Articles > Bible-Belt Road Trip

‘No doll, follow Judas out left… we ain’t going to Calgary today.’ I nod meekly as Annaliese, a 70-something basket weaver wearing a striped nativity-play smock and a make-up etching out a surreal version of the features God gave her nudges me off stage. It’s 6pm on a freezing fall day in northern Arkansas, the oaks of the Ozark plateau are a riot of russets and yellows, the sky a benevolent blue, and I’m standing with a cast of 200 – including 20 sheep, four horses and a camel – amid a vast, mimed, open-air re-enactment of the life of Christ. That none of this strikes me as at all surreal is symptomatic of the events of the day so far. My hearty breakfast In Myrtie Mae’s diner – more of a heart attack on a plate, involving neon ‘jack’ cheese and an omelette the size of a paving slab – sadly did little to prepare me for almost being floored by Jesus’ swinging ankles during an ascension rehearsal, or the disarming spectre of mother Mary wrestling with a popcorn machine.

I’d journeyed to the heart of the American Midwest with one aim: to prove or disprove my liberal preconceptions of Bible belt of cinematic fiction. Would I find a land of featureless sweeping corn and two-bit towns full of the sort of people whose names rhyme? Or did deeper undercurrents ruckle the smoothly ironed waters of the Mississippian contributories? And my trip was certainly off to an apposite start in Eureka Springs, a chocolate-box tourist town at the buckle of the Bible belt, which is famed for it’s 60ft ‘Christ of the Ozarks’ statue, its ‘two-person Jacuzzis’, cowboy-themed weddings, (shotgun in both senses of the term), poltergeist-spotting and ‘The Great Passion Plays and Holy Land’, a religious theme park set up in the 1960s by moneyed local industrialists Gerald and Elna M. Smith. The Smiths, I’m told, conceived the idea – recreating the Holy Land’s famed Biblical wonders stone-by-blessed-stone – when they became convinced the pesky warring A-rabs would flatten the Middle East.

The following day, after a night in a motel bed which – judging by its fragrance and shape – had been recently vacated by a camel with stage fright, I joined one amongst the thousands of busloads of God-fearing folk who descend on Eureka every year to take the Smith’s hallowed tour. Wearing ‘I love Jesus’ rainmates, the party from Tulse, Ohio, happily poked around Moses’ tabernacle, witnessed Jesus walking on a concrete block submerged in water and wept as a hyperbolic Mary Magdalene, in flip-flops and sports socks, prostrated herself at the garden of Gethsemane (certain liberties, we learned, had to be taken here with the width of the entrance to Jesus’ biblical tomb). Sated by a ‘ribs and ‘slaw’ buffet, we then hunkered down, trussed up in loaned blankets, to watch my fellow thesps in the outdoor Great Passion Play, a spectacle that runs for six months a year and employs most of the town’s residents.

‘Don’t be too quick to judge Eureka.’ Lynne Sitler, Eureka’s adopted tour guide and a woman who spices her conversation with trilling rhyme, is so quick to read my thoughts I’m suspicious of divine intervention. We’re dissecting my day over a smorgasbord of local delicacies that hint of the Midwest’s impoverished past: battered frogs splayed out like roadkill, leathery breaded catfish and ‘biscuits and gravy’ (essentially large savoury wheat scones with lard sauce). ‘It aint all root-a-deut-er-ronomy…’ she continues. ‘Eureka has a character of its own. You know, eight years ago we elected a dead woman to mayor? Everyone knew she’d died, but we thought we’d be better off with her, even if she’d passed. And look out the window’. I dutifully glance out onto Eureka’s cobbled streets at the apparently innocuous vision of two sensationally overweight Middle-aged women strolling around hand-in-hand. ‘Look closer, honey bun,’ winks Lynne, ‘they’re not both women… it’s the cross-dressing festival En Femme this week. They come from all over America to Eureka because we’re liberal here - they can marry as wife and wife, go shopping in dress, and we don’t judge.’

I was still meditating on this road-to-Damascus-style revelation – that the Bible belt may be a much looser fit than I’d imagined – the next morning, as I left Eureka and joined highway 62, a curving ribbon of blacktop that would sweep me east across the Western Arkansas plains, hugging the Missouri border, and drop me down into Memphis, Tennessee. However, the views from the comfort of my 4x4 – GPS-enabled and with seats the width of sofa cushions – swiftly banished all thoughts: ragged rivers and swift, clear streams carved through winebottle-green valleys on either side of me, as I sped along the forgivingly smooth road. This was beginning to feel like the archetypal gas-guzzling American dream of a road trip.

