As a drummer, I’ve come to realize that geography shapes groove. The swing in New Orleans isn’t the same as the backbeat in Memphis or the pocket in Muscle Shoals. You feel it in your hands, in your body. These cities aren’t just settings, they’re players. The Sounds of the South Tour was built to explore that: how specific places gave rise to music that would eventually shape the world.
Where It All Begins: New Orleans
We start in New Orleans because it’s the beginning. Not just of jazz, but of almost everything that followed. You can draw a straight line from the syncopation of West African drumming to Congo Square, where enslaved Africans were once given Sunday afternoons to gather, play, and hold onto fragments of who they were. Those rhythms survived the violence of slavery and fused with French, Spanish, and Creole melodies. That collision became something entirely new.
Walking through Tremé or standing in front of Preservation Hall, you’re not stepping into nostalgia; you’re confronting continuity. The music never stopped. Brass bands still march. Musicians still carry stories from one generation to the next. In this city, music is how people process joy, grief, protest, and identity.
The Electric Blues of Memphis
Up the Mississippi, the story picks up in Memphis. If New Orleans gave us collective rhythm, Memphis gave it grit. Black musicians escaping the Jim Crow South brought the Delta blues with them. What they found in Memphis — especially on Beale Street — was a charged, urban energy. They plugged in their guitars. They found jobs in nightclubs. They built their own record labels.
Sun Studio gets most of the headlines — and yes, it’s incredible to stand in the same room where Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash made their first records. But to me, the Stax Museum hits harder. This was the home of Southern soul, where Black and white musicians came together in a segregated city to make music that was defiantly integrated. Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Isaac Hayes — they made records here that didn’t just sound good. They meant something.
Muscle Shoals: Small Town, Giant Sound
Muscle Shoals doesn’t look like much from the outside. No neon, no crowds. But once you walk into FAME Studios or 3614 Jackson Highway, something clicks. It’s not just nostalgia. It’s about the groove — subtle, steady, undeniable.
This was where Aretha Franklin recorded I Never Loved a Man. Where Wilson Pickett tracked Mustang Sally. And it wasn’t in a big-city studio with the latest gear. It was in a converted cinderblock building with a bunch of local guys — the Swampers — who played with restraint and feel. They backed Black artists with humility and intention, and that quiet confidence helped shape soul music at its most powerful.
Nashville: The Machine and the Song
Nashville is often seen as the capital of country music — and it is — but there’s a deeper story. The city has long been a center for songwriting, where lyrics and arrangements are treated with surgical precision. What many people don’t realize is how important Black musicians were to its foundation. DeFord Bailey was the first Black star of the Grand Ole Opry. The uncredited session players who helped define the “Nashville Sound.”
We visit the Country Music Hall of Fame, RCA Studio B, and the less-polished corners of the city, too — the bars and cafes where people are still chasing their first record deal. For musicians, Nashville isn’t a museum. It’s a workshop. You see the polish, but you also hear the hunger.
Why This Tour Matters
The Sounds of the South Tour isn’t a checklist of attractions. It’s a tightly focused exploration of how music in the American South was shaped by slavery, migration, poverty, faith, resistance, and resilience. At the center of that story are Black artists — most of them never properly credited or compensated — who created entire genres out of lived experience.
We designed this tour for people who want more than a surface-level overview. We keep the group small, we move at a thoughtful pace, and we go to places that don’t always make it onto the big maps. It’s not meant to be flashy. It’s meant to be real.
You’ll leave with a better understanding of why American music sounds the way it does — and what it costs to make it that way.
And if you’re not ready for the full tour, we also offer individual experiences in each city. Our New Orleans Music Tour, Memphis Music Tour, and Nashville Music Tour each dig deep into their own scenes with the same attention to history and respect for the people who made it all possible.
