The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As seen on TV: a good Southern road trip
“That’s where Andrea died.”
It’s not the sort of remark one normally hopes to hear on vacation. But on a dazzling spring morning in Senoia, Georgia, it spurred a chorus of “oohs” as the assembled aimed cellphones at the site of her demise.
It was an understandable response: The frisson that came from seeing, in reallife, the same building where poor Andrea met her maker in the Season 3 finale of “The Walking Dead” was delightful. But so was the tidy historic downtown, the toasty but not yet oppressive Southern sun and the pervasive scent of honeysuckle.
I came for “The Walking Dead” tour but stayed for the ambience. For a few hours anyway, because there were more places to see where fictional people got killed, cursed, discovered, drunk, fed and further enmeshed in a Gothic murder mystery. Along the way I ate well, drank better and zoned out on rocky-top foothills and in kudzu canyons, letting my mind wander as hundreds of miles rolled beneath the wheels of my overpriced rental car.
Which is to say, I undertook a mythic getaway (an American road trip …) for a slightly corny reason (… based on TV locations). And it was great.
Nobody needs an excuse for a road trip, although it helps to have hooks for the thread of your adventure. Friends or family, or sites you’ve always wanted to visit: national parks, Civil War battlefields, Waffle Houses. (No judgment.) It doesn’t matter what it is, really; all you need is a framework. I write about — and thus watch a metric ton of — television. So that was mine.
I chose the South because, well, so has TV. Producers seeking ever more evocative backdrops — and fat tax credits — have turned the region into a popular shooting spot. Atlanta, in particular, has become a hub, the home base of both numerous series (“Atlanta,” “Stranger Things”) and box office blockbusters, like “The Hunger Games” and “Avengers” films.
So that seemed like a good place to start an As Seen on TV trek that would take me to Nashville, site of, er, “Nashville,” and then New Orleans, whose indelible atmosphere has enlivened shows like “American Horror Story,” “Treme” and “True Detective.”
The broader point, of course, is that the cultural and aesthetic charms that look good on-screen also make these cities excellent spots to visit, and using TV as your travel agent turns out to be a decent way to see things that give an area its character. The same things that beguile location scouts looking for a sense of place can be a great way to get a sense of a place.
In Atlanta, these include nearby small towns whose picturesque squares have served as settings for shows like “Stranger Things” (Griffin) and “The Vampire Diaries” (Covington).
‘Most people leave changed’
As I approached Chattanooga, Tennessee, the rolling Georgia terrain gave way to dramatic vistas of the Appalachian foothills before the highway bent west toward Nashville. In recent years, the country music capital has become your cool friends’ favorite city, thanks to New South cuisine and a fertile cultural scene. On this trip, I was there for the Bluebird.
Since opening in 1982 in a strip mall, the 90-seat Bluebird Cafe has become a favorite spot for songwriters to play for locals and friends. Then Rayna Jaymes and Juliette Barnes began singing there on “Nashville.”
“Now we have hundreds of people, many who just want to have their picture taken in front of the venue,” said Erika Wollam Nichols, the general manager. “Or they get desperate about trying to get inside, to the point of trying to break the door down, waving $20 bills at me.”
“It gets kind of insane,” Wollam Nichols added.
The crowd is now largely tourists inspired by the venue’s regular appearances on “Nashville,” where the fictional country stars extol the venue’s intimacy. (The show is shot on a replica Bluebird set.) The parking lot was thrumming when I got there 30 minutes before showtime, the line for reservation holders like me dwarfed by the serpentine one full of hopefuls angling for a walk-up seat. Inside, a cocoon envelops the space as the night’s acts take their turns.
Taylor Swift and Garth Brooks are among the superstars who were discovered at the Bluebird. The night I was there, Joe Martin, a young Englishman with a rich, resonant voice, seemed primed for bigger things.
As mawkish as this sounds: The Bluebird is about songs, not stardom — their power to crystallize ephemeral emotions and reach places inside you that don’t see them coming. And the warm aura of the place makes it hard to do anything other than open yourself to them.
‘We can convert people’
I arrived late at my hotel, the Pontchartrain in the Garden District, a mashup of oldschool elegance and kitsch — vintage room keys, velvet and chandeliers, an oil painting of Lil Wayne — with a terrific rooftop bar. I went up for a nightcap, but the panoramic views and southern breezes breathed the city’s vitality into me, and soon it didn’t feel so late. An Uber ride later and I was on Frenchman Street in the Marigny, catching the end of the Jazz Vipers’ Monday night gig at the Spotted Cat.
The Gypsy jazz stalwarts are among the many local musicians who appeared in “Treme,” the HBO drama that, with its colorful strivers putting their lives and the city back together after Katrina, functioned as a love letter to New Orleans. Later I’d explore other spots it showcased, including Bacchanal, a wine shop and restaurant with one of the prettiest patios anywhere, and the legendary jazz dive Vaughan’s, both in the Bywater. I plowed through a football-size barbecued shrimp po’boy at Liuzza’s By the Track, the last meal of John Goodman’s doomed professor Creighton Bernette. (You could do worse.)
The Garden District, with its ancient oak trees that tower and twist over the sidewalks, is so named because its mansions were originally surrounded by gardens, before lots were subdivided and smaller houses were added. But it was a big one I was interested in: the Buckner Mansion on Jackson Avenue, known to “American Horror Story: Coven” fans as Miss Robichaux’s Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies.
Built in 1856 by a cotton kingpin named Henry S. Buckner, the home also housed a business school until the 1980s. While it wears its opulence gracefully, its recent stint as a witch school — and all the murders, resurrections and tongue removals that entailed — gave it a sinister undertow even on a spring morning full of birdsong.
It was the first stop on a macabre itinerary. That night I would visit the infamous LaLaurie Mansion in the French Quarter, the site of the ghastly crimes that inspired Kathy Bates’ sadistic character on “American Horror Story.” (The show actually used the nearby Gallier House as the exterior.) First I headed to the wilder precincts outside New Orleans, where “True Detective” wove a Gothic mystery of existential angst and unspeakable evil in its first season.
I made one last stop on the way out of New Orleans, at Kermit’s Mother-in-Law Lounge, the beloved Tremé institution. The R&B great Ernie K-Doe opened the bar in the 1990s, naming it after his biggest hit, “Mother-inLaw.” He died in 2001 and his widow, Antoinette, ran it afterward, bringing it back after it took on 5 feet of floodwater after Katrina, until she died in 2009. It closed in 2010.
Later it was bought by Kermit Ruffins, the affable trumpeter and bandleader who played himself on “Treme.” In 2014, he reopened the lounge, a landmark with vivid murals of jazz scenes, Native Americans and Ernie and Antoinette looking down from heaven. At the bar I found Ruffins himself, an auspicious development — he was a good person to ask about something that had been on my mind.
Travel can be fraught with questions about appreciation versus appropriation — heedless tourists can treat cultures as instruments for their own enrichment and risk trampling them in the process. It seemed to me that if you approach places with humility, respect and an open heart, it didn’t matter how you discovered them. But I saw how facile it could seem, checking off a list of things you saw on TV.
I posed some version of this to Ruffins, who acknowledged that many people who come to his bar do so because they saw it or him on “Treme,” rather than because they are devoted jazz fans.
“But we turn them into jazz fans once they hear the band play,” he said. “We can convert people real fast.” If he’s untroubled by it, who am I to wring my hands?