NASHVILLE; or, What Makes a Music City?

Queuing to get off our plane into the US, I got chatting to one of the flight attendants. When I tell her that after San Francisco we’re headed for Austin, New Orleans & Nashville, she says:

“Smells like music to me.”

I have since learned that every US city claims to be the home of music in some form or another, but this is perhaps the holy trinity, and Nashville is the most boisterous in staking its claim by far. It’s more than country, too; all the major record labels have recording studios here, and these tend to be the pinnacle for a lot of musicians. These studios jostle with each other for space along Music Row, which, as the name suggests, must be the most boring iconic street in the world. It’s just hard to get excited about a side door, even if Dolly Parton once walked through it. To be fair, locals warned us there wasn’t much to see there, we just stumbled down it on our way home one night. It was utterly dead – in Nashville they don’t mix business and pleasure; this isn’t Soho.

The issue is that much of the  “pleasure” feels so much like business. It’s all funnelled along Broadway, the main drag, where fun is blasted at you from all angles; every building three stories of wall-to-wall fun, each floor blasting different live music at you. There’s Country and Rock and Country Rock and Hard Rock and Hard Country Rock and a Hard Rock Café. Each place is “the home of country music”, promising you its own unbeatable offer on jugs of Bud Lite. What I’m saying is, if you want a good deal on hard rock and jello shots, I know a couple places.

Fun.

The strangest thing in all this is that if you look up, you realise the buildings are brand new. In fact, for a place so keen to klaxon its history from signs all over the city, the whole place seems to have been built in the last ten years. It’s hard to imagine what it looked like twenty years ago, but I’m learning that bulldozing old things and replacing them with newer, shinier things is as American as a Hot Chicken Sandwich. Buffeted along Broadway, it’s hard to feel any spiritual connection to Dolly Parton or Willie Nelson; this is stadium country opening its red brick jaws for the hordes. And in they pour. I half expect to look up and see the giant hand of a record label exec hanging over us in the grey Tennessee sky.

This feeling continues at the Grand Ole Opry, the spiritual home of country music (another one, but this has more claim than most). A live radio show that’s been running for a hundred years, the Opry recently moved from the 2,300 seater Ryman auditorium on Broadway, to a bespoke 4,000 seater stadium in the wonderfully named Gaylord Opryland.

The show, where everything is recorded live including the ads, is fun (disclaimer: I’m a sucker for a country song). The suave radio host gives us a brief history of Nashville that slides into 'and you know what else Nashville has...932 Dollar General stores! At Dollar General you can meet all your families' needs...'.  That was great, but when the final singer croons about a poor farming couple struggling to make ends meet, sending up their “red, white and blue collar prayer” to the Lord, you can’t help but look around at the 4,000 seats around you. We were lucky to get tickets for $45 dollars each. Bo Burnham has satirised this better I ever could, incidentally.

Chapel Hart were the highlight of the night.

Perhaps I’m expecting too much, after all, the bit that got me most excited reading about the Opry was this section of their Wikipedia page:

What I wouldn't have given to see the Binkley Brothers' Dixie Clodhoppers.

With my mania for comparing things, it's hard not to think back to New Orleans, a week before. The closest thing to the Opry there is Preservation Hall, and it’s true they do several shows a day and pack you in and send you out via the Gift Shop, but when you’re standing at the back of a small room with peeling walls, a hundred people and five musicians, it does feel communal, spiritual. In a way it’s hard to pin down the difference; both are incredibly touristy, gift shops and neon abound, and Bourbon Street is just as much of a sensory waterboarding as Broadway, in its own way. And yet the French Quarter, and a lot of the surrounding area, keeps a sense of history. In the architecture, in the music, in the food, there is a sense of keeping something alive, struggling against the odds to preserve and evolve a tradition. This sense of struggle is the key, I think; in London, the best bars and venues are always the ones at risk of closure from a landlord dispute.

Maybe that's the best way I can put it: New Orleans feels anti-landlord. The city itself, as much as its music, feels like a song of defiance, against threats both natural and human (though the two are blending into one now, of course). The whole place feels like it has threatening letters piled up on the welcome mat. Downtown Nashville feels like it's holding hands with the landlord, skipping with him all the way to the bank. It’s also hard not to think there’s a racial element to it being the Music City that’s spent millions on a makeover. Two genres, jazz and country, that rose from channelling the struggles of poor, working people (with some obvious differences, of course), but one traditional form has had money poured into it. Of course, race isn’t the only reason, but whatever the cause, Nashville feels a bit like a try-hard city, corporatized and hollowed out (I’ve never seen so many party buses in one place), while New Orleans struggles on in style. Musicians flock to New Orleans because they love the music. They go to Nashville to make records (in the hope of making millions).

That’s not to say there aren’t great bits of Nashville, if you stay away from Broadway. We had two great nights in Printers Alley, the first (perhaps tellingly) at Bourbon Street Blues, where a jazz band played pop covers with gay abandon. I haven’t heard “Blurred Lines” played in a while, and though I’d love to tell you we tutted British-ly through the whole thing, that would be a lie. Damn that hook sounds good on a sax. Maybe the jello shots we had helped, too.

My favourite place, though, was in East Nashville, which we’d been told to check out on the first night by a friendly barman, who also warned us about Broadway. At Drifters Tennessee BBQ, we sat under a plastic awning and listened to Randy Hopper sing country in a grizzled voice that sounded just about the realest thing we’d heard so far. One song had a line I loved so much it had me immediately diving for my notebook:

“Red neck mother, drinking in a honky tonk,

Kicking hippies’ asses and raising hell”

(apostrophe my own, I think Randy is too cool for possessive plurals)

Though some other groups drift in and out of the area, for most of the set it’s just us two and a woman at the front who seems to know all of the words. At the end of the show, she thanks us for paying attention to the music all the way through. She’s Randy’s wife. We get chatting to them, and it’s clear he’s living his dream; he could’ve played just to her, and he’d have put his whole being into it. Under that rain-soaked tarp, the four of us talk, performer and audience alike, and I feel like we’ve stumbled upon some of the spirit of Nashville, after all.

God bless you, Randy Hopper.

Disclaimer

I feel like I was a bit harsh on Broadway earlier. It wasn't complete hell. First, there was this guy:

Legend.

Then there was Robert's Western World, which felt proper old-school and did a Recession Special, which got you this for $6:

Pretty good, all told.