February 15, 2009 Cincinnati, OH; Louisville, KY

Tucker's Restaurant was in a rough-and-tumble 'hood called Over The Rhine, and the endless blocks of vacant board-ups was anything but reassuring as I parked my car on a nearby side street and walked to the restaurant. Inside, though, the place was a bustle of activity, with yuppies and street entrepreneurs alike starting a bright, blue Sunday morning with coffee, bacon, eggs and pancakes. After breakfast, I got in touch with Abdullah, who agreed to meet me at Sitwell's Coffee Bar near the University of Cincinnati campus. Always a fan of Edith Sitwell's Facade, I was somewhat amazed and thrilled to be sitting in a coffeehouse named for her. Abdullah met me there with another partner of his, and we hung out there talking for awhile, and then I headed over to Shake It Records again, where I bought the Jamie Liddell album that contained the song I had heard the night before in Rookwood Pavilion, and a King Records retrospective CD. The weather was anything but pretty when I headed out from Cincinnati toward Louisville, but the trip only took and hour and a half. I checked into the Hampton Inn where my room was, and then walked a couple of blocks down to the conference, which was being held at a nightclub. After the panel discussion I was on had ended, I drove across the bridge to Jeffersonville, Indiana to the Longhorn Steakhouse for a late dinner, and then stopped by the Highland Coffee Company on Bardstown Road for a coffee before heading back to the room.

February 14, 2009 Cincinnati, OH

Drove up to Cincinnati on Saturday morning to spend a day there before the Kymp Kamp Music Conference in Louisville the next day. The drive up was relatively uneventful except for the twisted, broken trees everywhere caused by the recent ice storm. It was already dark when I got to Covington, Kentucky and I drove straight up to Shake It Records on the Northside of Cincinnati, but they were having an instore concert, and the store was so crowded that it was hard to move. Back at my car in the parking lot, I used my iPhone to call restaurants, but with it being Valentine's Day, everyone was on a long wait. I finally found a restaurant called Rookwood Pavilion, which was up on Mount Adams east of downtown, and they told me that there wouldn't be a wait, so I drove over there as quickly as I could, and found that the restaurant was in an old pottery kiln with a view of the river to the south and downtown to the west. Inside, futuristic dance music was playing, and some of the tables were inside the old brick kilns. I had a strip steak with frites, relaxing while some sort of cool neo-soul was playing overhead. I pulled out my iPhone to capture it with Shazam, and found that it was a song by an artist I'd never heard of named Jamie Liddell. After dinner, I had called Abdullah, my friend from Elementz Hip Hop Youth Center in Cincinnati, but he was about to take a friend out to eat, so we agreed to meet up the next day, and I headed downtown to the Blue Wisp Jazz Club, where there was live music going on. After midnight, I drove out to the Holiday Inn in Sharonville where I had reservations and checked in.

November 14, 2008 Winston-Salem, NC; Greensboro, NC; Charlotte, NC

It was another grey and rainy day, and after checking out of the hotel, I drove down to a breakfast cafe near the hospitals, and then started my day of work. To my surprise, I discovered that The Record Exchange in Winston-Salem was still open, even though I had thought all of the stores had closed. I was informed that a couple of them had become part of the Plan 9 chain based in Virginia. After a mid-morning break for a latte at Cafe Prada west of downtown, I headed over into the hood on the east side of Winston-Salem where there was supposed to be a record store called Miss Lady's Creations. I found that it had closed down, so I left the promotional materials with a hip-hop clothing store in the same shopping center, and then I drove to Greensboro. On the westside near the airport was a store called Hood Locker, and after I visited there, I drove across to a Biscuitville restaurant for a chicken biscuit. The manager there was from Germantown, Tennessee, and his brother had been best friends with Tim Auvenshine, the Select-O-Hits sales rep who passed away a couple of years ago. It really is a small world. The rain was much heavier now as I made my way to two other Hood Locker locations which sold both clothing and music. Then I headed downtown where there was a new record store called Da Beat Music, but although the lights were on and the music playing inside, the doors were locked, and knocking didn't bring anyone to the door. So I ran across the street in the rain to a coffee bar and enjoyed another latte before beginning the drive down I-85 toward Charlotte. I had not known that there were panels scheduled for Friday at the Mid-Atlantic Music Conference, so when I first arrived in Charlotte, I had stopped by EZ Records in Eastland Mall. Then I got a call from Kysii Ingram asking me where I was, so I rushed to the Crowne Plaza hotel and checked in, but I soon found that the conference events weren't being held at the hotel, but I a place called the Imaginarium a few blocks away. I managed to make it into the opening panel before it was over, and afterwards I and a couple of the other panelists decided to go to dinner. There was supposed to be a Saltgrass Steakhouse out at Pineville, but when we drove out there, we found it closed and abandoned, so we had to settle for Longhorn Steakhouse instead, which was decent. Afterwards, I had a hard time finding any coffee bar open after 10 PM even though it was Friday. I finally found one in the area just below downtown off of South Boulevard, and even they closed at 10:30, but I managed to make it there before they closed. Then a frightful storm came up, so although it was past closing time, we all stayed there for awhile until the rain let up enough to leave. All the jazz clubs in Charlotte seemed to have gone out of business, so I went back to the hotel and to bed.

