Nashville

My first day in Nashville was grey and wet with a solid, steady rain, but that was all right: I was hanging out with my old friends Andy and Ginger Coffey.

Well, Andy’s an old friend dating back to my rock-and-roll days in Chicago when we were bandmates whooping it up in such raucous fly-by-night concoctions as Rodeo Riot.  His wife Ginger I was meeting for only the second time, but she’s so easy-going, and the two of them are such a happy unit, that I felt I’d been friends with her for years.  I’d picked a Motel 6 near their house, in the “Hickory Bend” suburb near the airport, and after having lunch at a big roadside touristy gift-shop place called the Cracker Barrel I drove on over.

Andy and Ginger have a well-tended red-brick ranch house in a neighborhood of the same, with a garden out front and three energetic dogs within, and a back room sporting—yes!—a couple of drumsets.  Not THAT much water under the bridge, then, despite Andy’s recent cataract surgery and other hints of middle age, and within a few beers of my arrival he I were in the back room crashing through a jam session that made me a person of suspicion to the dogs for the rest of my visit.  The couple then treated me to dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant.

 I think I remember how to play these

The next day Hurricane Harvey finally packed up its remnants and cleared out, and it was a warm sunny Saturday to explore downtown Nashville. 

It was interesting to contrast Memphis and Nashville, neighboring Tennessee music cities.  In both cases I walked a special music district downtown and went to a museum.  But where Memphis had a soft, venerable, half-ruined feel, carrying the scars of its history even to its motel museum and its old musicians pushing CDs on Beale, I found Nashville to be too shiny and corporate.  Maybe it’s the difference between blues and country.  The Nashville music district on Broadway (called “The District”) is center stage to a Brobdingnagian urban renewal of enormous glass skyscrapers, stadiums, modernist event halls, wide boulevards, riverfront parks, all new and gleaming, through which the strip of music clubs functions like a theme street in Disneyworld complete with horse-drawn Cinderella carriages and pedaled party-carts full of singing beer-drinking girls going by.  It was enormously popular on this Saturday afternoon, the streets mobbed and the stacked balconies of all the clubs filled with bright faces.  I did squeeze for a while into one of the crowded clubs to listen to a live four-piece country band belt out some rockin just-add-water numbers about love and trucks, but the waitress hadn’t noticed me by the time the set ended, so I left.

I also went to the Country Music Hall of Fame Museum, which, after all, is a completely unfair thing to compare with the National Civil Rights Museum.  It’s not its fault if its subject is by definition an exercise in self-congratulatory promotion.  For what it is, the Hall of Fame museum is quite good: you come in through a huge atrium complete with restaurants, and walk long halls full of old instruments, stage clothes, lyric sheets, fancified cars (they have Elvis’ Cadillac and the Trans Am from “Smokey and the Bandit II”), and other memorabilia showcasing both the glitz and the work of show business.  Very well done was the audio: it’s a music museum, and the ways they isolated the sound specific to an exhibit—for example a video of Depression-era banjo-picking footage, or a booth where you can dial up famous hits featuring a given session man—worked perfectly, enabling you to move from one aural area to another in a constant flow but with no overlap. 

    Loretta Lynn's dress

Elvis' car

They do have a rotunda for the actual Hall of Fame, with bronze plaques for the likes of Glen Campbell and Tex Ritter, and overall this non-Country fan was surprised to find the extent to which his genes were already imbued with the music.  From Johnny Cash to Tanya Tucker to Loretta Lynn to Steve Earle, I more or less knew my way.  Country music is in fact an all-American story, and while the museum had much more information than I’d known or needed, it’s a story that somehow included me too.

Still, it was $18.00 to park downtown.  Nashville. 

Andy and Ginger were supposed to join me in the afternoon but they never got out of the house, so I went back to them, for one more jam session in the back room and a wonderful dinner out at a Mexican restaurant, with Margaritas on the patio by the grassy hill as the sun set in the blue sky.