A journey across the US in song

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The famous lyrics of US songs that have seeped into popular culture may fool us into thinking we understand the country but, as Kevin Connolly explains, discovering the real America is a very different experience.

We half-know America before we ever come to know it at all, as though it were a tune carried in snatches towards Europe on the gusting Atlantic winds.

A song about a yearning to reach Amarillo does not mean much to people who are already there I knew that years before I could have put it into words, when I auditioned for a school choir with a warbling, soprano version of Makin' Whoopee.

In it, I ran through the hazards of booze-fuelled adultery and the agonies of alimony as they appeared to a boy of eight.

Something in the faces of the listening nuns told me that, while I may have rubbed shoulders with the tune, and been on nodding terms with most of the words, there were cultural sub-currents I had not entirely grasped.

Long before I came here, and actually ate in a neon-edged diner, where everything tasted of the oil it was cooked in, and the oil tasted of everything that was ever cooked in it, I had seen hundreds of them in the movies.

Massive cocktails

I was expecting my cocktails to come in glasses the size of fire buckets. I knew they would be served with more ice than we would use to pack transplant tissue, and come garnished with paper umbrellas the size of real ones.

But often, that half-understood America of popular culture is an unreliable guide to the real country, as you discover when you visit Fargo, North Dakota, which you will find between the big skies and unreachably distant horizons of the Great Plains.

You might remember it as the title of a blackly humorous film a few years back.

Except as every taxi-driver, farmer and politician there will tell you, Fargo is not really set in Fargo, the film-makers just liked the feel of the word.

Road to Amarillo

You find something similar in Amarillo, the city that perches high in the thin air above the baking wilderness of the Texas panhandle.

It is, of course, internationally known as the setting for that pop song which somehow manages to combine thumping urgency and wistful longing.

I ate in a restaurant there, where a western-swing trio wandered from table to table, offering to play any song you cared to request.

When I asked for Amarillo, there was a moment of slightly awkward silence.

They had heard of the song, of course, heard good things about it too, but they did not actually know it.

And of course, when you think about it, they would not, a song about a yearning to reach Amarillo does not mean much to people who are already there.

There is just something in the cocktail of experiences that forged American place-names, that gives them a pleasing romantic resonance, ripe for poetry.

Last Train to Clarksville, now that's a song title suffused with unexpressed longing and regret

The languages of the original inhabitants give you Wichita and Muskogee.

The boundless optimism of the settler adds names like Gigantic City, which is a small town in New Jersey.

The vagaries of frontier life bring you such oddities as Hippo, Ding-Dong and Muleshoe.

But of course the place names are merely the raw material.

It is the American genius for the poetry of everyday language which lends so many towns here an immediate global cultural resonance, even to those of us who know nothing of the lives lived in them.

Agonised adultery

"First Train to Clarksville" would be a local newspaper headline. Last Train to Clarksville - now that is a song title suffused with unexpressed longing and regret.

I have never been to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and may never go there, but it has an immediate romantic meaning for me, because I grew up listening to the agonised musings of that man who was always 24 hours away from it.

If you know the tune, you will know the writer does a pretty good job of dressing up a moment of casual sex with a total stranger as a life-transforming ethical dilemma.

But when I was a child, I was fascinated by the mechanics of it more than the morality.

Where was he? If he was 24 hours from Tulsa, I reckoned, and anxious to get home, you would allow him say six hours sleep and a 10-minute break every two hours.

That would give him 16-and-a-half hours driving at an average of say 60mph (96km/h), making the likely scene of the adultery Rupert, Idaho or maybe Smithfield, North Carolina.

The real America

And the point of all this?

The 'soft power' of US popular culture can outweigh its military muscle Well, you will read a lot in the coming weeks about how America's place in the world will change when George W Bush gives way either to Barack Obama or to John McCain.

Those two men of course take very different views of the world and would pursue very different foreign policies.

But they are both more interested than Mr Bush in what the world thinks of America and if they want to change its opinion, they will have at their disposal all the diplomatic and military muscle of this vast land, not to mention the pull of its $14 trillion (£7.7 trillion) economy.

That is, in the jargon of diplomacy, "hard power". But what makes America unique is that even in the times when it is most angering its enemies and perplexing its friends, it has enormous "soft power". The priceless but intangible value that lies in people half a world away feeling that they know or want to know Fargo, or Tulsa, or Amarillo.

I am travelling lighter than the artists who wrote those songs and films of course, because I am unencumbered by any sense of poetry, but I am on a kind of journey too from the America I thought I knew, to the America I am coming to discover.

The real country, I guess, lies somewhere in between the two. If I ever find it, you will be the first to know.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 27 September, 2008 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the <a class="inlineText" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3187926.stm">programme schedules </a>for World Service transmission times.