Music Cities, Bourbon Country & Another Thud

In all of our holiday rushing around in recent weeks, we’ve been driving mostly on interstates. When we left Red Bay, AL and headed to Nashville, we took the Natchez Trace Parkway, a designated National Scenic Trail. During our 185-mile trip, we only saw about 100 cars, and the scenery was wonderful.

Nashville was named Music City not by the Grand Ole Opry but by Queen Victoria. A singing group from Fisk University, founded after the Civil War to educate slaves, performed in England in 1873 during a worldwide fund-raising tour, and their performance so impressed Her Majesty that she said the singers “must come from the Music City.”

But country music has long been the trademark sound of Nashville.

Back in 1927, promoter George Hay made a deal for a radio show on NBC called Barn Dance.  Its time slot was after a classical music-themed show called Music Appreciation Hour. Hay introduced Barn Dance by saying, “For the past hour, we have been listening to music taken largely from Grand Opera. From now on, we will present the “Grand Ole Opry.” And one of music’s most famous names was born.

After World War II, the Opry’s live concerts moved to the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville. Legendary performers including Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Roy Acuff and Minnie Pearl got famous at the Ryman. The Opry began appearing on television in the 1950s (the first TV series shot in color was Stars of the Grand Ole Opry). Country music crossed over into the cultural mainstream in the 60s and 70s when stars such as Dolly Parton, Garth Brooks, Reba McEntyre and Tim McGraw became household names.. The Opry left the Ryman in 1974 for a massive new venue across the Cumberland River in the Nashville suburbs. The burgeoning Christian music scene located itself in Nashville at about that time. Recording studios, licensing companies, cable TV network studios and entertainment law firms for all aspects of the music industry are located on Music Row on the outskirts of downtown. That’s Taylor Swifts Ferrari parked outside her studio.

The Ryman Auditorium is around the corner from Broadway, a thoroughfare where a number of honky-tonk bars now are the center of Nashville nightlife. That’s the scene we checked out while we were in town.

The atmosphere in the honky-tonks is great, and where else can you get served a fried bologna sandwich? However, the crowd and the bands are relentlessly white. That’s the image country music has always had – straitlaced and conservative. Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis each only got to play once at the Opry (Elvis was told his style didn’t suit the Opry’s image; Jerry Lee was told he could perform as long as he didn’t play rock ‘n roll or cuss, rules that he broke immediately when he took the stage). The Byrds were the first, and for a long time pretty much the only, rock band to play the Opry, and they were booed off the stage as “longhairs.”

Nevertheless, the whole scene is infectious. We even bought boots!

As fun as the music scene is, there’s a lot more than that to Nashville these days. The self-proclaimed Athens Of The South is home to 20 four-year colleges and universities. Vanderbilt, Abby’s alma mater, is the largest employer in the region (it’s big into healthcare). There is a beautiful re-creation of the Acropolis, the city is the state capital, there are plenty of parks and cool neighborhoods and it has been ranked as one of the five fastest-growing cities in the nation.

From Nashville, we planned to go to Louisville and explore the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. However, a looming snowstorm messed up those plans. We settled for a tasting at the MB Roland Distillery in southwestern Kentucky, where we saw an unlikely car window decal in the parking lot. Cheers!

Oh, by the way, our RV park near the distillery didn’t exactly have an award-winning view.

Then we were off to Tennessee’s other music city, Memphis.

Before Nashville’s recent growth spurt, Memphis had been the largest city in the state and one of the largest in the South since antebellum times. Transportation and music have always been two of the biggest industries in the area. Memphis’s location on the Mississippi River makes it a natural shipping port. More recently, Memphis is the headquarters of FedEx.

Beale Street is the heart of the city. It has spawned an astonishing array of musical genres and artists – blues, rock ‘n roll, soul, gospel, rap and “sharecropper” country. Artists who were born or got their starts in Memphis include BB King, Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Otis Redding, Percy Sledge, Al Green, Sam & Dave, Booker T & The MGs and Justin Timberlake. The sound is grittier, edgier and livelier than the “rhinestone country” of Nashville.

We visited the BB King Club, which had a kickass blues band. The only reason we didn’t stay there all night was that we had dog curfew.

And, of course, there’s Graceland, home of Elvis. Having never been fans, we didn’t spend much time there.

There’s another special place in Memphis – the Lorraine Motel, site of Martin Luther King’s assassination and now the home of a memorable civil rights museum that freezes in time the way the hotel looked on April 4, 1968.

From Memphis, we prepared to drive to Little Rock to tour the Clinton Presidential Library, the first of four Presidential Libraries on our itinerary over the next three weeks (along with LBJ, Bush 41 and Bush 43 in Texas). Then we learned that they’re all closed due to the government shutdown. So thud went our goal of seeing all 14 of the libraries on our trip. Thanks, Trump. Assuming your library ever gets built, I have a lot of time to plan something suitable to do when I visit it.