Days 38, 39: Nashville

Days 38-40: NASHVILLE

Our wonderful holiday just keeps getting better and better!

We took two internal flights to get from Savannah to Nashville.  Arriving in sticky heat and humidity, it is an onerous sign of the weather ahead of us over the next few days.

Awaiting us at the end of this tiring journey was the most amazing hotel we have ever seen! It is the Gaylord Resort and Convention Centre. It might convey an idea of its size to know that they offer an app to download as an aid to getting to your room!  The queue just to check in was half an hour long. 

Ours was one of the 2700 guest rooms!  They are arranged in four storeys around several beautiful tropical garden atriums (atria?). Most rooms have a small balcony overlooking one of the atriums.  While the rooms themselves are comfortable and roomy, it is not for the room that you would book into this amazing hotel – at around $370 per night!

Rather, it is for the beautiful tropical gardens throughout the complex. Paths wind in and around the thousands of healthy plants. There are several waterfalls, bridges and goldfish ponds, wonderful flowers – it just goes on and on.  Around twenty-four eating places, dozens of shops, bars and lounges in which to relax and country music radio station 650 WSM complete the hotel.

 We met our new tour director, Peter, and the rest of our tour group. Again it is a mostly Aussie group around our age. Peter has a great routine of dressing each day to the theme of the day. In this shot he is just right for our day immersed in country music.

We then made our way to one of the many restaurants, Jack Daniels, where Roger ordered macaroni cheese – unbelievably described here in the south as a vegetable.  I ordered fried green tomatoes, one of the traditional dishes of the south and also some pork rinds, another traditional southern dish.  Although delicious, I suffered the effects of these for two days.  As I discovered, pork rinds are pieces of crackling super grilled so that they are rock hard – so hard in fact they chewing them plays havoc with the roof of the mouth.

The following day, after breakfasting in a beautiful atrium, we set off to tour Nashville.  Most of the morning was spent with an informative tour with a local guide.  This was good for getting an overview of the history of Nashville, a city that was very important during the Civil War.  The state of Tennessee is just full of rivers, so Nashville was an important city for shipping – mainly cotton.  Just as we saw in Savannah, the riverside is lined with warehouses.  Goods were offloaded from the steam boats, wheeled into the front doors and sold from doors out the back.

 During the Civil War, many of the wounded soldiers were brought to Nashville to the many hospitals that were set up in various churches throughout the city. 

The tour, as do all city tours, included the memorial to people who served in WWII.  This one has an unusual feature – a granite ball weighing several tons that revolves while floating on a centimetre of water. 

We also visited what I still consider to be quite a ridiculous installation – a full size replica of the Parthenon!  Once we were told the context, I became a little more accepting, but I still think it seems odd to see ancient Greece within modern USA. 

The context for this extraordinary building is that Nashville is apparently known as the Athens of America, given that it is an esteemed city of learning.  There are no fewer than seventeen universities and colleges in the city, including the prestigious Vanderbilt College of Medicine and Belmont College of Music.

A fascinating bit of information about Nashville is that it was here that it was made possible to legislate for women to vote.  Apparently, for an amendment to be made to the Constitution, thirty-six states must vote for the amendment. This is known as the ‘Perfect 36’. By 1920, a decade or so of women’s suffrage rallies had brought USA to the point of making the nineteenth amendment, giving women the vote.  Thirty-five states had voted for it, but Tennessee’s vote was essential as the 36^th.  Our local guide told us that on the hill infront of the Capitol building in Nashville, a rally that became known as the ‘war of the roses’ took place.  Those who were in favour of women’s right to vote wore a yellow rose in their lapel, while those against wore a red rose.  The vote was taken in the legislative house and it was tied.  A second vote was taken – again tied.  After the second vote, one of the politicians received a telegram from his mother, expressing her wish that he vote in the bill’s favour. For the third vote, that is what he did, causing the bill to be passed by that one single vote.  Thus it is that one person’s vote turned the course of history for the whole of the USA. I think this is a great story.

After education and printing, Nashville’s third most important industry is tourism – no surprise there.  So great is tourism now, that the city skyline is dotted with cranes where twenty-three new hotels are being built.  There are another twenty-three ready for building to start and more than forty others waiting for approval.  With the cost of hotel building being estimated at half a million dollars per guest room, that’s a great deal of economy flooding into Nashville.

But it is for its status as home of country music that Nashville is best known.  The rest of the day was devoted to exploring the city as such, and what a jam-packed day it was.

We started at the Country Music Hall of Fame. There we saw displays of the birth of country music right through to current day country singers. Large screens played film from the early 1900s, featuring small groups making music with banjo, fiddle, mouth organ and various other instruments.

The wall of one section was covered with concert advertising posters for names such as Roy Rogers, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynne and of course Elvis.

Another section had thousands of gold records displayed. We looked of course for John Denver and found his ‘I want to live’ up there amongst all the others.

Finally it was to the section showing all the people who have been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

From there we went to the Ryman Auditorium, the original home of the Grand Ole Opry. Originally built as the Union Gospel Tabernacle, its major benefactor was Thomas Ryman, a river boat captain. 

