Big Fat Heads: Nashville

I’m not a particularly big country music fan, but Chan grew up with it playing in the background and everyone likes a bit of Johnny Cash. Chantelle has also been watching the eponymous TV series of late, so we spent a few days in Nashville. We rented an apartment over on the east side of town, next to Shelby park. Because Tennessee isn’t finished making me feel foreign, I went for a run one morning in the park and startled a black vulture from whatever equally odd dead thing it was pecking at.

There was also a farmers’ market in the park shortly after we arrived, from which I made another abortive attempt at cooking an economic meal.

“Seriously, Gareth, McDonalds only costs a fiver” – The cosmos

Anyway, Nashville is another relatively small city in that it has a population of only about 700,000, although that is predicted to double in the near future as you can now get 2 years of free community/tech college education if you’re local. As it is, they are throwing up hotels and apartment blocks at a rate of knots. The hotels that there are are wildly expensive because of near-constant popularity from tourism (foreign and domestic) and a running shortfall of rooms. Hence the construction efforts and why we rented through Airbnb again.

The building on the left with the spiky ears is the AT&T building. They call it the Batman building around here. Wait, what’s that on the right?

Someone explain counting to these people

We got on a hop-on, hop-off bus and got given the tour of the town. First thing we visited was the Johnny Cash museum, which is small but well presented.

Yeah, I only really found out anything about him after that Joaquin Phoenix film too. I made the mistake of downloading his entire back catalogue from Bittorrent once (don’t give me that look), it’s huge. I don’t recommend it by the way, not unless you want 50 albums of gospel tracks that all sound the same. That said, check out his version of Nine Inch Nails’s ‘Hurt’ on YouTube: it’s lumpy throat viewing. Trent Reznor wrote that very personal song about his own struggle with substance abuse and concedes that Cash came along and utterly made it his, both musically and emotionally – which has to be a hard thing to see as an artist. Still, if your work is going to be co-opted by anyone, you can do worse than Johnny.

Some of these aren’t gospel

As is required, we visited the Country Music Hall of Fame and recognised at least several of the artists featured. Taylor Swift has built an educational wing there; I know who she is, at least. Even ignoring the Country and Western musicians featured, it’s a fascinating museum of the evolution of 20th century music and culture, showing all the cross-pollination of slave, hillbilly, blues and rock’n’roll music from either side of the Atlantic. It also has some rather eclectic exhibits:

Handmade Banjo made from woodchuck hide: There is no instrument more redneck than this

This car looks very necessary

The triple-necked guitar is also a bit dubious

A walk down Honky Tonk Row was also obligatory.

All the bars are called saloons and they all have live music, as the agents for the major music labels are constantly skulking about, searching for the next big name that I’ve never heard of. The band will talk to you too, which is a bit unsettling. Normally In the UK I ignore live music while drinking until it goes away. Over here it interacts with you because you’re drinking in the middle of the afternoon during the week and there are only two other people there.

”Where you folks from? England? Guess you win this bar’s furthest from Nashville award!”.

Indeed, now leave me alone to sip my beer and awkwardly regard the tips jar while pondering whether I can take change from it.

Couple of interesting things: Nashville’s main income generator is not music but healthcare, with 300 healthcare companies based there. So there you go Another thing is that it has a Parthenon, which was unexpected.

We wandered about the Bicentennial Mall, which features a 1400ft granite wall detailing the history of the state from 1 billion years ago ‘till today, with dramatic breaks and cracks denoting conflicts. Another couple of cool things were the Tennessee Map plaza, where they’ve carved a 200ft wide map of the state-and a plaza with 50 columns containing a 95-bell carillon (representing the 95 counties of the state) which periodically plays music important to the state (like “Crazy” by Patsy Cline).