A Music-Heritage Road Trip

It’s called the Americana Music Triangle, and its dimensions are truly impressive: a total of more than 1,500 miles of highway, including route options and side trips that embrace stops in five Southern states responsible in their entirety for the development of nine American music vernaculars, specifically jazz, blues, country, rock and roll, R&B/soul, gospel, Southern gospel, Cajun/zydeco, and bluegrass. But it’s the Americana Music Triangle website—part history, part travel guide for the music enthusiast—that may be the project’s most impressive achievement, containing volumes of information on music history and cultural tourism broken down into easily digested facts and links for more than thirty destination communities. 

The geography highlighted by the Triangle—including Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas—constituted a particularly fertile region during the development of American popular music in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Something of a cradle for American roots music, this area formed a large portion of the national landscape where key variables favored the growth of vernacular music. Throughout the Triangle region, rural countryside dominates while central, cosmopolitan cities have grown strong. This balance created optimum conditions for a mix of traditional preservation supported by major markets, a place where modern transportation, commercial communications, and small-business investment combined to maximum effect. The Triangle also contains a broad sweep of musical styles, responsible for the success of musicians as varied as Jimmie Rodgers and Lead Belly, Hank Williams and Louis Armstrong, Dolly Parton and Tina Turner, Elvis Presley and B.B. King. As the Triangle website aptly puts it, this is a region where “history made music, and music made history.”

Both pieces of the Triangle, the on-the-ground trailways and the information-laden website, are integral to the vision of the project’s driving force, Aubrey Preston, a Tennessee native who experienced early success in healthcare real estate in Colorado before returning home to the hills of middle Tennessee in the early 1990s, purchasing a classic farmhouse thirty miles south of Nashville in the picturesque, historic village of Leiper’s Fork. Preston, an accomplished amateur guitarist and his wife, a veterinarian, arrived in Leiper’s Fork just as the tiny town was rebounding from near-complete abandonment, beginning a decades-long recovery as the rural gem of Nashville-chic it’s become today. As Preston watched Leiper’s Fork begin to prosper, he jumped to become both a promoter of small-town country life and a protector, buying up large tracts of open land to help preserve the town’s predominantly rural charm. 

Based on his local real-estate investments and participation in historic preservation projects in nearby Franklin and, most recently, on Nashville’s classic Music Row, Preston became a well-known figure in Leiper’s Fork among tourism professionals. Before long, applying contemporary business-development principles based primarily on brand management and user-friendly graphic design, Preston proposed a new approach to encouraging local cultural tourism. With boardroom-worthy buzzwords (Preston spoke of a “concentration of assets” offering a “bigger value proposition”), Preston conceived of a series of local road trips emanating from the heart of metropolitan regions and leading visitors into the local countryside, through a series of historic stops, then back to the city. Debuting in 2009, the result was the Tennessee Trails and Byways program, a collection of sixteen richly detailed trails offering self-guided road trips into all corners of the state.  

The Americana Music Triangle was an outgrowth of Preston’s work on the Tennessee Trails and Byways program, but with initial frustration fueling its conception. Immersed in his experience of living in Leiper’s Fork, which borders the Nashville end of the Natchez Trace Parkway, Preston had become friendly with a bunch of musicians and tourism folks in the Muscle Shoals, Alabama, region, just a short drive down the parkway. Why not connect the two, he proposed, for a kind of music-based tourism experience? But state-level tourism officials couldn’t see it. So Preston gathered together some like-minded friends and colleagues to form his own nonprofit that would see his vision through. 

The “product development” phase of the Music Trail proceeded fairly rapidly. Why not extend the Nashville-Muscle Shoals leg all the way down to Tupelo? Why not go all the way to New Orleans, and fold in Cajun country along the way? Why not bring the visitor back by way of Mississippi’s blues-drenched Highway 61 route? In Clarksdale, Mississippi, which already boasts a strong tourism effort related to the blues, Preston experienced a small epiphany: why not conceive of the Music Trail as a global asset, a project ultimately directed toward the fast-growing international tourism market?

With the outer dimensions of his product fully established, Preston and crew began work on the project’s website, the internal driver of the entire concept. Enlisting the assistance of esteemed music historian Colin Escott and local experts all along the Trail, Preston began to “drill down” into the real-world environment of his ambitious project, collecting deep information on music history and music sites while keeping an eye out for the kinds of local-culture experiences a music-driven visitor might really appreciate, like the Saturday morning zydeco breakfasts at Café des Amis, just east of Lafayette in Breaux Bridge, or Lorman, Mississippi’s Old Country Store, with its “fried-chicken and Southern fare” buffet, located just north of Natchez. 

Preston began to see the Americana Music Triangle website as the ultimate accomplishment of his cultural tourism project, a “Central Park of information” that required the utmost care to ensure its authenticity, relevance, and usability. Given the extraordinary range of the site—eleven fact-filled music-history timelines and five highly detailed, self-guided music trailways—making it simple and useful would prove to be Preston’s biggest challenge. He also insisted the work be done for only the purest of motives, refusing funding—whether public, private, or philanthropic—to assure the site would serve only the curious, music-driven visitor. Describing his stance as “advocating for the buyer,” Preston summed up his dedication to the Music Triangle’s editorial freedom by insisting, “In the long run, we will live and die by the integrity of our product. Later on, we may look at a variety of sources for funding,” he said, “once this whole concept is fully realized, after we’ve grown a dedicated audience, when we can tell any funder, ‘Look, this thing is firmly established, and you’re not going to tinker with it.’” 

The Americana Music Triangle serves as a model besides for encouraging local cultural preservation by way of international tourism; and given its grand scope and high aspirations, the project’s website is remarkably fully formed and factually reliable. I can’t speak to the project’s visitor-based selections on any of the other four segments of its far-flung route, but for the local component—the Natchez-New Orleans-Lafayette road trip—its choices seem solid and right. One reflection of this is the project’s highlighting Lafayette’s Blue Moon Saloon as the site of a stop on its grand rollout tour last spring. While there, in the presence of then-Lieutenant Governor Jay Dardenne, Aubrey Preston reflected on the similarities between the hillbilly home dances he knew growing up and the fais do-dos popular in Cajun culture. “It may seem like we’re separated by many things today, but there are still some things that help us stay connected,” he said, “and one of those things is the great story of American popular music.” 

Roger Hahn is the author of The Sounds of Louisiana: 20 Essential Music Makers, forthcoming this spring from Pelican Publications.

americanamusictriangle.com

tntrailsandbyways.com