November 13, 2008 Chapel Hill, NC; Durham, NC; Raleigh, NC; Winston-Salem, NC

The morning was grey and overcast, and it had been raining, but it wasn't at the time I checked out of the hotel. There was a restaurant called the 501 Diner down the road from the hotel, and I ate breakfast there, and then drove on into the downtown area of Chapel Hill, which somewhat reminded me of Bloomington, Indiana. The CD Alley store that I needed to visit wasn't open yet, so I drove further down the street into Carrboro, where there was a cool used book store, and there I purchased several books by Bertolt Brecht. There was a coffee house across the street from the bookshop, so I stopped there for a latte, and by then CD Alley was open. Next door to the record shop was a Marxist-Socialist-Anarchist bookstore called Internationalist Books, and in there I found a book that I had been looking for about the Wilmington Ten case. The other music store in Chapel Hill, Back Door Music, turned out to be used only, and the rain had picked up somewhat when I visited there. I then drove on to Durham, first to Bull City Records, which proved to be a vinyl only store, and then to Offbeat Music, which is one of the best record stores I had ever been in. The store was located in Brightleaf Square, former Liggett & Myers tobacco warehouses that had been turned into a collection of hip boutiques, shops and bistros. The store was full of used classical and jazz CDs, as well as great imports, and it was all I could do to keep from spending all my money there. A Brazilian bistro across the courtyard had good espresso and gelato, and then I drove on over to Raleigh, with the rain even heavier. I stopped at Schoolkids Records near the North Carolina State campus, as well as a coffee bar and two used record/bookstores, and then I drove through downtown over to the eastside, where there was a store called Mr. Freeze's, not far from a housing project. Further out on the northeast side was a store called Big Katt Records, and once I had left some promotional things there, I headed eastward toward Greensboro and Winston_salem, making a brief detour into Burlington to stop at Keith's CDs & Tapes. Finding a decent place to eat dinner proved to be far more difficult than I had imagined. I passed on through Greensboro into Winston-Salem and got checked into my suite at the Residence Inn. I then decided to eat dinner at The Loop Pizza Grill, which was outstanding, and then I drove downtown looking for live jazz or at least a coffee bar. Winston-Salem's downtown was dead, looking like it had experienced a half-renaissance that died aborning. Few places were open, although I did find a coffee bar, but, by the time I located a jazz event (in Greensboro) it was too late to go back over there. I finally drove back to my hotel and went to bed.

