From picturesque Charleston to urban Atlanta, the American South has so much to discover, says Griff Rhys Jones.
- 29 July 2025
You could, if you wanted to, travel the Southern States looking for trouble – scouring out poverty porn, wallowing in fraught history, and never once cracking a smile. Plenty do, despite Mark Twain making some of the funniest books ever written about the place. Or you might just look for the deep-fried pie.
Me, I was making a six-part series for Channel 4 – travelling from Charleston to Chattanooga, Alabama to the Appalachians to Atlanta. In the latter, just three hours from the rest of the USA’s big cities (or are they just three hours from sassy, hip Atlanta?), I had some of the whackiest ice cream I’ve ever licked – mixed up, on the spot, with my choice of breakfast cereal, opposite a crazy cemetery celebrating Mexican Day of the Dead. I can see why the South is where people want to be.
The term “urban sprawl” first landed on this city, and it was applied approvingly. Thirty miles of expressway link the leafy suburbs, but a bicycle route has been made out of the railway lines too, and today the best way to explore the coffee houses, parks and museums is in the saddle. And this is Georgia. The old sweet song is true. The back lanes are beckoning to mountains and forests beyond.
Tennessee is even more wooded. You don’t have to mention hillbillies or rednecks to understand mountain life. Here are the poor farmers who weren’t fake aristocrat plantation owners and even wanted to join the North in the Civil War. Visit cutesy Dahlonega, site of one of the earliest gold rushes in the US (I rented an RV just to frighten myself on the way). In the 1830s, the “gold in them there hills” was in them these hills.
After that, Europeans started pushing through the noted “Cumberland Gap”, displacing “the whole Cherokee Nation” – and the original Wild West went way down south. Davy Crockett, that semi-French, semi-housetrained hero of my six-year old TV infancy, was “King of the wild frontier” – right here in ‘river city’, San Antonio.
You can’t escape history round here. You might go deeper on the Appalachian Trail, the ultimate path through the woods, only a couple of thousand miles’ hike north, or hire a car and hit the Natchez Trace Parkway. I recommend both, but the Parkway was the revelation. The original Trace was a track blazed by Native Americans 10,000 years ago. It’s now an elegant two-lane blacktop – like a 500-mile country estate driveway. It links Nashville to Natchez, way down upon the Mississippi, in effortless, elegant splendour.
Tennessee is really a water state; you have to get afloat. The mountains feed the huge rivers that power the electricity and once opened the interior. Vast waterways still carry goods down to the Mississippi and supply an effortless grandeur on the way. “Music City”, right by the Tennessee River, was called that by Queen Victoria, after seeing an African-American university choir. And now it’s Nashville. Join the hen parties on Broadway if you want to. Get in the honky tonks. Go line-dancing with the Welsh World Champion, as I did. But don’t miss the Nashville Parthenon. It’s a wholly unexpected exact replica of the Athenian original – and, as Dolly Parton put it, “ours is new”. The stadiums are great, the bridges magnificent; even the post office, now a museum, is a wonder to behold. And music is everywhere.
That’s true not just in Nashville, but all across the South. If it ain’t Country, it ain’t music, they’ll tell you in Tennessee. But how about Soul? How about Delta Blues? How about BB King and Beale Street and Aretha Franklin? Every street in the South holds a music star. I felt like I was revisiting the soundtrack of my life. Florence, Alabama, a piece of small-town Americana as neat as you want, is home to Muscle Shoals and Fame Studios, where Etta James launched a flood of the greatest recordings in popular music. And I haven’t even mentioned New Orleans, where the parades are real and the jazz is realer.
I loved the exquisite historical neatness of Charleston, a perfection of southern brick-built charm, where you can still get lost amidst antebellum splendour. I adored the ridiculous pre-match pomp of college football. I passed fields of cotton in the land of cotton. Stayed in a Southern bed and breakfast. And ate. Louisiana is like a different world. I even went fishing at night with a bow and arrow in the Bayou. Lucky fish.
Some say that the Deep South is America’s oddity. But the South is where they invented the supermarket. The first Holiday Inn was in Memphis. Elvis was southern to the soles of his blue suede shoes. The Manhattan Project was largely based in Tennessee.
Dixie is the beating heart of the authentic United States. Just because a lot of those Old Kentucky Homes, Sweet Alabamas, Moon Rivers, Swanees and Georgia States of Mind were written by northerners who never got further south than Baltimore… that doesn’t mean that they aren’t there for the finding.
