¹ “What makes Dixie,” in Stephen Fry in America, dir. John Paul Davidson and Michael Waldman, first broadcast 2008 (BBC) (WestPark Pictures, BBC DVD, 2008); The Mighty Mississippi: With Trevor McDonald, first broadcast 2012 (ITV) (Channel 4 DVD, 2012); Jamie's American Road Trip, dir. Kirsty Cunningham and Tom Coveney, first broadcast 2009 (Channel 4) (Channel 4 DVD, 2009); Rick Stein Tastes the Blues, dir. David Pritchard (BBC Four 2011), accessed 27 May 2014; “Hugh Laurie: Down by the River,” ITV Perspectives, dir. John-Paul Davidson (ITV, 2011), accessed 15 May 2011; Rich Hall's The Dirty South, dir. Chris Cottam, first broadcast on BBC Four 2010 (BBC, 2010), accessed BBC iPlayer, Oct. 2011; Reginald D. Hunter's Songs of the South, dir. Ben Whalley, first broadcast February–March 2015 (BBC 2); Great American Railroad Journeys, BBC2 (2016), at www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07mdvbd.

² The term “televisual” is borrowed from Thomas, Lynnell L., “‘People Want to See What Happened’: Treme, Televisual Tourism, and the Racial Remapping of Post-Katrina New Orleans,” Television & New Media, 13, 12 (May 2012), 213–24Google Scholar.

³ Paul Gilroy, “Race and Racism in ‘The Age of Obama,’” The Tenth Annual Eccles Centre for American Studies Plenary Lecture given at the British Association of American Studies Annual Conference (2013), at www.bl.uk/eccles/pdf/baas2013.pdf, accessed 14 Feb. 2016, 11:23, 2.

⁴ McPherson, Tara, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (London: Duke University Press), 3Google Scholar.

⁵ Ward, Brian et al. , ‘What's New in Southern Studies – And Why Should We Care?’ Journal of American Studies, 48, 3 (Aug. 2014), 691–733, 691CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Ibid., 691–733.

⁷ For instance, Brundage's, W. Fitzhugh edited collection Where the Memories Grow: History, Memory and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar focusses on how people from the South think about their past, and the way the reproductions of collective memories work to produce southern identities. Exploring this from a racial perspective, James C. Cobb sought to deconstruct ideas of southern identity by demonstrating the problematic nature of essentialist discourses that group together diverse cultural and geographical heritages. In Away Down South (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)Google Scholar, Cobb examines variations in racial constructed notions of “southerness,” and how these point to fractures in common ideas of a shared history and identity. See also Taylor, Helen and King, Richard H., Dixie Debates: Notes on Southern Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

⁸ Cox, Karen L., Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 2–4Google Scholar. Cox also accounts for the fact that, paradoxically, tourism represents one of the main ways the region has modernized, entering the consumer-driven system of American capitalism while maintaining seemingly “authentic” characteristics of its history and identity.

⁹ Taylor, Helen, Circling Dixie: Contemporary Southern Culture through a Transatlantic Lens (London: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 24Google Scholar. Influenced by discourses of hybridity in Paul Gilroy's “black Atlantic” and Joseph Roach's “circum-Atlantic world,” where cultures transcend physical borders, approaches to the deconstruction of southern exceptionalism have been underpinned by the belief that placing the region within a more hemispheric context could act as a “template” for new interpretations; see also Peacock, James L., Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Ward, 728, argues that in the desire to examine the regions within a more global context, it is important for studies to remain based in the physical South.

¹¹ Viewing figures provided by the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, at www.barb.co.uk, accessed 9 March 2016, 11:15, do not take into account viewings through “catch-up” or “on-demand” services; in the same week that Stephen Fry's first episode on the South was shown, the highest BBC ratings were on the Saturday evening, reaching 9.95 million for Strictly Come Dancing; The Mighty Mississippi and Jamie's American Road Trip were also relatively successful, attracting audiences of just under 3 and 2.6 million respectively; viewing figures for the one-episode programmes by Stein and Laurie were not in the top 30 for the weeks they aired, and probably under one million viewers. Both Stephen Fry in America and Jamie's American Road Trip were both accompanied by books by the same name and became available on DVD; The Mighty Mississippi was followed by a DVD and also aired in the US on KPBS in 2013, at www.kpbs.org/news/2013/jul/15/mighty-mississippi-trevor-mcdonald, accessed 10 March 2016, 17:33.

