Nine days on the Deep South music trail: country, soul, blues, jazz, in that order

The whole of the first afternoon sits within four blocks of Broadway, so this works whenever you land.

The Country Music Hall of Fame runs chronologically from string bands and radio barn dances through the Nashville sound to the present, with Hank Williams's suits and Elvis's gold Cadillac and a rotunda at the end where the plaques of the inducted hang under a ring of windows. It is much better than a genre museum has any right to be.

The ticket includes the letterpress shop the museum runs, which is the best twenty minutes in the city: printing show posters from carved wood type since 1879, using the original blocks, with the presses running while you stand there.

Two blocks north is the Ryman Auditorium, which is where this whole trip starts properly. A riverboat captain called Thomas Ryman got religion at a tent revival and built it in 1892 as somewhere permanent to hold one, which is why the seats are church pews and why musicians call it the mother church. The Grand Ole Opry moved in in 1943 and broadcast from that stage for thirty-one years, and the room is good enough that acts still book it to record live albums in.

Then Broadway from late afternoon. The Ryman's back door opens onto an alley and the far side of that alley is the rear entrance of the honky tonk where Opry performers used to slip out for a drink between segments. Three or four bars in a row from there, three floors each, a different band on every floor, nothing on the door and a bucket going round between songs.

Away from the music for the day, and back to it in the evening.

The state capitol is on the hill north of downtown, a Greek Revival building whose architect quarrelled with everybody and is interred in one of its walls, and the free tours run through the day. The museum at the bottom of the mall below it is one of the largest state museums in the country and free, and the Civil War rooms are the reason to go: Tennessee sent more men to both armies than any other state and the museum does not tidy that up.

In the afternoon, drive west for the Parthenon, which is the strangest thing in Nashville and the best. It was put up at full size for the state centennial in 1897, made permanent in concrete in the 1920s, and it contains a gilded Athena forty-two feet high that was added in 1990. The city has called itself the Athens of the South since well before any of this.

In the evening, out to the Opry House. The Grand Ole Opry has been broadcast live every week since 1925, which makes it the longest-running radio programme in the country, and it is not a concert but a variety show in segments with the adverts read out live between them. Set into the middle of the stage is a circle of dark oak cut from the Ryman floor when the show moved out here in 1974, so every performer still stands on the boards you stood on yesterday.

Three hours and 200 miles west on the interstate. Leave after breakfast and you have the whole afternoon in Memphis.

Start at Sun. It is a single small storefront on Union Avenue with a control room and a live room behind it, and between 1951 and 1959 Sam Phillips recorded Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis in it. The tour is guided, it lasts forty-five minutes, and you stand on the X where Elvis stood. It is still a working studio at night.

Then Beale Street, three blocks of clubs and bars that was the centre of Black commerce and music in the South from the 1900s, was almost entirely demolished in the seventies in the name of urban renewal, and was rebuilt as an entertainment district. It is more polished than it was and the music is still real.

The Rock 'n' Soul Museum at the top of the street is the Smithsonian's account of how the Delta's music became Memphis's, and it is the best hour of context you can buy before the rest of this trip.

Eat barbecue. Memphis does dry-rubbed ribs and a pulled pork sandwich with slaw on top of it, and the argument about which counter is best has been running for fifty years.

The full day in Memphis and the heaviest day of the trip. Take the museum last or first, but not in the middle.

Graceland is ten miles south and is not what people expect. Elvis bought it at twenty-two, the interior is preserved as he left it in 1977 and is a museum of mid-seventies taste, and the tour is done on an iPad with headphones and takes about three hours with the aircraft and the car museum across the road. He is buried in the garden with his parents and his grandmother.

Stax is a few miles back towards town, a reconstruction of the label's studio on the site of the cinema it occupied, where an integrated house band recorded Otis Redding, Booker T, Isaac Hayes and Sam and Dave through the sixties in a city that was still segregated outside the door.

Then the National Civil Rights Museum, built around the Lorraine Motel. Rooms 306 and 307 and the balcony outside them are preserved exactly as they were on 4 April 1968, and you reach them at the end of a long chronological exhibition that starts with the slave trade. Allow three hours and do not plan anything afterwards.

Dinner somewhere quiet, and an early night.

Ninety minutes south on Highway 61 and the landscape empties out completely: cotton and soybean to the horizon, grain elevators, and towns of a few hundred people with the shops shut.

Clarksdale is the capital of this and it is a small, poor, half-empty town that happens to be the most important place in the history of American popular music. Muddy Waters was recorded on a plantation a few miles from here in 1941 by a folklorist from the Library of Congress. John Lee Hooker, Sam Cooke and Ike Turner were all born in this county.

