd like to add, Rick, that it wasn't just people who were oppressed coming to North America to escape that oppression. One of the major influences on how music evolved in North America came from people being brought here and placed in oppressive situations, mainly slavery plantations in the Southeast, which is why the southeastern U.S. is such a hotbed of music. We're going to talk in more detail about specific things a little later in our conversation, but when I'm doing a TV show, I like to always have what we call a wide shot to start with to give people the context so they know, you know, as we dig deeper into specifics.

4:59Give us just a very brief wide shot, a sweep through the story about how music has been diverse and a dynamic cultural force in the United States, in America. How do you thread it together to make it be like an arc? Well, I would say that the very first European settlers to North America brought with them traditions from the Church of Europe and England and Scotland and Ireland. Take Appalachia, for example, and they fused it with the music of minstrels, or what we today call folk music, or people who carried music from one little town to another, and work songs and so forth, and songs of prisoners and sailors' songs, that sort of thing.

5:43And then, you know, it influences and cross-pollinates with other traditions coming from West Africa and so forth. And these were all forms of expression that evolved as they moved from one mouth to ear, to mouth to ear, to mouth to ear. And from there, this music took on a life of its own, and children learned it, and, you know, they sang it around community meetings, and they sang it on the front porch. the county fair, whatever the terminology of the time was. And generation after generation, it all kind of comes together in this extraordinary fusion. And one musical form adapts and borrows from other musical forms and evolves in the process.

6:22I just love that context that we have now because, as you guys were explaining, it morphs from church to folk to work, shanties. It migrates, like with the movement of people, especially with slavery. And then it evolves with the technology, whether it's a fairground or a streaming media service, there's a way to help it metastasize through the culture. That's right. Borrowing and fusing and adapting and evolving and innovating. And, you know, every generation or every artist that comes along wants to capture the best of what's come before them, pay homage to it, but then innovate it, innovate on it and make something distinctive of their own.

7:03And this is going on constantly. Yes, so blues birthed jazz and bluegrass and rock and roll and Motown and soul, and it just goes on and on and on. So it is true to say that North America, especially the southeastern U.S., sits at the root of so much of the music that created the wallpaper of our lives. There you go. So this is the rationale for taking your guidebook, The Music Lover's Guide to North America, as almost a primer to understand music as like a textbook and how it's such a cultural force in our society. It's easy for people from a certain generation, especially in our day and age, to think that, well, okay, that's all over now, and now we're into a whole different reality.

7:51Is this sort of evolutionary story just barreling right through our lifetimes, or is it something that has brought us here and it's going to be different from now on out? Oh, I think it's constant. I think it's so deeply ingrained in the human genome, in our self-understanding, in our relations, in our connections to other people. I don't see any end of it. You know, there's no singularity. That's an important thing for us to remember as we're considering all of this. Indeed. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're enjoying a tour of North American music sites right now with Joe Mathias and Craig Jones.

8:26Their book is The Music Lover's Guide to North America. It highlights about 150 museums, exhibits, and historic sites connected to the places, instruments, and people that have propelled music in the United States and Canada. Joe is a freelance writer with a focus on travel, food, and wild places. Craig is a writer and a musician. You can find more on them online at their website, musictravelguides.com. Now, in your research for your book, you talked about, we want to take us where the music moves us, and that meant months of boots-on-the-ground research, countless miles, thousands of photographs, hundreds of interviews, suffering through all of this great music in order to distill it into a wonderful 180-page package that we can all have and do what a good guidebook does, help us get more out of our travels.

9:17Tell us about the research. That must have been so interesting. It actually started as a little bit of a love story. As a full-time travel writer, I was on the road a lot of the time, all over the world. And Craig was often gigging, and we were like ships passing in the night sometimes. I'm sure you know what that's like. And so I came home from one trip and said, you know, we both have writing backgrounds. Craig has a degree in political science, so he's got the politics and the history background and the music background, and I had the travel knowledge. Why don't we hit the road together writing music travel destinations?

9:58So we bought a bit of a hippie camper van, packed in the dog and the guitars and we hit the road for about eight weeks to look at the roots of American music in the southeastern US and came back and wrote a lot of magazine and newspaper articles and picked up the interest of a publisher. And the publisher came to us and said, could you do a book on one of these genres and which one would it be? We said, of course. And blues was the one that we chose because they like to say blues are the roots and the rest are the fruits. That's right. So much comes from the blues. The blues influence so much and it really picks up all these cultural and historical forces in the 20th century especially.

