This list of 7,250 songs was the base map for what a friend of ours called “the ultimate music road trip.”
We started in April 2014 and set out from Seattle to visit everywhere on our list.
No one has ever done this before and it has either been a test of our endurance or proof of our stupidity! Still not too sure which!
As we travelled around all 1,408 song places we, filmed the locations, songs or people that we felt were the most interesting.
Who are we?
Alice Cooper (yes, that is my real name) is Scottish and Clive is English.
In a desperate desire to have a cool name like Alice's, "Clive" (uncool - more towards warm) has changed into Mr C (probably more tepid than cool but it's in the right direction). In the States he usually gets called Clyde anyway!
With regards to this adventure.....
We were not externally funded, sponsored nor paid for this.
Neither are we musicians - we are not even musical so this was a massive learning experience for us.
We are not involved in the media. We had to learn how to film, edit, build websites and construct video blogs.
We are fun, friendly (well we think so), enthusiastic and determined.
We are the first people ever to have gone everywhere in the USA that is mentioned in a song title!
What did we do when we weren't on the road?
We retired from corporate life in 2010 and became full time house sitters and pet carers. This lifestyle allowed us to combine two of our passions - travel and animals -whilst researching and working on usa2zblog.com
With over 100 house sits on 3 continents we built a stellar reputation as honest, reliable and caring sitters. We recieved outstanding references from every home owner and eventually all of our house sits were repeat bookings. Here's a short video with a few of the comments we have received form home owners...
...We were having a home cooked Mexican meal and just generally talking about how we would really like to, one day, visit all 50 US States.
Just then ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ came on the radio and Charly says“Why don’t you make it more interesting and go everywhere with a place name in a song title?” Immediately - there was an energy, a crackle, a spark that ignited something inside of both of us. First thought was that the chilli was too spicy! However Charly’s suggestion had transformed something that would “be nice to do” to something “we must do.”
That one sentence from Charly redirected the path of our lives.
How long did it take?
After many rears of research we finally had 7,250 songs and 1,408 places to visit(there are lots of songs with the same place in the title). It was abundantly clear that due to visa restrictions we would not be able to complete the journey in one trip to the United States. So we phased it over 4 years.
We started in April 2014, visiting the West Region of the USA which encompasses the Mountain and Pacific divisions including Hawaii and Alaska.
In 2015 we travelled from El Paso on the Mexican border way up north to the Canadian Border at Sault Ste Marie in Michigan and back again. Along the way we drove across the Great Plains and through the entire Midwest heartland.
2016 found us in the South West, the Dixie heartland of the Deep South and the South Atlantic regions.
In 2017 we covered the song places in the New England states plus the eastern seaboard from New York down to South Carolina, officially ending our trip in Manhattan.
However as time went on we discovered a number of songs that we had missed and in 2017 we took time out to visit these places. In doing so we literally travelled from Portland Maine to Portland Oregon to complete our quest!
If we discover that we've missed another song place (which almost certainly we will do) then be assured we'll be back to ‘mop up the gravy’! Well, when you watch a new TV series you have wait a year for the next season - hopefully you'll find our's will be equally worth waiting for!
Update!
One of our followers wrote to say we had missed 2 song places - Black Bear Road and Wolf Creek Pass, both by the legendary C W McCall and both in Colorado. The songs met our criteria for inclusion so in 2023 we visited.
Then in early 2024 we learned that Glen Campbell had recorded a song titled Manhattan which we had assumed was NYC but NOOOOOOO! the song is actually called Manhattan Kansas - guess where we're headed summer 2024......