Perfectly on cue, I glanced out the window to a drowsing scene reminiscent of an outtake from Deliverance. A group of men in faded dungarees and cowboy hats, faces layered into deep crevices by years of driving tractor back and forth in the blazing Arkansas sun, loitered idly around a wheezing mechanical contraption powered by the exertions of a two harnessed horses. The cheery faced Jerry Edwards, flanked by a grimacing Jerry Edwards junior, hoisted his dungarees into place as I pulled up – no mean feat when it looked as if he was using them to smuggle and assortment of inner tubes – and let me in on the use of his ‘squeeze machine’. ‘It’s hillbilly sardam cane… we’re pressing out the molasses for old-time sweetenin,’ he chuckled, before filling me in on the rigours of living in here in Harnam County, ‘Gee, it’s tough. It’s a dry County. It don’t get wet ‘til you cross Cotter…’ . Armed with a jar of their black-as-hell syrup I rejoin the 62, speculating that the good lord and his tethered horses may be providing his ole boys with something a little sweeter than molasses to get them through the long Arkansas nights.

I dipped across the sheet-glass Mississippi into Memphis just as the sun was setting – a blood-orange gash on a broad charcoal horizon. After three days spent in the sort of town where slow-dancing in a waffle house is closest you’ll get to nightlife, I was keen to drink deep of the dark spirits fuelling this famously musical city; to don the Bible belt in glittering rhinestone. Much of Memphis’ famous musical output had already served as a sonic backdrop to my hours on the road – Johnny Cash, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and lesser-known black stars on whom their style was based such as Howlin’ Wolf – and my appetite was whet.

‘There’s an old saying in Memphis: “two people is a joint, and it’s enough for a party… ” said Pierson, the charismatic adopted Memphian who’d offered to show me around the Memphis’ hole-in-the-wall dives, or juke joints, which are usually out of bounds to the fanny-pack sporting Graceland brigade. Tad cruised into town five years ago in his restored ‘55 Cadillac: ‘just like Elvis’s’, and has since set about charming the slouch hat off everyone in this mythical city; from octogenarian bluesmen to louche local poets. We knock back a couple of Bourbons: ‘Hmmm… you can’t top that Mississippi brown water…’ before Tad hustles me into his bungalow of an automobile.

Growling to a halt outside Ja Vo Cabana, a Bohemian coffee shop in the fashionable Cooper Youngs district of Memphis, I feel as conspicuous as Charlton Heston at an Amnesty International rally. Crammed with batty bits of lunacy – mismatched classroom chairs, sagging sofas, clashing art deco prints – Ja Vo Cabana looks as if an eccentric great-aunt’s personality has been vomited all over the walls. At the far end of the room, vocalist Misti Rae struts around as if she’s had a fencepost inserted rectally, bellowing out a warming number about being eaten alive by her apartment. Davy Ray, a man with a beard that makes him look as if he’s been straining to lick the remnants from a jar of marmite, accompanies her on bass. In a half-assed sort of way it’s all very San Fran. These, Tad tells me, are the tender shoots of a new Memphis, only now pushing up through the burnt-out terrain of a town in terminal decline following the shooting of Martin Luther King in ’66. ‘Woo hoo guys, that was blastin’, I’m gonna go wee wee,’ squawks Misti by way of agreement.

‘Willie, who runs this joint, is one of the few remaining original bluesmen in Memphis. This place is unique,’ oozes Tad in silken tones as, 30 minutes later, we squint through the absurdly feeble light into Wild Bill’s blues club. Eighty-four-year-old Willie, hooded lids drooping to the beat, props up the door in a black hat and dapper suit and tie, as he has done since the Fifties. His wife, a sprightly 60-something, weaves her way around the red-lit banqueting tables, serving thimble-sized glasses of beer (this place isn’t about the refreshment, as the sweaty iced cake and pork rinds on the bar attest). The bone-rattling vibrato of vocalist Nicky rings out above the happy heads jitterbugging on the postage-stamp-sized dance floor. Breasts bouncing around like jello as she enacts in the ‘Memphis stomp’ popularized by Tina Turner, Nicky sings of no-good men: ‘Hey mamma, your husband’s diiirrrttyyy!’ But you get the impression that their lyin’ cheetin’ souls would have short shrift with Nicky. Nicky looks like the sort of woman who’d have no regrets in life; who’d push aside the slice of humble pie and have another pint of Bourbon instead.

