We endure an early start this morning and, unused to such foul hours, a few of us make a real hash of the Baymont Inn’s breakfast offerings. Silver, for example, explodes an oatmeal in their microwave, and yours truly creates some very, very questionable waffles. The day can only get better from here and, true to form, it does indeed: for our first stop is Graceland!

The homeof The King is a surreal, gauche, enlightening, kitsch and fabulous place, and it’s an odd ol’ experience walking his halls with a throng of genuine Elvis aficionados, all following along to John Stamos (no idea) on the iPad-guided tours. As with Louisville’s Ali Museum, it’s all unsurprisingly hagiographical, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little touched by the place, especially when you exit the Jungle Room, wander through Graceland’s grounds and find the grave of The King in his ‘meditation garden’.

There are private planes (x2) to explore and countless automobiles of varying levels of taste and utility. Some exhibits fall a bit flat, and there are eleven (count them…ELEVEN) gift shops slinging unbelievable levels of tat. However, overall, highly rewarding.

Even more rewarding, though in a very different way, is the exceptionally powerful Civil Rights Museum, which is to be our next stop (after another swift Chick-Fil-A of course). However, as we drive towards downtown we spot the historic Sun Studios, so The Eagle and I hop out to take a quick tour around the birthplace of ‘rock & roll’:

Content-wise it is similar enough to the Sam Phillips exhibition at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, but it is well worth it for the exuberance of the tour-guide, who has some strong gags and fine anecdotes. Standing where Elvis, Johnny Cash, B.B. King, Jerry Lee Lewis and countless others recorded huge hits is a bit of a thrill, no doubt about it.

There’s a complimentary shuttle bus downtown and it ferries the pair of us to the Civil Rights Museum, where we find the other four in quiet contemplation inside a fantastic, troubling, exceptional exhibition: Built around the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was assassinated and the lodging house across the street where the fatal shot was fired, it is an emotive location for a thorough, no-holds barred examination of the struggle of African Americans for equality, especially here in the Deep South. Obviously we all went in with the highest levels of respect for the great man, but coming out we are all just knocked backwards by the majesty of Martin Luther King Jnr. The drive out of Memphis is a quiet, rainy one.

*

I drive us south to Clarksdale, MS, along some of the strangest, dullest roads man has yet laid. I don’t like the car, the car doesn’t like me, but we make it work. Our accommodation this evening is fantastic: We are all staying in the enormous Bill’s House at the Shack Up Inn, just outside of town. It’s a huge, two-level wooden cabin, filled to the rafters with odds and ends, stag heads and guns, huge wooden desks and cabinets. All genuinely bizarre.

We are heading first to Morgan Freeman’s own blues bar, Ground Zero, and they send a car to pick us up…I say ‘a car’, it’s a 1980s-era limousine chauffeured by the irrepressible Abraham, who is a hundred gallon barrel of laughs.

Ground Zero is a cool place, though sadly Morgan is nowhere to be seen. We have a bite to eat and school the locals at pool, but then head across to the town’s other main bar, ‘Red’s’, in search of higher quality blues. And find them we do, in that little neon dive, which serves us beer by the bottle and music by the crate.

MVP of the three-piece has to be ‘Hollywood’, a surly teen named with deliberate irony who could not possibly look any more bored. However, he’s a far better drummer with one hand than most are with two.

Wellpast midnight Abraham returns, sans limo (electrics died, hopefully nothing to do with us..) and he takes some of us back to the Shack Inn in his own car, legend that he is. The Big Man and Silver stay on in town to head to a curious after-party in some sort of art gallery fixture, but I forewent this attraction – so you’ll have to ask them for a full appreciation of the Clarksdale art scene.

The Eagle has (somehow) managed to source a full rack of smoked ribs, so we feast on these in our eclectically and eccentrically decorated cabin, feeling supremely southern.