¹² “Deep South,” episode 2 of Stephen Fry in America; “New Orleans,” episode 1 of The Mighty Mississippi.

¹³ Beck, John, Franzen, Wendy, and Randall, Aaron, Southern Culture: An Introduction, 3rd edn (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2012), 177Google Scholar; between 2000 and 2008, Hispanics were the fastest-growing population in every southern state.

¹⁴ Taylor, 11.

¹⁵ Schama, Simon, “Television and the Trouble with History,” in Cannadine, David, ed., History and the Media (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 20–33, 23Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Anderson, Steve, “History TV and Popular Memory,” in Edgerton, Gary R. and Rollins, Peter C. eds., Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 19–36, 20Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Schama, 25.

¹⁸ See, for instance, Hall, Stuart, Evans, Jessica, and Nixon, Sean, Representation, 2nd edn (Milton Keynes: The Open University, 2003)Google ScholarPubMed.

¹⁹ ‘Alan Whicker,’ BFI Screenonline: People, atr www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/531470/index.html, accessed 3 March 2016, 11:20; Michael Palin presented a number of travel documentaries on British television from 1989 onwards, Around the World in 80 Days being the first six-part series, at www.palinstravels.co.uk, accessed 3 March 2016, 11:30.

²⁰ Historic viewing figures from “TV in the 1950s,” BFI Screenonline, at www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/1321302, accessed 22 July 2016.

²¹ American folk blues festivals in O'Connell, Christian, Blues, How Do You Do? Paul Oliver and the Transatlantic Story of the Blues (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 98, 138CrossRefGoogle Scholar; quote from Big Bill Broonzy, who visited the UK for the first time in 1951, from Riesman, Bob, I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 165CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² Ward, Brian, “Images of the American South in 1950s British Popular Music,” in Ward, Joseph P., ed., Britain and the American South: From Colonialism to Rock and Roll (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 187–214, 189Google Scholar.

²³ Chris Long, “Muddy Waters and Sister Rosetta Tharpe's ‘mind-blowing’ station show,” BBC News, 7 May 2014, at www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-27256401, accessed 25 Feb. 2015, 14:31.

²⁴ “Black and White Minstrels creator dies,” The Guardian, 29 Aug. 2002, at www.theguardian.com/media/2002/aug/29/broadcasting2, accessed 18 Feb. 2015, 11:05; “Robert Luff,” The Telegraph, 23 February 2009, at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/4788794/Robert-Luff.html, accessed 18 Feb. 2015, 11:08. The show was even accompanied by a popular live stage show that toured Australia and New Zealand in the 1960s.

²⁵ Frank J. Prial, “Alistair Cooke, Elegant Interpreter of America, Dies at 95,” New York Times, 31 March 2004, at www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/arts/alistair-cooke-elegant-interpreter-of-america-dies-at-95.html?_r=0, accessed 25 Feb. 2016, 16:33; “Alistair Cooke,” The Economist, 1 April 2004, at www.economist.com/node/2552913, accessed 25 Feb. 2016, 16:36.

²⁶ Alistair Cooke's America: A Personal History of the United States (London: BBC Worldwide Ltd, 2004) (DVD)Google Scholar.

²⁷ McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie, 15: McPherson comments on the rise in capital investment in the region and the arrival of large transnational corporations due to tax incentives, and the fact that six of America's fastest-growing cities of the 1990s were in the South; Cobb, Away Down South, 263–64, comments on the trend of inward migration of African Americans from 1970 onwards, where black population grew by 3.6 million in 1990s, so that by the year 2000 one-tenth of African Americans in the region were newcomers.

²⁸ C. Vann Woodward, “Rednecks, Millionaires, and Catfish Farms,” New York Times, 5 Feb. 1989, at www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/07/specials/naipaul-south.html, accessed 20 March 2017; Woodward also comments that by the middle of the twentieth century there were already more than 600 travel writings on the South.

²⁹ Younge, Gary, No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey through the American South (London: Picador, 1999), 24Google Scholar.