The Delta Blues Museum is in the old railway depot and holds the cabin Muddy Waters grew up in, moved here and reassembled, along with guitars, photographs and a great deal of context. An hour and a half.

The Crossroads, where highways 61 and 49 meet, is where Robert Johnson is supposed to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for the ability to play. There is a sign with three guitars on it in the middle of a road junction and it is completely underwhelming, which is somehow correct.

Then the evening, which is the entire reason to be here. Two or three juke joints in town have bands on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday: a converted warehouse with a stage at one end, and a genuine old room with a tin roof and mismatched furniture where the cover is fifteen dollars and the music does not start until late.

The one real day of driving: 470 kilometres, about five hours, south through Mississippi on Highway 61 and the interstate. Break it at Vicksburg for the Civil War siege lines or at Natchez for the antebellum houses, both of which are on the river and roughly halfway.

Arrive in New Orleans in the late afternoon and drop the car, because you will not want it again. Then walk into the Quarter, which is about a dozen blocks by six, with wrought iron galleries over the pavements and a cathedral on a square facing the river.

Go to Jackson Square first, in the last of the light, when there is usually a brass band on the Decatur Street side playing for whoever stops. Cross the road for coffee and beignets afterwards, eat early, and then queue for the one thing tonight that starts at a fixed time.

Preservation Hall was opened in 1961 to keep traditional New Orleans jazz being played by the people who had played it all along, and the room has barely changed since: no bar, no toilets, no amplification, a band a few feet in front of you and forty-five minutes of it. It is the single most direct connection to the beginning of this music that exists anywhere on this route.

The morning belongs to the ground this music actually came from, and it is five minutes from where you slept.

St Louis Cemetery No 1 opened in 1789 and is the oldest surviving one in the city. The tombs stand above ground because the water table is barely a metre down, so the dead are laid in stone ovens that bake in the sun and are reused by the same family for generations. Marie Laveau is entombed here. Access is by licensed guide only and the tours nearly all go early, which is worth knowing before you turn up at the gate at noon.

Then Congo Square, inside what is now Armstrong Park. Under French and Spanish rule, enslaved people were permitted to gather here on Sunday afternoons to trade, drum and dance, and the rhythms that survived that are the root of everything you have been listening to for a week. There is almost nothing to look at. Stand there anyway.

Tremé around it was the first neighbourhood in the country where free Black people owned property in numbers. The small museum on Henriette Delille Street holds the Mardi Gras Indian suits, hand-beaded over a year and worn for a single day, and the people who run it will talk you through all of it.

In the afternoon, walk downriver to the old Mint at the bottom of Esplanade. Coins have not been struck in it for a very long time and the upper floor is now the city's jazz museum: Louis Armstrong's first cornet is in it, and so is a good account of how a marching-band tradition and a Sunday drum circle turned into a music the rest of the world copied.

Today is the streetcar, and the ride is half of it. The St Charles line has been running this route since the 1830s and is the oldest street railway still working anywhere; the cars are wooden and from 1923, the windows go up rather than the air conditioning going on, and the route runs out past the mansions of the American quarter with live oaks meeting overhead.

Get off in the Garden District first, where the Americans built after the Louisiana Purchase at a polite distance from the Creole city. The cemetery in the middle of it is another town of above-ground tombs, smaller and greener than the one downtown, and it has spent long stretches closed for restoration, so check before you plan the morning around it.

Lunch on Magazine Street, six miles of shops and restaurants running parallel to the river and the least touristy strip a visitor is likely to reach. Then carry on uptown to the zoo at the top of it, which is genuinely good and has the white alligators, or stay on Magazine and walk it.

A drink at dusk on the porch of the old mansion on St Charles, with the streetcar going past the front steps, and then the last night of the trip in the one Uptown room everybody names. Tipitina's is a corner bar with a stage in it about a mile off the streetcar line, it is where the Neville Brothers and the piano tradition that runs from Professor Longhair down to today actually played, and the calendar is worth checking against your dates before you book anything else about this trip.

The last morning goes out to City Park, which is larger than Central Park and has stands of live oak in it that were mature trees when the city was founded.

The art museum sits at the head of the main avenue, strong on French and Latin American painting, with a sculpture garden behind it that is free and spread through the trees along a lagoon. An hour in each is a good last morning, and the garden alone is worth the trip if the museum is shut.

Then a coffee and something fried in sugar, which is the correct way to leave this city, and the airport, which is forty minutes west.