[A Pig at Large by Wilfrid: September 7, 2007]
It's not all about cowboys, stetson and geetar pickers.
I'm telling you. There's art too.
[There's a note on pigging at the end of the article.]
There, for example, is the Van Vechten Gallery at Fisk University. Home to a small collection of modernist gems, sourced from the Stieglitz collection in New York thanks to Stieglitz's wife George O'Keefe. And, contrary to anything the university web-site or local tourist guides would lead you to believe, it's closed for renovations.
I am a big admirer of Carl Van Vechten - novelist of high American bohemia, gifted photographer, tireless booster for the artists and writers of the Harlem renaissance, and this was high on my list. Ah, well the Frist Gallery downtown had a nice show of the New York "Ashcan" school - paintings of parks and theaters and local beaches; almost made a pig homesick. Okay, fine, forget it - let's go honky tonkin'.
The Ernest Tubb Record Store survives on downtown's honky tonk row. The original, of course; there's a simulacrum in the country theme park up by the new Grand Ole Opry, itself a simulacrum of the original Opry. Anyway, the original not only has about every country-related book, CD and DVD a fan could crave, it was also home to the WSM Midnight Jamboree, a music show Tubb launched sixty years ago to follow the Saturday night Grand Ole Opry show on the same station. That cardboard Tubb stands in for the real thing, whose passing in 1984 was the only thing which could save him from singing "Walking the Floor Over You" to end the of eternity. A two hundred dollar box set of Tubb's works made me wonder just how often he had recorded the song under different titles too.
Oh but Wilfrid, he was the real thing: one of the original country stars. Alongside his contemporary Hank Snow, and his junior by a few years, Hank Williams, he transformed the rough, yodelling blues of Jimmie Rodgers into a viable - regionally viable, anyway - commercial proposition. He and a few others fused ersatz cowboy fashion with simple instruments, plus what was then a Hawaiian guitar, and homespun lyrics into a genre which Garth Brooks and others would one day take around the world. That's if you're a true believer. Otherwise you might say they created an intensely narrow and conservative form of mock-folk, which is of historic interest only as one of the roots from which Elvis and Sam Phillips grew the great tree of rock.
Nashville's downtown is compact, anyway. Tubb's is a central feature of the honky tonk district, and that runs just a few blocks along Broadway headed toward the Cumberland River. There, the entertainment takes a sharp left turn and leads you a short step past Hooter's, B.B. King's (of course) and Coyote Ugly until all the drinking and two-steppin' fades into the workaday quietness of the old-town business neighborhood. Just about everything you need to see on a holiday is in lassoo's reach of these streets: the original Opry, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, the Frist (the closed Van Vechten is, wouldn't you know, a drag of a cab ride into the middle of nowhere).
For a deeper visit, there are bars and eating places up around Vanderbilt University. There's a rather superfluous, but apparently perfect, reconstruction of the Parthenon in a city park. There's Music Row, where there's nothing to see really, but where someone will point out the record company offices and studios which made the town famous and still feed its economy.
But for the most part, you can stick around the honky tonks. These, I should explain to those among us who think a cowpoke is an electric goad, are very rough-and-ready dive bars, all possessed of a stage, and featuring loud music, hour after hour. Quite apart from the fact that country is preferred to blues, the atmosphere is quite different from Memphis's Beale Street. Largely, the honky tonks feature locals playing to locals or near-locals (if locals include the city's large student bodies). Yes, there are tourists, but on Beale Street tourists are simply the audience. Here they blend in, holding their noses at the thick tobacco smoke (no, not banned here), avoiding the eyes of the crazier drunks, and deciding whether or not to degrade their experience by screaming "Hell yeah!" on demand.
The constant flow of musicians is impressive; not all good, but the good ones are legion. Apparently working for tips, its a gruelling existence. I watched one young lady throw herself bodily into a raucous up-tempo "Bobby McGee" to close a four hour set, a set she had then performed on fourteen consecutive days. Ernest Tubb would understand that.
Those who made it out of the dives are celebrated at the Country Museum - big, modern, catering for serious completists of the genre. I whipped around it in forty minutes or so, but once you start listening to the songs you could be there a week. Nicely designed, most of the galleries feature sound-dampening walk-in carrels where you find a country classic already playing. On the occasion of my visit, a special exhibit was devoted to Ray Charles's work in the country form.
Impressive in a different way is the nearby Ryman Auditorium. Built in the 1890s as a revivalist tabenacle to hold the huge crowds drawn by preacher Samuel Porter Jones, the Ryman is still filled with pews, rather than rows of seats, on two levels. It was later transformed into a place of more general entertainment, and finally, in 1943, became the long-term home of the WSM radio show, the Grand Ole Opry.
The Ryman's acoustics are legendary. Artists go out of their way to perform and record there: Neil Young's 2006 Heart of Gold performance was shot here. There's so much wood in the building, the shape is so graceful - walking around on a quiet afternoon, it was like being inside the body of a guitar. Every surface seemed to gently resonate. A few glass cases contain both evangelical and hee-haw artifacts.
Down by the Cumberland River, there was a colorful boat meeting - toward the end of a series of days so hot that public schools (back already) were using up their snow days and sending students home.
This was dry heat but searing, wilting the will to sightsee. After entering a Hooters for the first time in my life, and sucking at an ice-cold beer, I was relieved to turn into the shade of the old arcades and alleys around Union Street.