³⁰ See, for instance, Karen L. Cox's analysis of tourism during the early twentieth century and the representation of the South on film, Dreaming of Dixie.

³¹ Younge, 19. While reflecting on a deeply personal affiliation with the region, Younge also notes how “America's icons have a habit of becoming Britain's,” highlighting how Alison Landsberg's concept of “prosthetic memory” – the way mass media can function to create meaningful affiliations between individuals and distant histories and cultures – can be useful in helping to explain to the transatlantic interest and cultural investment in the American South. See Landsberg, Alison, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

³² Peter Walker, “The World Reacts to the new US President,” The Guardian, 5 Nov. 2008, at www.theguardian.com/world/2008/nov/05/barackobama-uselections2008, accessed 14 Feb. 2016, 11:16.

³³ Gilroy, “Race and Racism,” 2.

³⁴ “Deep South”, episode 2 of Stephen Fry in America. Fry also meets Anita Prather in South Carolina, who explains how her Gullah culture is a hybrid of West African, Native American and Europeans cultures. She also explains how she is not offended by the Confederate flag, as it represents part of the region's heritage, once again hinting that racial divides are not as relevant in the present day.

³⁵ “New Orleans,” episode 1 of The Mighty Mississippi.

³⁶ “Memphis,” episode 2 of The Mighty Mississippi.

³⁷ McDonald's approach stands in contrast to that of Trinidadian-born author V. S. Naipaul in A Turn in the South. Despite his seemingly ‘objective’ approach, Naipaul – who grew up in the Caribbean – comments on his affiliation with the plantation culture and heritage of “the old slave states of the American South” as a fitting reason for undertaking the book. See Naipaul, V. S., A Turn in the South (Basingstoke and Oxford: Pan Macmillan, 2012; first published 1989), 25Google Scholar; “Kentucky & Tennessee,” episode 1 of Reginald D. Hunter's Songs of the South.

³⁸ “Memphis,” episode 2 of The Mighty Mississippi.

³⁹ Cox, 288.

⁴⁰ Rick Stein Tastes the Blues. The American chef and celebrity Anthony Bourdain also visits the Senator's Place in season 3, episode 6 of his series Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown (CNN, 2014), which displays many similar characteristics to the British documentaries that essentialize the Mississippi delta as a place “off the beaten track.”

⁴¹ “Black and White Students Learning Together: A Dying Dream?” Channel 4 News, 24 May 2014, at www.channel4.com/news/us-schools-desegregation-apartheid-alabama-black-white-students, accessed 25 May 2014.

⁴² Goulda, Kenneth A. and Lewis, Tammy L., “Viewing the Wreckage: Eco-disaster Tourism in the Wake of Katrina,” Societies without Borders, 2, 2 (June 2007), 75–97Google Scholar; a criticism of the tours was also present in HBO's Treme episode “Right Place, Wrong Time” (series 1, episode 3, 2010), in which offended local residents angrily tell a “Katrina Tour” bus to move on.

⁴³ “Mississippi,” episode 3 of Stephen Fry in America; West made the comments live on NBC's televised Concert for Hurricane Relief on 2 September 2005, in King, C. Richard, “George Bush May Not Like Black People, but No One Gives a Dam [sic] about Indigenous Peoples: Visibility and Indianness after the Hurricanes,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 32, 2 (2008), 35–42, 35Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ “Hugh Laurie: Down by the River.”

⁴⁵ Thomas, Lynell L., “New Orleans Revisited: Notes on a Native Daughter,” Black Scholar, 45, 3 (2015), 3–9, 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁶ The Italian intellectual Umberto Eco commented how New Orleans, unlike many other Americans cities, shapes the experience of visitors with a more authentic ability to convey its history: “New Orleans is not in the grip of a neurosis of a denied past; it passes out memories generously like a great lord; it does not have to pursue ‘the real thing’.” Eco, Umberto, “Travels in Hyperreality,” in Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays. Translated from the Italian by William Weaver (London: Picador, 1986), 1–58, 30Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ “Georgia,” Jamie's American Road Trip. It is not unrealistic to suggest that the producers were looking to directly antagonize or get controversial responses for dramatic effect. In an interview on Irish television for RTE's Late Late Show, Reginald D. Hunter told of a scene which was ultimately excluded from his series, where his producers insisted that he attend a Civil War re-enactment dressed as a Confederate general. Hunter and the film crew were subsequently told to leave the reenactment very quickly due to the tension created. The Late Late Show, 11 March 2016, at www.rte.ie/tv/latelate/20160311.html, accessed 20 July 2007.

