Kentucky – Bluegrass, Bourbon and Surprises

As I sat in front of a sewing machine in Paducah, Kentucky, desperately trying to stitch together a mini-quilt, Quilt Man came to my rescue. With his faux-quilt cape aflap and his eyes gleaming with enthusiasm behind ornate goggles, he nimbly readjusted the machine and I was soon back on track. Not exactly what I had expected to be doing in a state best-known for its horse racing and bourbon drinking!

But, then, I was in a classroom in the National Quilt Museum, the world’s largest museum of fibre art, which, in turn, is located in one of only three American UNESCO-designated Creative Cities. And Quilt Man, who, it turned out, is actually Fowler Black, Sales Director, Paducah Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, was only doing his duty by dramatising exactly how special Paducah is.

Forget your grandmother’s antique patchwork quilts or even those highly collectable, traditional Amish ones when you visit this museum. These wall-hanging masterpieces are instead textile artworks inspired by everything from nature to Beatles lyrics and The Lord of the Rings saga.

Strategically sited at the confluence of the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, Paducah, a city of about 25,000 residents, has traditionally prospered from the barge and boat traffic flowing past its picturesque waterfront, said a tugboat captain we met in the River Discovery Center. However, the city was ravaged by a series of floods until a mile-long flood wall was built along the river.

Looming up to 14 feet, it could have been an eyesore but, ever resourceful, the good people of Paducah had it adorned with 52 colourful murals that depict the history of their town. Among them is a portrait of native son Alben Barkley, US vice president during President Harry Truman’s term of office.

The town’s main square is surrounded by cosy little restaurants and quaint shops. Its Old Market House is now an arts-and-crafts emporium and its Market House Theatre stages around 15 productions a year. Popping in for a peek, we discovered that a forthcoming show was to be Mary Poppins, featuring none other than Quilt Man, aka Mr Black, as Mary’s chirpy, cheeky, Cockney sidekick. Across the street from the theatre, the large performance hall is home to the Paducah Symphony Orchestra.

Arriving that evening at the white-frame Hotel Metropolitan, we were in for another surprise when its African-American proprietress Betty

Dobson greeted us at the door with, “What you white folks doing coming to my place?” As she showed us around, it soon became evident that she was, in fact, portraying Ms Maggie Steed, who opened the Metropolitan in 1908 for touring black actors, sports stars and others not welcome in the all-white hotels.

As we wandered along the upstairs hall, she pointed out rooms that had housed the likes of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Ike and Tina Turner. Then, out of one of the rooms stepped ‘Billie Holiday’ belting out Strange Fruit, a heart-rending reminder of the cruelty once inflicted upon African-Americans. We then all adjourned to the dining room, where the buffet table was piled with such savoury Southern specialities as crispy catfish, fried chicken, collard greens, sweet potatoes, cornbreads and Miss Maggie’s ‘famous chess pie’.

FROM BACK TO THE FUTURE TO A CORVETTE FACTORY

Paducah, tucked away in the far south-western corner of the state, was our second stop in Kentucky. We had arrived from the airport in Nashville, Tennessee, a couple of days earlier at Bowling Green near the south-central state border. We were immediately drawn to the Corsair Artisan Distillery overlooking an old-fashioned town square reminiscent of the one in Back to the Future. How could we resist sampling a tipple or three of Pumpkin Spice Moonshine, Vanilla Bean Vodka or Triple Smoked Small Batch Bourbon? Then, off we went to the town’s National Corvette Museum and factory, entranced by its claim that ‘We Build Dreams in Bowling Green’.

Our guided tour was most impressive. As the assembly line of sleek Torch Red, Laguna Blue, Shark Grey and other Corvettes glided by, they were carefully, almost lovingly, assembled by male and female factory workers – the plant’s 90 robots were restricted to the body shop. The 137 vehicles produced in an average eight-hour day, we learned, then go through a battery of gruelling factory and road performance checks before being distributed across the USA.

Moving to the nearby museum, we learned that America’s ‘true sports car’ was launched in the early 1950s after World War II returnees sang the praises of their European equivalents. Among the exhibits were tributes to the company’s founders and designers and displays of the magnificent vehicles owned by the likes of rock/country music giant Roy Orbison and appearing in the 1960s cult TV series Route 66.

The most surprising exhibit was of six of the smashed-up, vintage Corvettes that disappeared into a huge sink hole in February last year, when the ceiling of a cave underneath the museum collapsed. Oddly enough, the highly-publicised incident actually proved of benefit to the museum – the number of visitors has since doubled and the museum is now building a sink-hole attraction to lure in even more people.

KENTUCKY BLUEGRASS

Up river from Paducah, Owensboro is home to the International Bluegrass Music Museum, which introduces visitors to the swirling string instrumentals and lyrics of such musicians as Earl Scruggs, Lester Flatt, Maybelle Carter, the mother-in-law of Johnny Cash, and, most importantly, Kentucky native Bill Monroe, the ‘Father of Bluegrass Music’. Summoned first to a barbecue buffet – a reminder that Owensboro is home to both bluegrass and barbecue festivals – we were then treated to some foot-tapping bluegrass by a quartet of guitar, bass, mandolin and banjo players. Explaining their choice of music, banjo-strumming Matt Hargis said: “If you do a murder song, then you have to do a gospel song.”

