0 to 389 miles

Hours into our journey and already we have hit a rich seam of records running in tumble down piles through a ramshackle thrift store on the wrong side of town. Realising I haven’t locked the car, but not wanting to suggest to anybody walking by it that I suspect them of thievery I decide not to use the remote locking from the shop door but instead go back to the car, get my note book and then lock the doors.
The records are water damaged, their smell is mouldy and their contents is amazing. Above the deaf Korean cashier is a portrait of a moustachioed Physics teacher and his librarian wife super imposed onto a champagne glass emerging rising from a floral display.
Finally out of the shadow of Atlanta’s obesity I realise I have left, and now lost, my notebook and that perhaps the possibility of being interpreted as a bigot by a total stranger in the South isn’t something to loose sleep, or a notebook, over. Jack Hills wonderful “T is For Texas” is the record we choose to guide us through the rural roads of Georgia.


'Jack calls this album "Don't Know Where I'll be Tomorrow." I know where Jack will be tomorrow; in the hearts of a hell of a bunch of Country Music Fans.' Hillman Hall

Flat and long the swathes of asphalt wind us through gothic landscapes with heavy, moss-infected trees hanging over red neck Hansel and Gretel homes. Dead armadillos lie on the side of the road upturned like Hummers in Iraq, the swamp jungle shakes with the chorus roar of cicadas as the trees give way to an open vista of green tidal plains.
We book a room from a man who talks words like illegible handwriting as 10 mosquitoes feast on his face. The man two doors down called Buck Rodgers extends us a beer and takes us for a ride through the water ways with his twins. Since the area is tidal, he tells us, all of the water is considered land. This land has been owned for centuries by local families, oyster and crab men who sound as feral as the land. These young men have inherited with the land the right to shoot fishermen who lay anchor and are thus trespassing. But their catch tasted good enough and the local restaurant with a side of flour battered fries for us to forgive them their murderous tendencies.
On the road again early the next morning we meet a black man called Raymond. He is living on the side of the road in a caravan that is eclipsed by a hill of beer cans. When he sees us approaching he runs behind his home and returns with an American flag that, after much wading and rising, he pitches for us atop the mountain. “People drink a lot of beer around here” Raymond says with a rye smile. “For a black man to stay out of trouble he gotta think small”.
A few miles further down the road we enter Brunswick, a small town fortified by giant paper factories that feed off the seemingly inexhaustible interior we have just emerged from. The 100 plus degree air physically assaults us when we get out of the car and pelts us as we flee to a nearby Flea Market. Inside this oasis we find a whole room floor to ceiling with crates of records. The joy of two midday hours to kill getting dusty fingers is intensified as ruby’s and emeralds start appearing in every crate. Among our finds are two Goombay albums from the Bahamas. George Symonette “so tall that he had to sit sideways at the piano” and the darling Eloise Lewis, billed as the only girl balladeer of Goombay in the Bahamas, turn on our record player as palm trees begin to pepper the dense woodland and we enter the pastel decay of Florida and Eloises native Jacksonville.

-4382 to 0 miles

Touch down in Atlanta, a taxi rank of wheelchairs and drivers waiting at our gate to shuttle their 300lb cargos back into the land of choice and convenience.
The first person to greet us is an officious looking man wanting to know where we are going. Not wanting to begin our trip dishonestly we decide to answer him as truthfully as possible; from Atlanta we are heading to the Georgia coast, down into Florida and across to its pan handle. Zig zagging between Florida and southern Alabama we will be heading to the Mississippi delta, taking in all of Louisiana and then will try and make a dent of exploration into East Texas, rising up its pan handle into Oklahoma and cruising into Kansas. From Kansas we will turn East and head down through Missouri, dip our toes into Arkansas and then stitch a line between 'Tennessee, North Mississippi and Alabama all the way back into North Georgia and eventually Atlanta.
If at this point he’d followed protocol and asked us the purpose of our visit we would have replied that we were in his land to excavate for our own personal phonographic pharaohs, private pressings onto vinyl by amateur musicians who in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s found themselves inhabiting a unique epoch in which they could press their own records, an era in music that saw everyone from midgets to torsos and parrot orchestras to blind whistlers stand in front of a studio mic. As it was the line of wheelchairs was congesting like an overworked artery behind us and he simply waved us on as if to prove honesty is sometimes the best option.
In our car we join the 7 lanes of traffic that circle Atlanta like tracks on a permanently stuck LP. At the city limits we stop and an International House of Pancakes for coffee before stepping forward into the wild interior of the American South. The woman in front of us with thighs as wide as domestic boiler tanks asks to be seated at a table because she “can’t fit into a booth”.
Infiltrating this culture will obviously require us to eat five regular meals a day. Goodbye feet, hello enlightenment.


'When brother Esmond Patterson started at WAOK Gospel Caravan in the old '81 Theatre in Atlanta, almost everyone thought it would be successful. Whoever heard of gospel singing in a movie house? However brother Patterson is not familiar with failure.'