Beyond Elvis: Tennessee's Country Music Tourists
Graceland, Grand Ole Opry, Marketing the State's Music To Tourists
Oct 18, 2008
Elvis may have left the building, but try telling that to the several hundred thousand visitors who pay homage to the king of rock and roll each year at his historic home, Graceland. For these visitors, the King is nigh, brought to life during audio tours that include his own voice as well as stories and memories of the house from his widow, Priscilla, and daughter, Lisa Marie.
Visiting Graceland, Home of Elvis Presley
“There’s more to Elvis than the man with a jumpsuit,” insists Kevin Kern, media relations manager at Graceland and himself a Memphis native. After the decades of look-alike tributes that visitors have come to associate with Elvis, most are understandably surprised by the house.
“It’s unlike any other historic-homes tour,” Kern says. “It’s a Southern Colonial-style mansion, but like a living breathing time capsule for the era that Elvis lived in the house—shag carpet, wood paneling, Tiffany-style lamps, and avocado green appliances.”
Most Music Tourists to Graceland Never Heard the King Live
Surprisingly, more than half of Graceland’s 700,000 annual visitors are under age 35. “Elvis is such a part of the American fabric, a tremendous part of pop culture, that even if you didn’t grow up with his music, you know instantly who he is.”
And it isn’t just Americans who are fascinated with the King. Kern notes that Graceland sees more international visitors from the UK (33 per cent) than from neighboring Canada (29 per cent). “The overseas market is a tremendously important and growing segment; Elvis is huge across Europe and really catching on in Asia. Memphis is known worldwide as the birthplace of rock and roll and home of the blues.”
Marketing Graceland to Music Tourists
It’s natural that, over the 25 years that Graceland has been open to the public, a synergy has developed between the marketing of Memphis and of Graceland. “We’re the launching pad for music tourism in Memphis,” Kern notes. “There’s no Elvis without Graceland, no rock and roll without Memphis. We are a must-see place for anyone who wants to take a musical journey, and over the past 10 years, Memphis has grown into a three- or four-day destination to see everything from Sun Studio, where Elvis first recorded and was discovered, to Beale St, whose blues bars influenced him, to the Smithsonian’s Rock N Soul Museum.”
Beyond Memphis, Country Music Rules
Outside Memphis, Tennessee is less about rock and roll and more about the vestiges of Scotch-Irish dirges that have come to be known as country music.
“In Tennessee, country music tourism puts bread on our table,” says David Kinney of David Kinney of All In One Destinations, Inc., a tour operator based in Nashville that books country-music themed packages to Tennessee. Kinney’s four-night package for the CMA Music Festival, which bills itself as the world’s biggest country music festival—in 2006, 161,590 people arrived in Nashville to hear performances from 86 country-music acts—is Kinney’s most popular annual package. He finds that group tours often want to visit multiple cities while in Tennessee.
Nashville, Center of Country Music Tourism
It’s not out of pretension that Nashville calls itself Music City USA. “Many people around the world have not only heard of the Grand Ole Opry, but also associate it with Nashville,” says Pete Fisher, vice president and general manager of the Grand Ole Opry and a former music executive at WarnerSongs, Inc. “We kind of go hand in hand.”
He notes that about 35 per cent of the visitors to Nashville are there specifically for the Opry complex, which includes the house, the museum, the Acuff Theater and the Opry Plaza. Fisher estimates that the complex sees some 10,000 visitors a day (state tourism figures, which only factor in the house and museum, put the number much lower).
“Nashville is undeniably the center of country music,” he says, citing the three or four streets lined with record companies and recording studios known as Music Row, the Country Music Hall of Fame, which opened in 2000, the Ryman Auditorium, an erstwhile church that became the Opry headquarters from 1943 to 1974, and the honkytonks of Lower Broadway—essentially, the opportunity to hear live country music almost 24 hours a day.
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