Tag: music

I can’t claim to be the biggest fan of Elvis. He didn’t write his songs, he wasn’t a particularly notable guitarist or pianist and although he was a ‘good’ singer I doubt many would say he was the greatest.

You don’t get to be pretty much the most successful recording artist in history without having something special though. Charisma, x-factor, controversy, an uncanny knack of picking great pop songs to record… Whatever it was, Elvis had it, lots of it, and his story is one of the most interesting in pop music. As a music fan you can’t help but be drawn to Graceland .

There’s a lot more to see than the house but we started with an audio tour of the Graceland Mansion itself. It feels exactly like you’d expect a mansion bought by a very rich young man in the 1950’s to feel. It’s lavish, opulent, completely OTT in places (the ‘jungle room’ has green grass carpet on all the walls and ceiling and an indoor waterfall), but it’s also nowhere near as big as you’d expect it to be. The main floor only has a living room, music room, dining room, kitchen guest bedroom and sitting room (the jungle room, which was built on an extension) so it’s really not that big. He did have a TV room in the basement with three televisions in it though, which at the time would have cost a fortune, but still it doesn’t feel like it deserves to be called a mansion. He did add to the house though, there is quite a lot of land with stables and a huge racquetball court housed in it’s own building which he added in the 60’s.

Also located in the grounds (in his meditation garden) is his grave and those of his family. I can’t have done much research on Graceland before going because I didn’t know he was actually buried there and I wasn’t expecting to see his grave or the hundreds of gifts, floral tributes and messages that are still left there on a daily basis by visitors. I’m not sure what I made of this memorial garden. You can’t help being moved when reading the tributes and I saw a few people crying as they stood in front of his gravestone read all the messages, but at the same time it was completely nuts and obviously incredibly tacky in places.

As I said though, there’s much more to see than the house itself. We spent some time looking round his incredible automobile museum (see the photos of his Silver Ghost, Ferrrari Dino and some incredible Cadillacs) and then had a look round his two private jets.

We finished the visit with a tour of another museum containing costumes and other exhibits that obviously wouldn’t fit into the house. I’m really glad we took a detour to Memphis to visit Graceland. You certainly get your money’s worth there and here were still more exhibits and mini-museums we could have done if we’d have had more time but we had to get to the National Civil Rights Museum which Jen’s going to write about in the next post.

Detroit is famous for 2 things; cars and music.

Detroit = The Motor City = Motown

From the window of our hotel we could see the Ford building and the Ford test track below. We were also just a few minutes from the Henry T Ford Museum, but we only had one morning and I’d put Detroit on the itinerary for one reason only and that was to visit the Motown Museum.

The Motown Museum is no ordinary museum, full of glass cabinets and exhibits (althouth there are some). The Museum is built inside the small residential property which housed Tamla Motown records during their busiest years and was mostly set out just like it was in the 60’s and 70’s.

Berry Gordy bought the property in 1959 and it was both his home, a recording studio, headquarters, distribution hub and artist development centre. We got to stand (and sing, badly) in the original Studio A where artists like Stevie Wonder, The Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, The Temptations, Gladys Knight, Smokey Robinson (the list goes on…) recorded their biggest hits. We also got to see how Motown really was a small cottage industry, run from a small property where everybody chipped in (the artists would pack boxes when they weren’t recording and Diana Ross sat on the front desk answering the phones when she first got there).

I think my favourite story from our (excellent) tour guide was about the candy machine in the lobby. Apparently the Baby Ruth bars were always kept in the 4th slot from the right hand side and whoever filled it was told they MUST make sure the Baby Ruth bars were 4th from the right. This was because Baby Ruth bars were Stevie Wonder’s favourite and he could only find them by hitting the 4th button from the right 🙂

Unfortunately, no photos are allowed in the museum but you get a sense of how small it is from the few photos I got of the outside.