November 12, 2008 Charleston, SC; Wilmington, NC; Durham, NC; Chapel Hill, NC

A grey and overcast day, although the sun began to come out later in the morning. The hotel staff had recommended a breakfast place called the Bear-E-Patch, so I ate there before I made the rounds of record stores. Monster Music and Movies is owned by the same Nashville firm that owns Pop Tunes in Memphis, but this store was nearly a block long and full of music. I noticed a new CD from the Numero group that featured the Young Disciples from East St. Louis, a group that had been formed as part of an anti-poverty program in the 1960's, so I bought that, a new funk compilation from Soul Patrol and the new Mercury Rev CD. The girl that was working at Monster recommended that I head over to the Cat's Music on Folly Road, but when I got there, they refused the promotional items and told me that they were closing down the store. After walking around the harbor and taking pictures, I drove out to Loco Record Shop, and then back downtown to King Street, where there were a couple of stores. 52.5 was mostly a rock store, but there were a few jazz and rock items, and down the street was an old and intriguing store called Honest John's Records and TV Repair. On the shelves were plenty of old LPs and a handful of old 45s, but I didn't have time to look through them. Instead, wanting coffee, I used my iPhone to locate a place called Kudu Coffee, which was just across from the campus of the College of Charleston. In keeping with the name, the coffee house was decorated with African artifacts and artwork, and the coffee was very good. Driving further south on King, I ultimately came to the Battery, the wooded park at the tip of the peninsula featuring monuments, cannons, statues and stately mansions. Despite the wind, it was warm enough to walk around, and I took a lot of pictures, but it was much later in the day than I had intended, so at 3 PM, I headed across the Septima Clark Bridge onto Highway 17 for the drive to Wilmington. I had driven this route in reverse a month before, going from Myrtle Beach to Charleston, but today the trip seemed to take forever, made worse by the traffic signals and endless snarls in Myrtle Beach. Once I crossed into North Carolina, I was still much further away from Wilmington than I had imagined, and by the time I arrived there, it was pitch black. I approached Wilmington with some foreboding. From my reading, Wilmington had always been a place of riots and racial tension, the scene of the Wilmington Ten incident, so I half expected to see an old and decrepit port city of deteriorating buildings and was quite surprised to see the charming downtown with its restored buildings lit up for Christmas. Christmas choral music was drifting across the chilly night air (whether live or a tape I could never determine), and the threat of rain seemed imminent. After leaving some posters at CD Alley, I decided to walk around the corner to Port City Java for some coffee, but across the street I noticed an antiquarian bookshop, so I ducked in there and ended up buying several books about the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Then I ran back across to the coffee bar for a latte to go, and then drove eastward from downtown. What my iPhone thought was a record store in a Black neighborhood east of downtown was actually a recording studio, but fortunately, that put me closer to Gravity Records, an indie rock store that nonetheless was thrilled to get some Pastor Troy promotional items. In the store they were playing a disc by a British singer named Richard Hawley, whom I had never heard of, but whose mournful, melodic tunefulness seemed to fit the dark, foggy, chilly night. The guys at the store warned me that the trip to Raleigh on I-40 would take about 2 hours through rural lands of absolutely nothing, and they weren't far from right. I was ravenously hungry, but the exits along the way either featured nothing or fast food. Raleigh seemed to be a place of feast or famine, with very expensive upscale restaurants and the usual diners and fast food, but little in-between. A promising-sounding steakhouse proved to be out of business, and another proved to be $30 and up for entrees. Finally, I discovered a mall in Durham where there was a Cheesecake Factory, and I stopped there, but, noticing a Champps Americana across the walkway from the Cheesecake Factory, I decided to eat there, thinking that it would be cheaper than Cheesecake Factory. It wasn't, and the food, while basically good, didn't stand out. After a dessert and coffee at the Cheesecake Factory, I drove another few miles into Chapel Hill, and had no problem finding the Sheraton Hotel. My room proved to be very luxurious indeed, and I went straight to bed.

November 11, 2008 Augusta, GA; Columbia, SC; Sumter, SC; Charleston, SC

A cool but sunny day. I went to breakfast at the Veranda Room of the Partridge Inn, a historic restored hotel near the famous golf club where the Masters is held every year. The view from the restaurant was great, but the food was average and overpriced. The rest of the morning was spent going around to a number of record shops and hip-hop clothing stores, after which I went downtown briefly in order to take some photos of the skyline and the fountain at the foot of James Brown Boulevard. I made a brief stop at the Jury Room Coffee House across from City Hall, but, as they didn't have any espresso drinks, I had only a gelato there, and then headed over to the Aroma Coffee and Wine Bar for a latte before I hit the road toward Columbia. There were several record stores in Columbia, and they were scattered across the city, and, as it was late in the day, it was getting dark, but I managed to visit all three of them, and then I continued on to Sumter. There I left posters at the Music Gator, but I found the other store closed for the evening, and now I headed southwards toward I-95. Thoroughly hungry, but wanting to eat in Charleston, I made my way into the city, and having called to make sure that restaurants would still be open, I headed across the massive Septima Clark Bridge into Mount Pleasant, where there were several waterfront restaurants along Shem Creek. I chose a seafood restaurant called JB's, which was built with a view of the water, and I ate dinner there, although it was extremely cold both inside the restaurant and outdoors. After dinner, I resisted an impulse to go to Red's next door where a band was playing, and instead, I drove down King Street to Market Square and a dessert cafe called Kaminsky's, which I knew was open until 2 AM. I had a slice of chocolate peanut butter pie and a cup of coffee there, and then, with no information about any jazz clubs, I drove into West Ashley and checked into the hotel there. It was quite cold, but I managed to get my room warm and comfortable.

November 10, 2008 Mountain Brook, AL; Augusta, GA

First day of my Select-O-Hits sponsored trip across the Carolinas promoting the new Pastor Troy album T.R.O.Y. At Birmingham, I drove into Mountain Brook to a pizza place called Bongiorno for lunch (okay but not outstanding). Mountain Brook, a "new town" which had apparently been built in the 1920's or 1930's, was primarily residential, but with three central "villages" that housed cafes and other businesses. I managed to pass though Atlanta with little difficulty, but it was getting dark earlier these days, and colder as well, especially at Augusta. The rappers V-Tec and Hill met me at the T-Bonez steakhouse in Augusta for dinner, and then I drove downtown to the Metro Coffeehouse for a latte before heading out to Club 360 near Barton Village, which was supposedly having an event. There were a few cars there and a radio station van out front, but I changed my mind about going inside (I was really tired), and headed back to my room at the Courtyard hotel.