Renowned pianist Jools Holland drives from Clarksdale to Memphis replicating the journey which so many musicians have made before him. Once in the Bluff City- arguably the most important music town in the world – he visits the project housing where Elvis Presley lived as a teenager and where he first played in public and goes to Aretha Franklin’s birthplace, situated in an area of tremendous urban deprivation which is gaining a new life through music.

At the renowned Royal Studios where Al Green recorded all his classics and where Bruno Mars made Uptown Funk, Jools meets owner Boo Mitchell, adds his own distinctive stylings to a new EDM track and records a version of Memphis’ oldest song with the North Mississippi Allstars.

Finally he visits – and plays with - the high school students at the Stax Academy who are making their way in the world today but schooled under the shadow of Otis Redding, Booker T and The MGs and the legendary Stax soul label.

(Photo: The Stax Museum of American Soul Music. Credit: Mark Hagen/BBC) Show less