The story goes that at the time Ryman was plying his trade up and down the Cumberland River, a major tributary of the Mississippi, Nashville was a den of iniquity with wine and women freely available to the steamboat sailors.  A preacher, Rev. Sam Jones, was using a tent as a revival centre, converting the population and persuading them away from their sinful ways, from which Ryman was directly benefitting. One day in 1885, Ryman went to one of the evangelical rallies mainly out of curiosity.  He ended up being ‘converted’ on the spot and did indeed commit the rest of his life to Christ. He spent $100,000 building a church where people could listen to Rev Sam Jones and others preach.  It was built on the same site as that original tent revival centre. For the rest of his life, Ryman worked closely with Sam Jones in bringing people to Christ. At his funeral in 1904, Sam Jones proposed that the Union Gospel Tabernacle be renamed as the Ryman Auditorium and it has been called that ever since.

As well as religious meetings, in order to fund its ongoing upkeep, the Ryman Auditorium hosted concerts, operas and other events. 

The story of the Ryman Auditorium goes hand in hand with the Grand Ole Opry.  It started in 1925 as a broadcast barn dance.  It gradually grew to be a very popular country music radio program with a live audience.  There is a story that the name comes from an error an announcer made.  The weekly broadcast was always preceded by an hour of opera – the Grand Opera hour.  In moving one week to the country music program, the announcer made a mistake and announced it as the Grand Old Opry, meaning to say ‘Grand Old Country’. The name stuck and remains with it today, seventy or so years later.

In 1943 the Grand Ole Opry was in need of a bigger venue and it moved to the Ryman Auditorium. There it stayed until 1974, when a new purpose-built auditorium was erected some way from the centre of Nashville. In its design, care was taken to echo the church ambience of the Ryman.  So it is that the audience now sits in church-like pews to watch the show broadcast.

Yes I know - we have to practice our selfie routine

Having by now fully caught onto country music fervour, we then visited a couple of honky-tonks, the many small bars that line a couple of city blocks of Nashville’s main street, Broadway. It is here that as yet unknown country singers come and sing just for tips in the hope of being ‘discovered’. Although we quite enjoyed the music, we found it far too loud to spend more than a few minutes at each one, but at least we now know what they are all about. 

Our tour guide Peter told us a great story about Garth Brooks and honky-tonks.  Apparently he had sent his introductory track to several record companies, none of whom expressed interest in him.  But then one night, he was singing in one of Nashville’s honky-tonks, the right person heard him and signed him up back in the kitchen of the bar.

That night we had tickets to go to The Grand Ole Opry.  What a great show it was – impossible to do justice to it in words, but I will try. 

The show is still broadcast live – now internationally.  Being a radio broadcast, it is sponsored and so every few items are broken up with a live read of an advertisement by the host. It was divided into four sections, each being hosted by a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame.  Each section has about three different artists, all country music artists but from many genres within it.  There were banjo players, singers, guitar soloists and a wonderfully entertaining group named the xxxx.  The five group members would all have to have been at least 75 year old but goodness did they get into the music and put on a great show.  Other artists included several modern country music singers and an amazing guitar duet. There was even an eighty-one year old Japanese country singer – quite bizarre but he sang country as if he had been brought up with it. All the backing musicians were having a great time.  Again, none of them seemed the right side of 60, but they obviously love the gig.  The night finished with Crystal Gayle, sister of Loretta Lynne.  She has recently been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame and it was great to see her perform.

One last thing before we left Nashville the next morning:

We drove down what is known as Music Row.  This is the area of Memphis where all the musicians work – the recording studios, the legal firms, the agents and the two national organisations that control royalties for various artists. We went to Studio B at RCA, an iconic studio that many of the singers of the past have recorded in.  There we had a great tour conducted by a guy who is really passionate about the place. We went onto the actual studio which, apart from other instruments, contains a grand piano.  He told us that Elvis would sit for hours playing that piano, working and reworking the songs he wanted to record.  Interestingly none of these were written by Elvis.  Every song that he recorded was a cover of someone else's song.

All the stories he told us were interspersed with the particular songs he was talking about.  One magic moment was when he told us about the recording of ‘Are you lonesome tonight’.  Apparently Elvis liked to record very late at night.  One particular recording session, he had a couple of takes of the song but wasn’t satisfied with it.  It was 4am and he decided to do it one more time, but this time in the dark.  This was the recording that we all now hear.  At this stage of telling the story, the guide dimmed the lights and played the song.  Standing there in the semi-darkness listening to Elvis singing  ‘Are you lonesome tonight’ reverberating through the studio was one of those magic moments that will stay in my memory for ever. Roger pulled me close to him and we stood there hugging each other close.  It was magic and I was in floods of tears.

Before leaving RCA, the group was given the opportunity to make a recording of us singing along with Elvis.  We were given a copy of the words to ‘Don’t want a silver dollar..’.  After a run through as rehearsal, we were on and it has turned out to be quite a reputable recording.