We’re seeing pictures from back home that show Tromsø blanketed in snow, but here the temperature is pleasantly mild, and the air is just a little hazy with humidity. The pernicious invasive weed kudzu is devouring entire forests like something from Day of the Triffids. In this steamy lush green landscape, Rock and Roll was born. Here is how it happened.

The treaty-violating Indian Removal Act drove most of the American Indians out of the South at bayonet point in the Trail of Tears in the 1830’s and as a result they don’t play much of a role in this story. A range of musical traditions brought by the settlers and the slaves and later waves of immigrants to the stolen lands swirled and blended and whirled around each other. Blues and folk and gospel and old country ballads flowed across the rolling countryside and throve in the climate. At a certain point in the Mississippi delta region, the mix was just so and a certain chemistry took hold.

In chemistry, you can take sodium, a dull grey metal which explodes on contact with water, and chlorine, a poisonous greeen gas, and combine them just so to get ordinary table salt (as memorably pointed out by Mark Baker in his book Atoms of Language, which I recommend if you are interested in linguistics). So it was with music in this area. A cow started licking a spot in the fecund, whirling mix, and eventually a face emerged. It had boyish vigor and dreamy eyes and kissable lips. It was Elvis. The cow kept licking and the rest of Elvis appeared in the ooze, an Adonis for the modern age.

Elvis rose from the primordial blue soup and walked into Sun Studios in Memphis and recorded his first song in 1954. He didn’t actually invent a genre, and he didn’t even write any songs, but his talent and charm and looks made him an instant youth idol (being white didn’t hurt, in a country that wasn’t ready for a black superstar). Elvis exuded a youthful energy and exuberance that thrilled his audiences, and his beauty and sexuality had every teenage girl in the country swooning. Teenage boys noticed this and flocked in droves to form rock bands. Rock ’n’ Roll became a youth movement, and took the country and then Europe by storm.

Sun Studios was the crucible for much of the most important rock music of that early era. Besides Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis all recorded at Sun Studio and became legends.

In fact, the South continues to be a major engine of rock ’n’ roll evolution, as explained by the ghost of Brian Jones in my brother Ian F. Svenonius’ Supernatural Strategies for making a Rock ’n’ Roll Group:

“Music from America’s North often exhibits a stinginess toward change or even a kind of stasis (the Ventures from Tacoma, Washington; New York’s perversely redundant Ramones; Oregon’s Dead Moon; the “folk” revival movement based in Boston, Massachusetts). This is an artistic conservatism arising from the exhaustive pace of frenetic industrialism. Inhabitants of such places long for the comfort of the familiar.

“Conversely, bucolic Southern agrarianism inspires artistic restlessness (such as hypertrendy “soul” and R&B) and a taste for novelty. Southern music forms have thus been elected the soundtrack to voracious capitalist culture, which demands transformation and newness. Rock ’n’ roll, therefore, keeps its eyes fixed on Dixie, even if via transplants or disciples in Detroit, London, LA, or Munich.”

Elvis, already a millionaire by the age of 22, bought a mansion in Memphis called Graceland and it is now a shrine to him, a kind of Great Pyramid or Taj Mahal and a mecca for rock ’n’ roll fans. We are most certainly in that category and Egon in particular has eaten, drunk, and breathed rock ’n’ roll for most of his life, so for us on this trip, Memphis is a major destination.

On the road to Memphis we are playing lots of Elvis and also Memphis bands Jack Oblivian, the Reigning Sound, the Compulsive Gamblers, Big Star, and the Box Tops. The latter two, Egon explains, are Alex Chilton’s bands, and so this justifies also playing the Cramps album produced by Alex Chilton.