Drunk on the atmosphere, toes tapping involuntarily to the groaning bass, I begin to loose my heart to Memphis. The Republican US press bleats on about race hatred and crime in downtown Memphis, but as I sit, ten minutes later, with my underwear round my ankles, comparing footwear with 43-year-old black Memphian Rhonda, I speculate that this is so much special recipe hogwash. The ladies’ restroom in Wild Bills, a small room with two toilets side-by-side, separated only by a shoulder-height partition, sums up the Memphian spirit. In this low-down joint, it ain’t about the breast-beating or US domestic policy; it’s about the blues. This is the Memphis that reared Otis Redding and BB King, the first black ambassadors on international TV, and the city that gave rise to the Sun and Staxx Studios, where black and white artists made music and magic together, free from the race wars outside the Studio doors. ‘It’s a city that doesn’t judge,’ agrees Tad later as we’re heading home, feasting on a Memphian snack of Rendezvous BBQ Ribs (‘about as far as a pig can go in this world’). ‘If you want proof, look number of New Orleaners we have here after Katrina,’ Tad continued, red juices spilling onto his pencil tie. ‘The population has increased by 20%. And most of them are staying.’

The next morning I was on the road east again, to Nashville, a Tennessean city with an equally impressive musical heritage. Memphis city outskirts pass in a blur, and soon my surroundings are a snowdrift of cotton plantations, their buds fidgeting in the fall breeze. After four hours on the road, head still pounding with bass reverb, I realised I needed coffee like George Bush needs help with an IQ test, so I pulled up in the oceanic parking lot of Exxon gas station. This was the heart of two-bits-ville, the signs decorating the front of the squat, concrete shop to the rear of the lot bearing the legends: ‘we sell used cows’ and ‘Deer cooler – hunters must supply own rope’. Delirious with boredom, the station attendant stared through me, a snail-trail of drool forming at either side of her mouth. Another man stood silently at the fingerprint-smeared glass door, as if he’d been in the same position, unblinkingly eyeballing the same uneventful expanses, for a decade. Above their heads, a battered TV screen blared out the sort of channel where they play commercials on loop, rightly surmising that their viewers are too cretinous to remember the preceding 20 minutes. After two minutes of nervously fingering the beef jerky and Tammy Wynette wallclocks, I sprint back to the car, unable to shake the sensation of four deadened eyes staring after me until I reach Nashville’s city limits.

Nashville is to Memphis as a mellifluous blues riff is to a tortured banjo strain. Everything seems starker here, the paper-white of the proud new pedestrian bride overarching the Camberwell river, the tide of blondes in blue jeans, their helmet hairdos possibly impenetrable to the sounds of the guitar and banjo busking duos lining the Broadway, which is Nashville’s main strip and the place to bag yourself a flame motif shirt, or tomato-red Stetson. I’m cruising through to briefly drink in the Bud-steeped atmosphere before I head ten miles north out of town, to Goodlettsville, home to the Nashville Cowboy Church, and my final port of call.

Billed as the happy marriage of music and ‘the big man’, the Cowboy Church was set up fifteen years ago by Joanne Cash (sister of Johnny) and her pastor husband, Harry Yates. Lured by the Cash legend, Nashville’s brightest, best and most hirsute perform for free at the church’s twice-weekly services. I shuffle in near the back – where I’m treated to a good eyeful of the pine-mountain backdrop – and view the scene. A stetson is being passed around for collection as pensioners with pom-poms mouth words from an overhead projector. In the row in front, the corpulent Peggy jigs up and down as she speaks in tongues, whilst onstage Gary Brock urges the Lord to ‘clean ma up, I’m a goin’ to heaven,’ his moustache, which is planted on his face like a sideways comma, twitching in rhythm. Joanne stands near the stage, all crashing Cash eyebrows, arms aloft like a pop-culture Messiah.

The scene is in equal parts cartoon-kitsch and heart-warming. As at many points during this, the most surreal week of my young life, I’m battling twin urges to kick my cowboy boots together and join in with abandon, or run screaming out into the icy Nashville night. It’s said that America is one great big conspiracy to make you happy. Ten minutes later, my chin sinking into the folds of Peggy’s flesh as she gives me some of the lord’s lovin’, I realise that – although in come cases it’s as married to reality as the waterfall cascading picturesquely around Gary’s chap-clad thighs – I could get with the Bible belt’s take on Prozac living. God Bless America.

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