10:43I want to get into some of the special little discoveries in the intimate places, but before we do, Joe, can you just quickly run me through the major three or four museums or sites that would be obviously on everybody's checklist? Well, I would say the New Orleans Jazz Museum in the city of New Orleans. In Memphis, you'd be looking at Sun Studios or Stax, perhaps Graceland. That's very well known. In Nashville, it would be obviously the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Grand Ole Opry. And I would say those are the biggest ones. Well, except in Cleveland, you've got the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

11:18Rock and Roll. And then Detroit, you've got the Motown Museum. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Those are the biggies. Okay. Now, you mentioned you visited like over 100 spots. I love a well-done museum, and they don't need to be big and famous to be special. How do you mark a quality museum? What's the kind of museum that really sparkles for you? Oh, well, some of these museums are like four-hour exhibits. You know, you don't go in there expecting to come out in less than four hours, like, for example, the Bob Dylan Center or the Woody Guthrie Center, both in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Another museum that really, really made an impression on me was the Seagal in South Carolina.

11:58And that's an interesting story because it's a private collection that just got out of hand, got so big that he had to relocate to a much larger space. And he's imported instruments from all over the world, including a piano that Chopin toured with and a harpsichord that Mozart played on. Wow. And this is not the kind of museum where you're not permitted to touch anything. they want you to play these instruments and they put on concerts and it's just where is that craig greenville south carolina okay and then there's this beautiful little museum in the in brady texas called the heart of texas country music museum and it's another one that a personal project started by a young young man radio disc jockey who just started writing to country artists and say hey send me a pair of boots hey send me a hat and they did amazing amazing he collected it all put together in this beautiful museum.

12:50And, you know, it's not a Smithsonian-type institution, but it's a beautifully curated, lovingly curated museum.

12:59We're getting you ready for a road trip to see where great music was born, from Nashville and Motown to the back roads of Appalachia, the Delta, and the Southwest. Josephine Mattias and Craig Jones are the authors of The Music Lover's Guide to North America. They also explore the home turf of Mississippi Delta blues legends in their earlier book called Chasing the Blues, A Traveler's Guide to America's Music. Stops in Mississippi and Virginia are just ahead on Travel with Rick Steves. Our guests, Craig Jones and Joe Matias, outfitted a camper van to travel thousands of miles to search the music trails of America.

13:38They visited dozens of museums, exhibits and historic sites, places that are dedicated to the people and instruments that propelled the music made in the USA and Canada into the hits and legends of the 20th century. Their book's been called A Rockin' Crash Course on America's Music Revolution. It's The Music Lover's Guide to North America. So, Joe and Craig, talking to you about how this is a cultural story and how things are interconnected and how things morph and evolve with time, we keep thinking of different influences. Let's just do a little quick review of these various influences. Of course, we have African and Caribbean music styles brought by enslaved peoples.

14:22Tell us a little bit about that, and we'll look at some other influences. Yeah, you know, we had a tide of enslaved persons come into North America, and they brought with them their African traditions, which included singing while working. Very important. And you mentioned that earlier, and I hadn't thought about that, pachanties and, you know, yo-ho, heave-ho when you're pulling a boat up the river and when you're picking cotton, you've got music. Exactly. Working in the turpentine camps or pounding nails in building railroads, something like that. If you have an individual in that group who is able to create some kind of rhythmic utterance that coordinates the work of other people, that person is valuable.

15:07And that becomes a form of music that is transmitted and easily incorporated into the culture. If you want to learn more about African-American impact on music culture, where would you go? I would go to Mississippi, not because Mississippi is the only place, but because blues has a huge influence on North American music. Mississippi is kind of the cauldron where blues really takes form before it migrates out of the Mississippi Delta. I would go there first. Another thing which is interesting to me is a lot of the vibrancy and diversity of music relates to the advent of the railways. Oh, yes. And not only in the building of the railways and the coordinating human movement to lay track and so forth, but then to move individuals from place to place.