⁴⁸ The festival is one of the largest of its kind in the south east of the United States. See http://lakelandpigfest.org.

⁴⁹ “Mission” of the Southern Foodways Alliance, at www.southernfoodways.org/about-us, accessed 21 April 2017; see Stanonis, Anthony J., “‘Just Like My Mammy Used to Make’: Foodways in the Jim Crow South,” in Stanonis, ed., Dixie Emporium: Tourism, Foodways, and Consumer Culture in the American South (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 208–33Google Scholar; on similarity to the Southern Foodways Alliance see Ferris, Marcy Cohen, “History, Place, and Power: Studying Southern Food,” Southern Cultures, 21, 1 (Spring 2015), 2–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ferris states, “Contrast and contradiction is what the South – and, thus, its food cultures – is all about. Southern food reflects the abundance, beauty, and richness of southern culture, but also the dark underside of slavery and racial disfranchisement.” Latshaw, Beth A., “Food for Thought: Race, Region, Identity, and Foodways in the American South,” Southern Cultures, 15, 4 (Winter 2009), 106–28Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ The first KFC opened in Preston in May 1965, and by the mid-1970s there were over 250 restaurants across the UK. Barry Freeman, “Britain's First Kentucky Fried Chicken Flies the Coop after 49 Years,” Lancashire Post, 4 Dec. 2014, at www.lep.co.uk/lifestyle/nostalgia/britain-s-first-kentucky-fried-chicken-flies-the-coop-after-49-years-1-6987614, accessed 22 April 2017; for recent surge in popularity of southern-style food in UK see Mollie Goodfellow, “London's Best Southern Soul Food,” Evening Standard, 10 Jan. 2014, at www.standard.co.uk/goingout/restaurants/londons-best-southern-soul-food-9051583.html, accessed 26 April 2017; Katy Salter, “Pulled Pork: Why We're Pigging Out on US Barbecue Food,” The Guardian, 6 Nov. 2014, at www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/nov/06/pulled-pork-us-barbecue-food-has-craze-peaked, accessed 26 April 2017.

⁵¹ “Agent of memory” in Stanonis, 209.

⁵² “Mississippi and Louisiana,” episode 3 of Reginald D. Hunter's Songs of the South; King, Stephen A., “Blues Tourism in the Mississippi Delta: The Functions of Blues Festivals,” Popular Music and Society, 27, 4 (2004), 455–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵³ Rick Stein's documentary is also mentioned directly on the Deep South USA website and referred to as a “pilgrimage,” perhaps to be shown as a model for a potential “blues tour” of Mississippi. See www.deep-south-usa.com/newsletters/352-rick-stein-tastes-the-blues-the-deep-south-usa-visitor-information, accessed 13 March 2016, 12:34.

⁵⁴ Interestingly, Clarksdale is also the home of civil rights activist Aaron Henry, although this is not mentioned in any of the travelogues, even when issues relating to the segregation and the civil rights movement are discussed. Ground Zero Blues Club, at www.groundzerobluesclub.com, accessed 6 March 2016, 16:31.

⁵⁵ Ryan, Jennifer, “Beale Street Blues? Tourism, Musical Labor, and the Fetishization of Poverty in Blues Discourse,” Ethnomusicology, 55, 3 (Fall 2011), 473–503, 480CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁶ Hamilton, Marybeth, In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions (London: Random House, 2007), 1Google Scholar. Hamilton writes of her own experiences of visiting locations revered by blues enthusiasts, and discusses how these spaces are dominated by preconceived ideas gathered through the 1960s blues revival, demonstrating Brundage's idea that spaces are “colonized” by preconceived knowledge. Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (London: Harvard University Press, 2005) 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The literature on the romanticism of the blues revival is extensive; in addition to Hamilton see also Wald, Elijah, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the “Invention of the Blues” (New York: Amistad, 2004)Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ “Hugh Laurie: Down by the River.”

