Just a short walk deeper into City Park is a beautiful Botanical Garden, with sculptures by Mexican artist Enrique Alférez, and tranquil displays that reward a casual stroll through butterfly houses and Japanese meditation gardens. Considering it’s a public holiday there’s not many other visitors to crowd our views, and even by the ancient oak trees, whose branches creep along the ground in a voodoo embrace, the sense of space is a welcome respite from the bustle of the French Quarter.

The Steamboat Natchez is 285 feet long, 46 ft wide and has a wheel weighing 33 tons to drive it along the third biggest river in the world. We head south of the city, towards the Gulf of Mexico, which sits 100 miles down river from New Orleans, passing heavy industry and huge ships as we go. It’s a taste of old school travel with the Steamboat Stompers playing Louis Armstrong numbers and Dixieland jazz in the dining room, but there’s not a huge amount of scenic beauty to observe and we’re happy to be first off the boat to the sounds of them playing ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’ two hours later. 

The spirit of the city engulfs us as we leave the restaurant and walk straight into a uniformed brass band who are celebrating a wedding party procession with the strains of ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’, blasting their way down Royal Street, complete with dancing tuba player. We weave our way through the crowds, and down a side street behind the St. Louis cathedral, into Jackson Square, where in 1803 the French handed over control of New Orleans to the United States.

While I’ve discovered a new-found appreciation of Elvis – who we blast out of the speakers as we leave Memphis – I’ll never become a Bob Dylan fan. However there’s still a thrill as we drive straight onto Highway 61, made even more famous by Dylan’s album of the same name… revisited. This Great River Road, which runs for 1400 miles to New Orleans, becomes iconic as it travels through the Mississippi Delta, giving birth to musical legends along the way.

I’m pretty certain that Memphis wasn’t this hot 200 years ago. It’s mid-May and even the Climate-Change-Denier-in-Chief has to acknowledge that it’s dangerously, unseasonably hot. The mercury is well over 100 degrees before 10am and as we’re dropped off in the parking lot outside Gracelands, we slap on the Factor 50 with abandon.

A little further on we drive through a hamlet called Summertown and take the turning for Highway 20 and we’re suddenly in the real rural Tennessee. This is what we expected to see; there are forests and fields, beautiful houses and run-down shacks, little towns and overgrown creeks, wooden white churches with pointed spires and little homes with rocking chairs on porches. This feels like the American South.

Having got the flavour of Nashville over the past 36 hours, and with our bus-tour yesterday giving us a sense of the city, the next two days are focussed on work. An early start ensures we’re deposited back on Broadway by the hotel shuttle bus in time for coffee. It’s already roasting and the bars are in full swing with bands blasting out loud and proud before 11am. This truly is a city that never sleeps.

In one corner is a recording booth manned by the infinitely patient Nathan, who spends his day recording tourists massacring country classics. We’re no exception and duet our way through a rather unique version of the classic tune ‘Crazy’. Coman maintains it’s in the wrong key for him, but Nathan assures us he’s heard a lot worse – suffice to say, Patsy Cline will be turning in her grave. 

They screech past at high volume, like flocks of drunken geese, pedalling furiously, these newcomers to the Nashville scene. Seated either side of mobile bars that career through the streets of downtown, gaggles of hen parties in bridal veils and lurid t-shirts whoop and holler along to deafening chart hits, knocking back cheap cocktails on their Pedal Taverns. It’s not quite the Nashville music scene we were expecting.