Another local fan of this ‘bastard child of country music’ claimed that “young people are migrating to it because of its purity”. He may be right; certainly, the museum has enough support to be planning a move to much larger, new premises three blocks away.

If we had headed on up along the Ohio River, we would have come to Kentucky’s largest and best-known city, Louisville, site of Churchill Downs, home of the world-renowned Kentucky Derby and its related museum; the world’s oldest operating paddlewheel steamboat, The Belle of Louisville; and the impressive Muhammad Ali Center, where, it is said, local resident Ali, now frail, drops by from time to time to watch the films of his championships boxing matches.

The Belle of Louisville paddlewheel steamboat is a reminder that many of Kentucky’s most historic and interesting towns and cities were built along rivers.

However, I had been there before to attend the early-May Kentucky Derby (where my colleague, a chain smoker, created a stir by setting her ornate hat on fire). Also bypassed on this trip was delightful Lexington, the epicentre of Kentucky’s beautiful, thoroughbred-horse-breeding country, where I’d previously visited stud farms, Keeneland Race Course and the Kentucky Horse Park. So I was not disappointed when we headed south instead to Abraham Lincoln’s Birthplace National Historic Park in Hodgenville.

ABE LINCOLN’S BIRTHPLACE

Rather surprisingly, we found a replica of the log cabin birthplace of the 16th US president’s encased in a sombre, stone hilltop shrine. Asking the uniformed park ranger what was planned for this year’s commemorations of the president’s death 150 years ago, we were told: “We talk about his beginnings here, not his ending”.

And what strange beginnings they were for the future, hugely-influential Civil War era president – born the backwoods son of a frontiersman father and a mother, who provided much of his sparse education but died young. You can learn more at the site’s visitor centre, which includes a reconstruction of the interior of the Lincoln cabin and two life-masks of the great man. Several miles away at Knob Creek is the site to which the Lincolns moved later; the historic house there is the home of a family whose son, Lincoln’s friend, saved him from drowning in an area stream.

Next came Bardstown with its own local celebrity – Stephen Foster, the ‘ Father of American Music’. Creating scores of popular, 19th-century songs, he was the first composer to actually make a living, churning out such favourites as Beautiful Dreamer, Camptown Races and My Old Kentucky Home, the latter inspired by a visit to his cousin’s Bardstown plantation, Federal Hill. Every summer, a 1,400- seat amphitheatre on its grounds stages The Stephen Foster Story. During our visit, one of its production executives told us Foster’s music is so popular in Japan that when he visited a Japanese kindergarten, the children greeted him with a medley of the composer’s songs … apparently they are used there to help teach English.

THE BOURBON TRAIL

Bardstown is also the home of the Whiskey Museum and a gateway to the Bourbon Trail. As a tribute to this potent Southern drink, we attended an afternoon session on cocktail mixing in the historic Kentucky Bourbon House. “I’m an old guy now, so I drink a mint julep every morning and a Manhattan every night before I go to bed,” proclaimed our host, Col Michael Masters, with his white moustache and goatee the epitome of what a Southern Colonel should look like. He added that the house has a child ghost named Henry, who likes to stroke women’s legs when they ascend the stairs. I didn’t put it to the test.

To see how the real thing is produced, we headed some 30 miles away to Clermont, home of the Jim Bean Distillery. The only one in America to be run by seven generations of the same family, it “still produces bourbon with the same DNA as our grandfathers drank,” said our Bourbon Ambassador guide, Megan Breier. The booze gets its colour, she added, from the wooden barrels in which it is aged. In the process, a certain amount of the liquid, known as ‘the angels’ share’ is lost.

Claiming that “there are now more barrels of bourbon in Kentucky than people,” she continued our tour through the immense and impressive distillery, which, with its steaming vats of mash and clanking assembly line of bottles, bore a faint resemblance to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. I emerged from its shop with a box of bourbon-ball chocolates as well as a bottle of Knob Creek 100-proof bourbon.

Travelling eastwards, we reached Berea, home of the namesake college that not only pioneered mixed-race education but also proclaims it offers ‘the best education that money can’t buy’. In other words, no tuition fees are charged to its 1,500 students, most of them from low-income, Appalachian-area families. Instead, the students work their way through college, among other things as trainee craftsmen and women. This emphasis on creative skills spills out into the surrounding town, which is full of shops and studios producing everything from blown glass and silver jewellery to beautifully-crafted furniture and ceramics. And if you can’t find what you want there, there’s the huge Kentucky Artisan Center on the edge of town.

Our last stop before returning to Nashville revealed another beautiful, rural resort side of Kentucky. For 27,000-acre Dale Hollow Lake State Resort Park – one of 18 such facilities in the state – features modern accommodation overlooking a huge, crystal-clear lake dotted with emerald green islands, one serving as a children’s summer camp overseen by volunteer state troopers. There’s also a scenic, but challenging, 18-hole golf course, great fishing and a marina filled with both rental pleasure craft and houseboats.

How tempting it was to linger on in what I must now confess is ‘My Old Kentucky Home’– I was born in Louisville, although I have lived for decades in ‘My Old British Home’ in the heart of London.