Some Damn Good Life Experience(through the eyes of Stephanie): Bridge to Music City

The drive from Georgia into Tennessee was absolutely beautiful. Finally, some hills…thick green trees…lakes that reflected the blue sky…and some views of the Appalachian Mountains. The next time I come to Tennessee (and I hope I get the chance) I really want to visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park – the pictures I’ve seen of it are breathtaking. (The more places we’ve been to, the more places I realize I still have yet to visit. It may turn into an endless quest in my life.)

On May 17, we arrived at the Ramada in Nashville, Tennessee, the capital of “The Volunteer State”. (This nickname refers to the time in 1847 when the Governor called for three regiments to serve in the Mexican War and 30,000 Tennessee men bravely volunteered.) We were supposed to get off at exit 49, but accidentally got off at exit 48 and very mistakenly assumed that we could find the hotel from the wrong exit. When there are three people in an SUV, and none of them have been to a certain city before, and none of them are the sharpest navigators, getting lost is second nature. We ended up Suburbaning all the way around the city of Nashville in a futile circumvention and getting back on the interstate to take the right exit.

The Nashville Ramada’s claim to fame is their indoor guitar-shaped swimming pool, complete with strings painted on the bottom. Some sort of aquatic tape, actually - I swam to the bottom and touched them. Lots of the rooms opened up into the pool area, and we saw a man peeking out at us while we were swimming, hunched suspiciously in his room with just a corner of his curtain peeled back as he stared, backlit by the lamp in his room. Creepy – just the thought of Peeping Toms is scary, and even scarier when I’m in a bathing suit. It was fun to just walk out of our room and go in the pool, but what wasn’t fun was that as soon as the pool opened in the morning the aquatic guitar would be filled with screaming kids, and it would wake us up. Something about kids – stick ‘em in a pool and all of a sudden the decibel level screams up dramatically. On those days, though, we’d actually make it downstairs to the free hotel breakfast.

The first meal that we consumed in Nashville was at Shoney’s Buffet. Shoney’s had a great selection…although NOT very healthy…fried foods, green beans, ears of corn, biscuits and gravy, and some of the most delicious mashed potatoes I’ve ever had. We went back there a few times for the mashed potatoes. We were usually about the only white people in there.

Nashville has a pedestrian bridge, which crosses the Cumberland River. The bridge is concrete and well-lit in white lights that reflect the underbellies of the bats that flap around above it. (We couldn’t decide if they were bats or birds, but the rapid fluttering motion of the creatures’ wings led us to the bat conclusion.) Fortunately, our Ramada was across the street from the Coliseum (where the Tennessee Titans football team plays) and the stadium is next to the pedestrian bridge, so to get to the city we just had a football-stadium-sized parking lot to cross, and then the bridge - it only took ten or fifteen minutes to walk downtown. I have worn my flip-flops to about a quarter-inch thick…it was too sweltering in springtime Nashville to wear any socks or pants. The nighttime cityscape of Nashville is smaller than most cities’, but it’s beautiful. The tallest building is the BellSouth building, which the locals refer to as ‘the bat tower’ or ‘bat building’ because there are two spiky points on the top of the tower and it is lit in blues. The skyline view from the pedestrian bridge, with the cities’ lights reflected in the Cumberland River, is one of the greatest views we’ve had on our trip.

Nashville is the L.A. of country music. Its alter ego of “Music City” was its destiny beginning in the 1920s, when WSM radio started the “WSM Barn Dance” which later became known as the legendary Grand Ole Opry. In the 1950s, the “Nashville Sound” emerged and the term “Music City” was coined in regards to Nashville. Since the 1960s, Nashville has been an enormous music production center (second only to New York) in the United States and rakes in $6.4 billion a year! I’d better start my fiddling lessons. We visited the Country Music Hall of Fame, which is a beautiful building, and saw all of the plaques representing the pioneers of country music. The Ryman Auditorium, the original home of the Opry, lies downtown and houses the ghosts and legends of all the performers who got their start on that very stage: Elvis in 1954, Johnny Cash in 1956, Patsy Cline in 1961, and so on.