⁵⁸ The Shack Up Inn, at www.shackupinn.com/#!ourstory/c161y, accessed 16 July 2016.

⁵⁹ The blues revival of the late 1950s and the 1960s saw the rediscovery of a number of singers and musicians that had recorded during the 1920s and 1930s, but there was also the discovery of a number of previously unrecorded singers. McDowell was found by Alan Lomax on a trip across the South in 1959, whereas British blues scholar Paul Oliver discovered Lipscomb on his first visit to the South in the summer of 1960, and photographs of the singer featured in Conversation with the Blues (1965), in O'Connell, Blues, How Do You Do?, 103, 138.

⁶⁰ O'Connell, Christian, “The Color of the Blues: Considering Revisionist Blues Scholarship,” Southern Cultures, 19, 1 (Spring 2013), 61–81, 61–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Mississippi and Louisiana,” episode 3 of Reginald D. Hunter's Songs of the South; see Bob Stanley, “How Seasick Steve Turned Out to Be Session Man Steve,” The Guardian, 29 Sept. 2016, at www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/sep/29/seasick-steve-session-musician-ramblin-man-book, accessed 28 Jan. 2017.

⁶¹ The musician Jim White presenting the documentary “Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus,” Arena (BBC Two, 2004)Google Scholar, accessed 15 Oct. 2015.

⁶² Fitzhugh-Brundage, The Southern Past, 6.

⁶³ “Richmond to Jamestown,” episode 15 of Great American Railroad Journeys.

⁶⁴ “Deep South,” episode 2 of Stephen Fry in America.

⁶⁵ “Hugh Laurie: Down by the River”; “Memphis,” episode 2 of The Mighty Mississippi; “Deep South,” episode 2 of Stephen Fry in America; “Georgia,” episode 5 of Jamie's American Road Trip.

⁶⁶ Peacock, Grounded Globalism, 249.

⁶⁷ Rick Stein Tastes the Blues.

⁶⁸ “Hugh Laurie: Down by the River.”

⁶⁹ Another interesting factor is how central the Civil War is to the public perception of the American South, but also how experience of historic sites, such as battlefields, shape and define perceptions of the southern past. In his brief travels to discover the “southern spirit” by visiting Virginia and Maryland, Michael Portillo focusses heavily on the Civil War when he visits battle sites such as Manassas, and offers thoughts that are not too dissimilar to the ideas of the Lost Cause: “The American Civil War can be represented as a struggle between good and evil, and there's truth in that. But as soon as you come to the South and stand here you develop an extra perspective. Those young Americans who fought and died here for the Confederacy deserve to be remembered and honoured.” “Manassas to Richmond,” episode 14 of Great American Railroad Journeys, BBC2, 18 Feb. 2016.

⁷⁰ Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, 9–10.

⁷¹ In fact, here Oliver seems to reflect a trend in southern food writing in the US; see Kathleen Purvis, “The Testosterone Takeover of Southern Food Writing,” Bitter Southerner, 16 Feb. 2015, at http://bittersoutherner.com/the-testosterone-takeover-of-southern-food-writing#.VuXW0vkrLIV, accessed 8 March 2016, 17:08; Warnes, Andrew, Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America's First Food (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 4–6Google Scholar.

⁷² “Manassas to Richmond,” episode 14 of Great American Railroad Journeys.

⁷³ The Woodford Reserve Distillery, at www.woodfordreserve.com, accessed 15 Feb. 2016, 14:06; Sir Trevor McDonald, “Rolling on a River: Sir Trevor McDonald Traverses the Mississippi to Discover America's Illustrious Past,” Daily Mail Online, 23 March 2012, at www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2118733/Sir-Trevor-McDonald-traverses-Mississippi-River-discover-Americas-illustrious-past.html, accessed 5 March 2016, 21:28. McDonald calls the swamp “the most primeval place” he'd ever visited; Rick Stein Tastes the Blues; “Mississippi,” episode 3 of Stephen Fry in America.

⁷⁴ McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie, 12.

⁷⁵ “Memphis,” episode 2, The Mighty Mississippi; “Deep South”, episode 2 of Stephen Fry in America.

⁷⁶ Rich Hall's The Dirty South.