This was a weekend stroll, and sadly some lunching curiosities were closed. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we must all try hard to believe that Charley's cheeseburgers are good for you (oh, look close, that's what it says).
And look at this facade in the old arcade. I don't know if the food is good, but there is every appearance they've been making it the same way forever.
The grandest hotel in town is still the Hermitage, and that was the next stop just to sit and experience the AC. The lobby is eminent, and the ceiling marvellous.
I stayed, however, at the Wyndham Union Station - dramatic enough in its own way, as it is indeed built into the city's old railway station. Apparently it was with difficulty that they extracted the pigeons from the highest reaches of what is now the towering lobby. You finally get off your sore feet and resort to a cab (they have them in Nashville, unlike Memphis) or a tour bus or a covered wagon for the surprisingly long trek out to the Opry's current home on Opry Drive, about half an hour or more out of the city center. A monument to the transition of country music into an international business of enormous value, the new Opry is a huge theater - amusingly preserving the pew arrangement of the tiny Ryman. It sits alongside a new theater where the Tubb Midnight Jamboree still follows the more famous show; alongside a new version of the Tubb record store; alongside hotels, dining "options", souvenir stores. It's a country Disneyland. A Hankland. A sophisticated rethinking of the reason cowboys were put on the planet.
I had tickets for the late show, and fighting against the crowds pouring out of the earlier broadcast, I was relieved to find the pews less than packed. There was elbow-room. An informal atmosphere prevailed: I have to say, some of the "yee-haws" even from the fans were audibly ironic. If you've seen Robert Altman's Prairie Home Companion, you have a good idea of what to expect from the Opry. Split-second timing of long-veteran announcers; the most cornball promotions read live on-air; musical acts swept on and off-stage in the blink of an eye.
Continuity and tradition are the bedrock of the Opry, of course, and perhaps carried to extremes. I knew Porter Wagoner would be presenting one of the segments: he's eighty years old, and has just notched up fifty years of hosting and singing on the Opry stage. I have always had a soft spot for his brutally nasty country ballad, "The Cold Hard Facts of Life", but instead we got a croaky gospel holler and some good-natured rambling about the stage with reading glasses and notes. What I didn't expect was "Little" Jimmy Dickens, ploughing through his comic songs and "You know when you're old jokes..." at the age of eighty-six.
Fortunately, the second half was in the hand of Jim Ed Brown, a chicken in his early sixties, who was in good voice for his hit "The Three Bells" (yes, the same as "Les Trois Cloches" by the Compagnons de Chanson). He also cheered me with "Pop A Top", a drinking song complete with bottle-popping effects. No bigger stars on this night, although the Opry still attracts them: Martina McBride is performing next weekend.
The highlights were some of the younger pretenders, Rocky Lynne and Mandy Barnett. But despite this, and although I can take a portion of Hank Williams or Webb Pierce when the time is right, I was surfeited not just with the twang of the stuff, but with the ultimately depressing conservative pretence of it all. No matter how many times you call Porter Wagoner "the wagon-master" he is not, never was, a cowhand. He had a contract with RCA when he was twenty-three. The schtick is old, the hats are old, and it behoves anyone of intelligence to feel uneasy when the constant message is despair in the face of modernity.
That Waylon Jennings song kept nagging at me:
"So baby let's sell your diamond ring/Buy some boots and faded jeans and go away/This coat and tie is chokin' me.../Maybe it's time we got back to the basics of love." But of course the town in the song, Luckenbach, Texas, scarcely exists. It's just a place where country acts perform. Love is complicated. So is life. There are no basics. The old men on stage don't ride horses any more, if they ever did. It's one step from this empty nostalgia to the thoughtlessly unpleasant "ain't no rag" rhetoric of a Charlie Daniels (and yes, he has a personal museum just near Hooters).
Hey, Nashville is a bright, modernising, appealing town: it has none of Memphis's quiet desperation. But once I'd thought about it too much, I was ready to head back to New York.
A gamut of web-sources for you:
Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
The Opry - appropriately slow to load
Ernest Tubb's record shop (I may do some mail-order from this place)
The Union Station Hotel - recommended
The Frists' excellent Ashcan show
Please defend all things country at MouthfulsFood.com
A Note on Nashville Pigging
Not much about food, right? Fair comment, although I'd have tried a Charley's cheeseburger if the joint had been open. I'd been warned about the general standard of food in downtown Nashville, and the warning was right. A few of the honky tonks serve quite poor junk food - hamburgers, sandwiches, barbecue I couldn't touch after eating the real thing around Memphis. There's a Corky's BBQ somewhere (they're in Memphis too), and there are a couple of steakhouses - the Stockyard for example, a way out of the central area. The main point, though, was the music, and I didn't want to break up the honky tonkin' to travel for food which might not be that great anyway.
Watermark (see separate article) was a good, medium-upscale restaurant. With the amount of money floating around Nashville, there are surely a few others. I do kick myself for not getting to the Loveless Cafe - even thought of doing it on the way to the airport, but ran out of time.
So baby let's sell your diamond ring
Buy some boots and faded jeans and go away
This coat and tie is chokin' meSo baby let's sell your diamond ring
Buy some boots and faded jeans and go away
This coat and tie is chokin' meSo baby let's sell your diamond ring
Buy some boots and faded jeans and go away
This coat and tie is chokin' me