Sarah and I were wandering around in downtown Nashville, perusing the tourist shops, which sold items such as bright purple sparkly cowboy hats, tank tops saying REDNECK WOMAN and Jack Daniels sweatshirts. We found ourselves wandering down Broadway, after eating at the Hard Rock Café, and heard a band playing inside one of the bars. The cowboy at the door ushered us in, and that was the beginning of a week saturated with amazing live music. Everyone who wants to make it in the country music business eventually drifts to Nashville - and networks like crazy with all the other singers and musicians to get gigs playing on Broadway, where all the honky-tonk bars are. They play all day, in four-hour sets, and since there’s so much competition, we got to hear the best of the best. It was ironic that after we started listening to country music when we were in the Southwest, and listened to it for the past few months, we got to end up in Nashville – if we’d gone to Nashville first, I wouldn’t have known so many of the songs! The Stage is the name of the first place we found ourselves in, and the guitar-shaped neon Heineken and Budweiser signs seemed to fit perfectly with the enormous, beautifully detailed mural of Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and Hank Williams, Sr. that covers an entire wall. Our other favorite hangout was the Second Fiddle – smaller than The Stage, but with the same first-rate live music and dancing and friendly people, locals and non-locals; we met plenty of both. The honky-tonks on Broadway don’t have cover charges; the bands get paid minimal money and make their money by passing around their tip jars. On our first day downtown, Sarah was designated as the band’s tip girl. It’s good enough money that most of the musicians can live off of their tips, though it certainly isn’t lucrative – but to make a living playing music seems more feasible in Nashville than anywhere else. Dreams abound.

A tradition that needs to be spread across the country is the “Holler and Swaller”. This commences when whoever the lead singer of the band is makes the grand gesture of raising whatever beer he is currently drinking or shot that was just bought for him and yells for the crowd to “HOLLERRR”- a pause for the whoops and yee-has of the crowd - and “SWALLER!” as the entire crowd, band members included, takes a swig of whatever they’re having. Crowd participation is fun!

One night we went to Robert’s Western World with our friend Lucas, a drummer from Missouri. You can buy cowboy boots, beer and cheeseburgers there as you look at the nostalgia-covered walls, and listen to great music. The Don Kelley Band was playing, and the air was filled with cigarette smoke and amazing bluegrass; I didn’t really know the songs but if the live music is good enough it’s not relevant whether or not you’ve heard any of it before. The energy they brought to the stage was completely hypnotizing, and I didn’t go a second without tapping my foot to the beat – too bad I was wearing flip-flops and not cowboy boots! Dave Roe, who played the upright bass, (“slap bass”), was absolutely incredible – he toured with Johnny Cash for eight years and now tours with Dwight Yoakam.

Aside from seeing the huge bass played (or “slapped”) in crazy rhythms, the two other instruments that I really grew an appreciation for during my time in Nashville are the fiddle and the steel guitar. (Of course we heard “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” several times…but that’s a song you never get sick of, especially when there’s an accomplished fiddler up there.) The steel guitar produces beautiful sounds – it’s what makes country music sound so sad. The steel guitarist sits at a bench, with the guitar strings stretched out horizontally in front of him on a sort of table, and he uses guitar picks attached to his fingers to play and slide the strings. He uses foot pedals and levers beneath the guitar to tune the instrument with his feet and legs while he’s playing. It’s an unmistakable sound, and I can recognize the twanging sound of it now in songs I hear, even though I didn’t ever know that the steel guitar existed before.

I am not a good dancer. I cannot learn coordinated dance movements. I have a specific and severe short-term memory loss when it comes to dance steps. I never know what to do with my hands. It’s not pretty. Well, I danced more in Nashville than I ever have – men who live in the South are much more into actual dancing than at home, and they enjoy plucking girls from their seats and transporting them to the dance floor. And although I still felt like a complete idiot, it was fun. Everyone down there (in the South in general, really) enjoys dancing, and dancing to country music is so refreshingly different from the butt-grinding that goes on everywhere else. Southerners are more inclined to know actual dances, like swing dancing with the hands looping overhead and the turns and spins – oh dear I cringe to think of me spinning and flailing and turning the wrong way and practically crashing into people, which happened often during my dancing attempts. I’m glad no videotape exists. That’s all I have to say.

Late-night food is eaten at a 24-hour greasy spoon called the Hermitage Café. The bathroom has a sign that says “Out of Order” - but that’s a lie. (That’s an inside tip.) The bathroom is, actually, functioning…barely. The coffee was good, the biscuits and gravy were yummy, the service was rather sluggish, the menus were ancient and dirty, and the company was always nothing less than fantastic. There are some hilarious people hanging out at the Café late at night – we went there several times and the plastic, no-frills booths were always full. At one point Sarah, Bill, and I – plus our posse of new friends - were cramped into the back room, which has three small tables which each comfortably seat two to four people - and there were about twenty people in there. Screw the fire codes – I’m eating my artery-clogging late night meal. (I see Taco Bell commercials lately on TV that refer to their late-night menu as ‘fourth meal’. Really healthy, America.)

It rained several times while we were in Music City; there’s nothing like being in a crowded, sweaty honky-tonk and slipping outside onto the sidewalk to get rained on for a few minutes. Everyone was clamoring to get underneath awnings, but my face was upturned to black sky and the cool flecks of water that reflected the neon signs of Broadway. I wasn’t wearing a white shirt, so it was okay.

