Here are the highlights from my first day of travel.

Alcenia’s – Memphis

I found this Memphis soul food restaurant doing a casual search on the Diners, Dives and Drive-Ins website. I was actually looking for another place I had visited a few years ago called the Cozy Corner. Alcenia’s, topping the alphabetical list of Memphis restaurants, looked very interesting and it seemed like a better choice than repeating an experience I had already had.

The place was easy to find, it’s essentially at the base of the Memphis pyramid building. I had fried chicken because it’s Tuesday (the daily lunch special). While the food was fantastic, it was the spirit of the place that really stayed with me. The owner, a cheerful woman named BJ, came bounding out from the back to greet me shortly after I sat down. She gave me a hug and kiss and welcomed me to her place. I told her where I was from and she asked me to sign her guest book. Apparently she treats every customer this way. Unfortunately, she was very busy and she disappeared before I had a chance to ask her if I could take her picture.

Also, two of the customers overheard me say I was from St. Louis. One young woman introduced herself and told me she was from Glen Carbon, IL and was in Memphis to do some research for the V.A. Another gentleman, also introduced himself to tell me how excited he was that they were going to get a Sweetie Pies in Memphis!

Really? That was news to me. I proudly told him that I live a few blocks from the original location and that he won’t be disappointed in the food.

An interesting side note about my visit to Alcenia’s – I was the only white person in the place. Despite Guy Fieri’s visit there, it has remained a neighborhood restaurant catering to locals. And yet I felt very welcome. It’s was encouraging coming from the racial tensions in our own backyard.

The Shack Up Inn

This was another accidental find. I was browsing through online travelogues from people who had taken Blues pilgrimages to the Mississippi Delta region.

The Shack Up Inn is a lodging facility – it cannot rightly be called a motel or a hotel. It’s built on the site of an old sharecropper plantation and the units are mostly shotgun shacks moved onto the site from various locations around Mississippi. The idea is to create an authentic historical experience – to live like one of the great old Blues masters. The FAQ for the Shack Up is clear in that you probably shouldn’t book a unit if you have any reservations whatsoever about staying in a rundown, wooden shack. To further illustrate this, their slogan is “The Ritz we ain’t!”

I had misgivings about it. I was worried that it might be touristy, or exploitative, or just cheesy in general. It’s none of those things. I knew I was in the right place when the man in the lobby – the term lobby is a stretch – asked me if I wanted to take a guitar to my shack. I turned to look in the direction he was pointing and saw a collection of acoustic guitars of varying sizes and degrees of quality. Yes, like a bowling alley, they offer equipment to those not committed enough to have their own.

I told him i don’t fit in that category. He told me the Shack Up gets 20% of the royalties from any song I write while on premises. Well played, sir.

The Shack Up has a large hall attached to the lobby for live music. The interior of the hall is a kind of Church of the Blues – it’s an amazing site to behold. Alas, they only have music on the weekends. He did have tips for both dinner and live music, though.

My shack is called the Electric Blue. It has a two bedrooms and two porches, one in front and one in back. It would make a great place for a self-guided retreat, or to work solo on a creative project.

Ramon’s

My new friend at the Shack Up threw out a couple of restaurants in the area he thought were good. He was using a small business map of the Clarksdale area. He also pointed out the Delta Blues museum, which I visited, and the Hambone Art Gallery – the only place in town with live music on Tuesday nights.

Then he pointed to a little restaurant on the outskirts of the map and said, “Now, if you want the best fried shrimp on the planet, go to Ramon’s.”

That sounded perfect.

It sounded perfect until I actually saw the place. When I got there it looked even worse than the shack I was staying in. This wasn’t the kind of place you would even see on Diners, Dives and Drive-Ins, it’s far too low on the scale for that. I’m not sure why I decided to go in, but I did. It looked even worse on the inside. I didn’t want to touch anything. I had no idea how I was going to actually eat food prepared in this place.

I ordered the large (8 piece) fried shrimp dinner, which came with a salad and fries. The salad was slimy, but the dressing was surprisingly good. I realize that slimy lettuce doused in dressing is just one way of making salad, but in this case it just seemed indicative of the sliminess of the place.

My waiter, Pat, was an affable gent. He was talkative and very attentive. He was greeting members of a Red Hat Society meeting going in the big dining room as they arrived. I felt like I was in a scene from The Help – these were Southern Belles, with accents so thick you would think they’d never heard of a one syllable word.

Eventually the shrimp came – and they were, far and away the best fried shrimp, and the best fries I’ve ever eaten. I was totally blown away. It’s the kind of place you dream of finding on the road – hidden, visually unappealing to keep out nosy tourists, and food so good it may as well have been made in heaven.

I told Pat how amazed I was, but he took it all in stride. He hears high praise like this all the time. He even talked me into taking a half order of onion rings home, along with his own special condiment preparation of Worcestershire sauce and ketchup.

I’ll be thinking about that meal the for the remainder of the trip.

The Hambone Art Gallery

Clarksdale, MS is a depressed little town with no industry except Blues tourism. To its credit, though, it does Blues tourism perfectly. It doesn’t sell out and it keeps the Blues as cool as they should be. Even the crossroads of highways 49 and 161 — one of the many in the region that claim to be the site where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his musical talent — is pretty low key. I was actually expecting far worse.

The Hambone Art Gallery is right in line with this “Keeping it Real” philosophy. As the name implies, it’s an art gallery, and it’s also a live music venue. So, even on a dreary, rainy Tuesday night in September, there was a crowd of people to see a local musician who goes only by the name Big A. He’s a fantastic guitar player and wanders around the room on a wireless guitar system, chiding members of the audience. At one point, he even encouraged most of the audience to get up and dance with him, which we did. Yes, I joined in, too.

Overall, it was an excellent first day.