| Nashville
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It's
very clean
A white shop assistant in Memphis tells me that Nashville is her favourite city. Why? I ask, "It's my favourite city," she repeats. "Why do you like it?" I ask again. She thinks for a moment, struggles to articulate and then concludes: "It's very clean. The downtown is clean. I mean it's clean here, but Nashville is very clean." We get to Nashville and walk around in the blistering heat for a short while and it's true, the downtown is very clean, but no cleaner than Memphis. I start to wonder if clean isn't another word for white. Where Memphis is a black city, built on black music, black people organising for civil rights, Nashville seems outrageously white to our whitey tourist eyes. Hatch Show Print Hatch is possibly the only place in Tennessee where you will see a Say No to Bush sign. I want to hug the building and all of the people inside it, and the two fat cats lolling around on a hairy rug too. Hatch is a letterpress that makes promotional posters. Its clients have included, over the years, every country music star you care to think of, vaudeville and minstrel shows, local businesses, carnies and fairs, more bands of every musical genre that you care to think of, plus -ew - Nike and Pizza Hut. The posters are beautiful, with fonts and colours that sock you right between the eyes. And the press is still working! The back of the shop is lined with wooden blocks and ink, and the walls are smothered with the labour of their work. It is a magical place. Got some money and want to know more? Get the sublime Hatch Show Print book. In need of eye candy? Visit their website and marvel at the prints. 
Broadway Hatch sits on Broadway, which looks to me like the main street, the place where things happen downtown. It's a great street! Under the malevolent gaze of the two-pronged devil horn BellSouth building, there are bars with amazing neon going on, Ernest Tubb's famous (to some people) record shop, and places where you can try on and buy country music outfits. I see cowboy musicians swaggering along the street with their guitar cases, ready to hit the big time, and no one stares because this probably happens every day. Nashville's big entertainment businesses are owned by a company called Gaylord, and there's a Gaylord Centre on Broadway, which cracks us up. Country Music Hall of Fame It's big, it's exhausting, it's ludicrous yet also oddly moving. The early country recordings showcased in the museum choke me up, they are simple and hopeful songs borne out of poverty and performed in a ragged way. A lot of space is reserved for incredible outfits and memorabilia in glass cases organised by genre of music. Hank William's cowboy boots! Gram Parson's Nudie suit! Episodes of Hee Haw! Right on. The building is ridiculously over-symbolic, and the guidebook explains the significance of the atrium (like a porch on an old fashioned shack), the tower (like a radio beacon), the circular design (reminiscent of recording formats - the 78, the single, the CD), the piano key windows, the treble clef ground plan and even the lifts, which are done out to look like miniature barns. Stoopid. The Hall of Fame itself is studded with blobby bronze plaques with poorly-rendered portraits of the greats - Johnny Cash looks like a street drinker - but despite this there is a hushed reverence as people enter this holy space. 
Opry In the morning we're looking at Porter Wagoner and Little Jimmy Dickens' rhinestoned Nudie suits at the Hall of Fame, and by the evening we're watching the decrepit old stars onstage at the Opry for real. What's the Opry? It's the venue at the heart of the country music world, it used to be located in downtown Nashville but has since been moved to a monstrous out of town area called Opryland. The Grand Ole Opry is also a television and a long-running radio show. On Fridays and Saturdays the Opry hosts a series of shows where country music legends introduce breakthrough acts and stars of yesteryear. It's taped at the vast Opry auditorium and broadcast around the country. We got tickets for a taping. We took our seats near the front of the stage on barn-style pew seats amongst several thousand others. The stage is pretty weird, with sectioned off areas for performers, various hangers-on (someone wins a prize draw to go and sit up there), session musicians and the drummer (our boyfriend David Brookings told us at Sun Studio that the Opry never used to allow drummers because it evoked "Negro music"). The show is broken down into segments which are each presented by a big country music star and also sponsored by various southern businesses (Cracker Barrel restaurants, GooGoo confectionery, Odom's Tennessee Pride sausage, Martha Wight's Cotton Pickin' Cornbread mix). There's a mumbling announcer who keeps his head down and never veers away from his script, and a group of haggard-looking old backing singers who occasionally step up to the mic and sing a jingle: "Go Get a GooGoo/it's Good!" So we see Little Jimmy Dickens making self-deprecating jokes and singing songs, Porter Wagoner is like a benevolent ghoul as he stalks across the stage, and we get to see some new music, some girl singers, an older singer introduced as "A good Christian lady," some bands we've never heard of, some bluegrass and some cajun too. The music is good. The Opry Square Dancers treat us to some really frantic dancing. Lorrie Morgan presents the broadcast segment, the TV cameras are rolled out, the lights are on so that they can film audience cutaways, and the rube sitting next to us is amazed that our hostess reads off the autocue. The Opry is a great experience, but just as I'm getting a little too complacent, a bit too caught up in the music, a little too oblivious to the cultural values of the sea of white southerners around me, something happens. Morgan introduces Lee Greenwood. Who he? Apparently he had a hit back in the 80s. So on steps this wizened little monkey man and he gets right to business, telling the audience that he's proud to be an American, which is also the title of his biggest hit. The audience take the hint and start standing up, punching the air and putting their hands on their hearts. I turn to Kay and say: "I'm not standing up." Everybody in the Opry is standing, thousands of people are standing except us. We sit and stare blankly. We are afraid. We think that we will get attacked for not standing, but nobody even seems to register that we are sitting. Greenwood sings, he brings on his two little kids to accessorise his performance and he interrupts his own song to say that Americans' "hearts should go out to those poor people of London who now know what it's like to be under attack by terrorism." Kay and I, two Londoners, two Londoners who experienced the attacks on 7 and 21 July, two Londoners who know all about the IRA (and me, a Londoner who went to Northern Ireland in order to try and understand the motivations behind that era) sit and we say "Fuck you!" I want to shout it but I'm too scared, so it comes out as a kind of outraged, strangled peep instead. No one turns, no one says anything, the song ends and everybody sits down again, satiated and sure that they've done the right thing. 
Parthenon The Parthenon is a recreation of, you know, the other Parthenon. It was built in Centennial Park for the 1897 Exposition and everybody liked it so much that they decided to keep it. Inside is a giant statue of Athena, but we didnŐt make it that far. I have to say that the Nashville Parthenon is probably much nicer than the, er, other Parthenon, because it looks all clean and new and is covered with pebble-dashed concrete. Nothing's broken. It looks good. We sit in the shade and catch our breaths in the searing July heat, and then I go and stand inbetween the columns and re-enact the climactic scene of Robert Altman's film Nashville by singing: It don't worry me/It don't worry me/You may say that I ain't free/But it don't worry me. 
The Genius of Robert Altman The whole time I'm in Nashville I keep thinking of the film of the same name and marvelling at the genius of Robert Altman. His observations of Nashville society seem so well-observed, absolutely spot-on, from the shots of fans creeping down the aisles at the Opry to take photos of their favourite stars, to the upstanding white folks we see at the restaurant taking their Sunday brunch in a post churchin' glow. The Broadway cowboy musicians and girl singers could be any hopeful wannabes from that film, which was made 30 years ago (time stands still in Nashville). The breadth of Altman's vision, his storytelling abilities and characterisation, all of them are stunning and his film haunts me the entire time I spend in that city. |
 
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