You could, if you wanted to, travel the Southern States looking for trouble – scouring out poverty porn, wallowing in fraught history, and never once cracking a smile. Plenty do, despite Mark Twain making some of the funniest books ever written about the place. Or you might just look for the deep-fried pie.
Me, I was making a six-part series for Channel 4 – travelling from Charleston to Chattanooga, Alabama to the Appalachians to Atlanta. In the latter, just three hours from the rest of the USA’s big cities (or are they just three hours from sassy, hip Atlanta?), I had some of the whackiest ice cream I’ve ever licked – mixed up, on the spot, with my choice of breakfast cereal, opposite a crazy cemetery celebrating Mexican Day of the Dead. I can see why the South is where people want to be.
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The term “urban sprawl” first landed on this city, and it was applied approvingly. Thirty miles of expressway link the leafy suburbs, but a bicycle route has been made out of the railway lines too, and today the best way to explore the coffee houses, parks and museums is in the saddle. And this is Georgia. The old sweet song is true. The back lanes are beckoning to mountains and forests beyond.
Tennessee is even more wooded. You don’t have to mention hillbillies or rednecks to understand mountain life. Here are the poor farmers who weren’t fake aristocrat plantation owners and even wanted to join the North in the Civil War. Visit cutesy Dahlonega, site of one of the earliest gold rushes in the US (I rented an RV just to frighten myself on the way). In the 1830s, the “gold in them there hills” was in them these hills.
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After that, Europeans started pushing through the noted “Cumberland Gap”, displacing “the whole Cherokee Nation” – and the original Wild West went way down south. Davy Crockett, that semi-French, semi-housetrained hero of my six-year old TV infancy, was “King of the wild frontier” – right here in ‘river city’, San Antonio.
You can’t escape history round here. You might go deeper on the Appalachian Trail, the ultimate path through the woods, only a couple of thousand miles’ hike north, or hire a car and hit the Natchez Trace Parkway. I recommend both, but the Parkway was the revelation. The original Trace was a track blazed by Native Americans 10,000 years ago. It’s now an elegant two-lane blacktop – like a 500-mile country estate driveway. It links Nashville to Natchez, way down upon the Mississippi, in effortless, elegant splendour.
Tennessee is really a water state; you have to get afloat. The mountains feed the huge rivers that power the electricity and once opened the interior. Vast waterways still carry goods down to the Mississippi and supply an effortless grandeur on the way. “Music City”, right by the Tennessee River, was called that by Queen Victoria, after seeing an African-American university choir. And now it’s Nashville. Join the hen parties on Broadway if you want to. Get in the honky tonks. Go line-dancing with the Welsh World Champion, as I did. But don’t miss the Nashville Parthenon. It’s a wholly unexpected exact replica of the Athenian original – and, as Dolly Parton put it, “ours is new”. The stadiums are great, the bridges magnificent; even the post office, now a museum, is a wonder to behold. And music is everywhere.
That’s true not just in Nashville, but all across the South. If it ain’t Country, it ain’t music, they’ll tell you in Tennessee. But how about Soul? How about Delta Blues? How about BB King and Beale Street and Aretha Franklin? Every street in the South holds a music star. I felt like I was revisiting the soundtrack of my life. Florence, Alabama, a piece of small-town Americana as neat as you want, is home to Muscle Shoals and Fame Studios, where Etta James launched a flood of the greatest recordings in popular music. And I haven’t even mentioned New Orleans, where the parades are real and the jazz is realer.
I loved the exquisite historical neatness of Charleston, a perfection of southern brick-built charm, where you can still get lost amidst antebellum splendour. I adored the ridiculous pre-match pomp of college football. I passed fields of cotton in the land of cotton. Stayed in a Southern bed and breakfast. And ate. Louisiana is like a different world. I even went fishing at night with a bow and arrow in the Bayou. Lucky fish.
Some say that the Deep South is America’s oddity. But the South is where they invented the supermarket. The first Holiday Inn was in Memphis. Elvis was southern to the soles of his blue suede shoes. The Manhattan Project was largely based in Tennessee.
Dixie is the beating heart of the authentic United States. Just because a lot of those Old Kentucky Homes, Sweet Alabamas, Moon Rivers, Swanees and Georgia States of Mind were written by northerners who never got further south than Baltimore… that doesn’t mean that they aren’t there for the finding.
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