15:54And the blues musicians in the Mississippi Delta, they moved around carrying their music with them. And that was a form of spreading the influence. It's the blues that moves north into Chicago and becomes the basis for rock and roll. And it's rock and roll that conquers the world, really. And then another dimension of this that's just occurred to me, we have the impact and the evolution of various instruments. Oh, yes. Because, you know, like, take the piano, a very complex piece of machinery, very fragile. So not a lot of them around. But the guitar, very simple, very portable, maybe not the most robust instrument.

16:33You know, they break, you know, they warp and so forth, but you can get them through a mail-order catalog. Maybe you could get pianos through a mail-order catalog too, but they arrive and they're a ton and a half. Yeah, but think about it. A banjo, a fiddle, a guitar, a harmonica. Mississippi saxophone. These are portable. One other one that you didn't mention, which is geography. Things like the 1927 Mississippi flood that changed the shape of the landscape in the southeastern U.S. made work on plantations impossible for people. So they packed up their music and went north, and they took it to places like St.

17:11Louis, Detroit, New York, Chicago, and that's how the music went from the Delta up north. It's a story with a plot, and you can track the arc of it. In your book, you list your favorite music trails for driving or walking. It ranges from Blue Ridge Music Trail to the Johnny Cash Music Trail. Tell me about a favorite music trail and why that would be a rewarding goal for a traveler. I would say one of the very first ones we did through Virginia, which was the Crooked Road Music Trail that goes through Appalachia. And it links not only museums, it links historic sites like the Carter Family Fold, which still has a Friday night dance and jamboree.

17:56And they're on the dance floor and they're flat footing. They're step dancing. And just up the road, there's a remarkable place in Floyd at the Floyd Country Store on Friday nights. They have a jamboree. Local musicians play outside, up and down the main street. and then inside there's a feature band and people are getting up all generations. Grandparents dancing with grandchildren. It's really unique. So it links not only museums but historic sites and culturally important sites. And places that are alive. Like I was thinking of that because you also list music festivals, obviously, in a music lover's guide.

18:37But a problem with the festivals, you've got to be there on a certain weekend or whatever. And what I really like in my travels is that kind of place that I write it up as it's a festival every evening, you know, a beer hall in Bavaria or a pub on the west coast of Ireland. And, Joe, you were just listing several examples of that. Let's just collect five or six places right now that you could go to and reasonably expect to hear a little mini festival of live music of that genre any time of year. I would say in Louisiana, Prejean, which is a dance hall. and you'd find that many nights of the week.

19:16And again, it's multi-generational. The Floyd Country Store in Floyd, Virginia, in Mississippi, the Blueberry Cafe in Clarksdale. These are all small spots that usually feature local artists and have huge followings. Almost any street in downtown New Orleans, you're going to find a bunch of kids cracking out. Yeah, a great example. It's amazing. You know, I've known people from my youth who traveled to New Orleans to live for a couple of years and play on the street exactly to imbibe that culture. And if you love art, visual art, you can go to the gallery and see the genius of all of these artists.

19:57But when it comes to music, you need to hear it. And if you can hear it live, that's it. So your book would give people a good sense of where they're likely to experience that music live in their travels. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We are talking with Joe, Matthias, and Craig Jones, and they're joining us from their home base in Kingston, Ontario right now as we explore the music that emerged from the United States in the 20th century and eventually changed the world. Their book is The Music Lover's Guide to North America, focusing on the best music museums and historic sites in the United States and Canada that relate to music.

20:34We have links to Joe and Craig's work in the notes for this week's show at ricksteves.com slash radio and you can learn more about their work at their website, musictravelguides.com. Now, what I'd like to do is play kind of a little game. Let's just pretend each of you is an advertising agent promoting one region's music. And I'm going to give you one minute to promote why a traveler would want to go to that region and enjoy the music dimension of that culture. So, you know, what's there? Why does it matter? What would we highlight? Right. So, Joe, take me to the northeast of the United States and tell me what is the dominant force, where will I go, and what will I find?

21:15Well, you've got the larger cities. You've got New York and Boston, places like that have some lovely museums right now to visit. You've got the influence of jazz when it moved with people like Louis Armstrong into the cities in the northeast. You also have in more of the rural areas, places like the Martin Guitar Factory in Nazareth. And that's a fabulous spot to go to because it's not only a museum about the instrument, it has a factory floor tour, which is fascinating because on that factory floor, you see pieces being laser cut, but then you see them being hand glued together by one technician.

