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

Travel with Rick Steves - Rick Steves

This episode of Travel with Rick Steves explores the rich musical heritage of North America, highlighting key sites from blues and country r

Key takeaways

• North American music evolved from a fusion of diverse cultural traditions brought by immigrants and shaped by historical forces like slavery and migration.
• The blues serve as the foundational genre that influenced rock and roll, jazz, soul, and country, making the Southeast U.S. a central hub for musical innovation.

Main topics

• Musical roots in the Southeastern U.S. (blues, country, Cajun)
• Iconic music landmarks: Sun Studios, Graceland, Country Music Hall of Fame

Notable quotes

"North America, especially the southeastern U.S., sits at the root of so much of the music that created the wallpaper of our lives."

"Blues are the roots and the rest are the fruits."

Conclusion

Music is a living, evolving expression of North America's diverse cultural tapestry—rooted

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:00) So much great music was created in the past hundred years, and you could log thousands of miles, road-tripping to all the sites of popular music legends. The authors of the new Music Lover's Guide to North America recommend you start down south. Speaker 1 (0:13) North America, especially the southeastern U.S., sits at the root of so much of the music that created the... wallpaper of our lives. Speaker 4 (0:23) 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, Speaker 6 (0:31) we'll look at the legends of country and Cajun, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll from Tupelo to Tulsa and beyond. And 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. Speaker 3 (0:46) 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. Speaker 6 (1:00) 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. And 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 our musical traditions and cultures cross-pollinated. For 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 Mathias 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. Joe and Craig, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us, Rick. Thank you. It's Speaker 4 (2:49) a Speaker 6 (2:49) 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? Speaker 4 (3:22) Yeah, start with the easiest question first. Well, 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 Speaker 6 (3:54) 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. Speaker 1 (4:17) Yeah, 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. Speaker 6 (4:45) 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. Give 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 ark? Speaker 4 (5:16) 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. And 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 they sang it around at 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. I just love that context that we Speaker 6 (6:24) 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. Speaker 4 (6:47) 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 on it and make something distinctive of their own. And this is going on constantly. Speaker 1 (7:05) Yes, so blues, burst, 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. Speaker 6 (7:26) 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. Is 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? Speaker 4 (8:00) 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. There's no singularity. Speaker 6 (8:14) 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 Matias and Craig Jones. Their 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. Speaker 6 (8:50) 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. Tell us about the research. That must have been so interesting. Speaker 1 (9:21) 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. Speaker 2 (9:40) And Speaker 1 (9:40) so I came home from one trip and said, you know, we should... 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? So 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 U.S. and came back and wrote a lot of magazine and newspaper articles, and picked up the interest of a publisher. Speaker 6 (10:18) And Speaker 1 (10:18) 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. It really picks up all these cultural and historical forces in the 20th century especially. Speaker 6 (10:43) I 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? Speaker 1 (10:56) Well, I would say the New Orleans Jazz Museum in the city of New Orleans. Speaker 6 (11:00) In Speaker 1 (11:01) 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. Speaker 4 (11:18) Rock and Roll. And then Detroit, you've got the Motown Museum. Speaker 1 (11:21) Yeah. Oh, Speaker 4 (11:22) yeah. Speaker 1 (11:22) Those are the biggies. Speaker 6 (11:23) 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... a quality museum. What's the kind of museum that really sparkles for you? Speaker 4 (11:39) 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. And 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. Where Speaker 6 (12:25) is that, Craig? Speaker 4 (12:27) Greenville, South Carolina. Speaker 6 (12:28) Okay. Speaker 4 (12:29) And then there's this beautiful little museum in Brady, Texas called the Heart of