Destination Take to the US streets
Seven things to do
1. 42nd Street When you are on 42nd Street, you know you are in Tin Pan Alley and the heart of New York’s Theatre District. It became the title song of a 1933 backstage musical film, sung by Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell. In 1980 a long-running Broadway musical immortalised it. “Come and meet those dancing feet on the avenue I’m taking you to – 42nd Street.”
2. Route 66 “Get your kicks on Route 66, it winds from Chicago to LA, more than 2000 miles all the way.” Those words have been sung to us by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, Nat King Cole, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, the Rolling Stones, Manhattan Transfer and John Meyer, among many hundreds of others.
3. Copperhead Road The song is an FM radio staple by Steve Earle. Located near Mountain City, Tennessee, Copperhead Road has been renamed Copperhead Hollow Rd due to the theft of road signs bearing the song’s name.
4. Broadway They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway, sang the Drifters in 1963. “There’s always magic in the air.” It dissects 42nd Street, so that’s very likely the case. It was so when George Benson, Bette Midler, Neil Young, Eric Carmen and James Taylor sang it years later. There’s a Broadway in Nashville and Sydney as well, but it’s the Big Apple one that people head for.
5. Union Avenue When the young Elvis Presley drove a truck for the Crown Electric Company in Memphis, he would sit outside 706 Union Avenue trying to build up enough courage to go inside. When he did enter Sun Studios, it was to eventually record That’s Alright Mama, a fusion of black rhythm and white country that would change music forever.
6. Tobacco Road This refers to the tobaccoproducing area of North Carolina. Today, the stretch of Interstate 40 that runs through that area is known as Tobacco Road. Truly timeless, whether it comes to us from Lou Rawls, John D. Loudermilk, Nashville Teens or Eric Burdon & War.
7. Seven Bridges Road Steve Young wrote this ode to Woodley Road, a rural road that runs south from the Cloverdale neighbourhood of Montgomery, Alabama. Before the release of Hotel California, the Eagles would warm up pre-concert by singing it in the locker room shower area and then open each show with the group’s five members singing a cappella into a single microphone.