Bill got caught in the rain one Nashville day while he was out riding his bike – after that he resorted to riding laps around the Coliseum parking lot so he wouldn’t be caught far away from the Ramada in a rainstorm. As of our departure from Nashville, he’s logged 3050 miles and is coming into the home stretch – as is our trip.

I love that people actually wear cowboy hats. Nobody in New Hampshire wears them. But they look cute on girls and guys. There’s no denying the ‘country’ style of dress at the honky-tonks. Lots of the locals dress country, and lots of the tourists use their Nashville vacation as an excuse to, because it’s fun. There are several stores in Nashville that sell just cowboy hats and boots. All colors, all embroideries, sequins, you name it. You can tell the quality of a pair of boots by the number of lines of stitching in the boot embroidery. Standard boots will have 2-3 lines of stitching, and the nicer the boot, the more lines of stitching there are. The style of apparel in the downtown area is varied – people wore anything and everything – and I have to say that I was never, how shall I say, partial to cowboy hats and jeans and boots…and NOBODY would dress like that at home…I don’t have any guy friends who even own a cowboy hat…but I’ve gotten a bit used to seeing real country girls and real cowboy types that own horses and rope cattle, etc. And now I think cowboy hats and Western-style outfits are sweet. For other people.

Y’all, I’m fascinated by Southern accents and slang words. I have been trying to perfect my own imitation Southern accent, but when I try, the native Southern drawlers just seem to laugh extremely hard, so I reckon I’m fixin’ to improve it.

We ate at a few great places in Nashville – one night we ate with our friend Marc (a bass guitarist originally from Massachusetts) at a place called Bailey’s, where you can eat on top of the roof. I tried ‘firecrackers’ that night, which are pieces of breaded fried chicken underneath your choice of cheesy, melted sauces. I had my firecrackers under a spinach-artichoke-alfredo mixture, which was delicious. The only downside to our meal were the several gigantic roaches scurrying around at about 40 mph on the floor and terrifying waitresses and restaurant patrons alike…but I found it all pretty funny…to see that everyone at every table was fixated on the roach…none of them crawled on me, so I just enjoyed watching everyone squirm. It didn’t ruin my firecrackers.

We were told we had to visit Jack’s BBQ on Broadway, a Nashville legend since the seventies, and that food was great too. I had Texas beef brisket, cornbread, and potato salad. Jack’s is a plastic-utensiled, low-key place with a variety of homemade barbecue sauces in different flavors and colors, and rolls of paper towel on each table for wiping the BBQ sauce off of your face and fingers. I enjoyed the ‘Tennessee Original’ and the ‘Texas Sweet Hot’ sauces the best – you can pump them out into little plastic containers, and my beef brisket was delicious when barbecue-sauced. If you’re looking for a vegetarian, don’t look towards me. (I’ll be at Jack’s.)

Sarah and I asked Sebastian, our sweet, mustachioed waiter at Merchants Restaurant, (excellent appetizers…crab and lobster fondue for $12 and delicious quesadillas in spinach wrap bread…I do enjoy discussing my culinary adventures) where to find a Western Union place, because Sarah’s paying someone to take care of her two cats while we’re gone. He directed us to one a few blocks over, so we walked in the oppressive heat over to a little place with a PAYDAY LOANS sign on the side. We were in there forever, and I planted myself by the indoor air conditioner and people-watched while Sarah waited at the counter. There were two corn-rowed women in full McDonald’s regalia discussing their paychecks, which were $40 and $46, respectively. Another very scrawny guy was in there with a pair of the tightest, most tapered jeans I’ve ever seen, which easily gave away his dipping habit by outlining the hockey-puck shaped bulge in his back pocket. Another patron, a woman, was unashamedly sporting some puffy black slippers. I was wearing white shorts and a tank top and, except for Sarah, I was the most fashionable person in the Payday Loans facility by far. And if I am the most fashionable person in a particular location, you know the place is not a haven for style.

There’s a lot more to see in Nashville, and it’s been one of the highlights of our cross-country adventure. I will definitely visit Music City again and for anyone who loves country music, or just good live music played by an incredible array of musicians – I recommend it. Go to Nashville, wear a cowboy hat, buy a beer, learn the history. Swim in a guitar-shaped swimming pool and sample six different kinds of barbecue sauce, and listen to songs in the same venues that so many legendary singers have played at. Nobody could be disappointed as they explore Nashville.

Upward…

-stephanie

Some Damn Good Life Experience(through the eyes of Stephanie)

What will certainly in the future become legend: my attempt to capture true adventure - the drama, pain, and hilarity of our largely unplanned six-month trip across the country. It's like reality TV, except you're going to read it!

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Bridge to Music City

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