21:58So it's a real marriage of new technology and old technology. What site is that and where is it? That is the Martin Guitar Museum in the town of Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Okay, and I don't know if Washington, D.C. is what exact region that is, but of course in Washington, D.C., we have the National Museum of African American History. You've got the Smithsonian Museums, yes, that have beautiful artifacts on display, ones that are one of a kind, pieces of history. Now we're going to go to Craig, and we're going to talk up the Southeast. Southeast is, there's so many museums, it's hard to know where to start.

22:37I was really impressed with Bristol. Bristol's got a terrific museum. It's a Smithsonian institution. And, of course, Bristol is a source of the Big Bang, and there are literally thousands of country musicians come out of that part of the world, country and bluegrass musicians. You've got piles of museums in your book from Tennessee and Mississippi and Louisiana, right? Yes, that's very rich and dense cultural history there. And of course, you know, Mississippi produces the blues. It's not the sole source of the blues, but the B.B. King Center in Indianola. Amazing museum, amazing exhibit. Where else in Southeast?

23:17Yeah, I would also like to add that Mississippi is a living history museum of music. places like the Delta Cultural Museum in Clarksdale, places like Gateway to the Blues Museum in Tunica, which is just below Memphis. And a lot of people don't realize that Elvis came from Mississippi, from the little town of Tupelo, and it has a fabulous museum called the Elvis Birthplace Museum that we actually both preferred to Graceland. One of my takeaways from your book, if there was a family tree of music, the trunk would be in the southeast, I think. For sure. All right. Hey, Joe, take us to South Central.

23:57That's Texas and Oklahoma, because it punches above its weight. Well, two of my very favorite museums are in Tulsa, which was a complete surprise to us. It is a hotbed of music, but the two that really spoke to me are right next door to each other. One is the Bob Dylan Center, and the other one is the Woody Guthrie Center. And, of course, Bob Dylan chose this location because he worshipped Woody Guthrie. What I loved about the Bob Dylan Museum that made it different than any other museum we went to is that it's not just about Bob Dylan. It's really dedicated to the art and the craft and the full production of music and takes us through all the decades that he has been around because he still is.

24:42And right next door, the Woody Guthrie Center is also world-class, but it talks about how he was really influenced by the Dust Bowl, which was a whole history lesson for us. Tulsa, probably per capita, has more musical thrills from a history point of view than any other place. Oh, yes. In addition, you've got Kane's Ballroom, which is the old-fashioned wooden floor ballroom where Bob Wilson, his Texas Playboys, started out. You've got the Church Studio, which was a studio for Leon Russell. There's all sorts of great sites there. Okay, we're going to go now to Craig with the Midwest. Music follows people.

25:22It follows industry. We have a lot of people in industry in the Midwest. Tell us about that. Well, the Motown Museum, you can't pass the Motown Museum. It's newly renovated. It's such an extraordinary exhibit. And that music is so powerful and so resonant and so fresh today. It still works so well. as a bass player, of course, I'm enthralled with James Jamerson. So it's kind of a shrine for me, as Stax was, as Sun Records was. You know, these are shrines. So I would go there. Shrines. That's a great thing. Shrines to music. Yeah. Okay, we're going to move it along. We're going to go to Joe for the West, because Los Angeles is just, and San Francisco, right?

26:03Joe, take us to the West. Yes, San Francisco does not really have a large museum dedicated in that area, but it does have a very deep and rich history of music all along the West Coast. And if you go further down to Bakersfield and you've got Los Angeles, so you've got clubs where, you know, the Eagles began and Linda Ronstadt played and other influential artists who were there. And then in Phoenix, Arizona, you've got the massive musical instrument museum, which has musical instruments from all around the globe. That sounds like a fascinating place to check out. And then you guys are both Canadians, so let's talk about Canada.

26:47How does Canada work into the story? Well, Canada is right next door to the United States, a considerably smaller population and under the enormous influence of the United States. So it's only fair to acknowledge that most of the music that we grew up with, certainly that defined the 20th century, came from the United States, maybe with the singular exception of one culture we haven't mentioned, which is the Acadians who were displaced from Canada in an ethnic cleansing and moved to Louisiana region, the bayous and so forth, and cultivated a music style there. But we have like the Hank Snow Museum in eastern Canada and the Anne Murray Museum and the, what's the one in Calgary?