Sour mash, sweet music
Bright lights, big city: Downtown Nashville with its looming “Batman Building”
Bourbon whiskey, glittering rhinestones, blistered hogs and cool Country music – Chris Moss goes on tour in Nashville and finds the stetson still mighty but a buzzy new culture riding in over the skyline
At first, Nashville made me think about missing buses – not Greyhounds (or else I’d have penned a sad song) so much as metaphorical ones, the buses of fate and fortune. Didn’t the town have its heyday with Elvis, or even Bob Dylan? Or Johnny Cash and the Grand Ole Opry, before the latter became a cliché, if ever there was such a time? In the postmodern 2020s: could the fabled home of country music still surprise?
Now styled as “Music City”, the state capital of Tennessee serves up heaps of the stuff, every night. Venues like The Mercy Lounge and The High Watt host an ever-rotating roster of indie and cover bands – “karaoke” gigs, of a sort. Good for a sway and a drink, memorable in the moment, forgotten before you make the exit. But at The Station Inn, The Gulch neighbourhood’s surviving country music spot, open since 1974, I caught the tail end of Nashville’s annual songwriters festival, Tin Pan South.
Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan penned the classic soundtrack to Nashville’s musical heyday
Photo: Chris Moss
The names on the bill meant nothing to me but the all-acoustic gig was warm, intelligent – trad, but quite cool, too. I sucked on my lite beers, leaned back, and luxuriated. American artists are talented at top-level mediocrity; only a handful of the thousands of musicians who drift through Nashville have the gift and luck to make it, but many of them are very likeable and listenable. As a finale, veteran performer Rory Bourke was asked to play one of his old numbers. His speaking voice sounded hoarse and tired, but when he began to sing his biggest hit, The Most Beautiful Girl – yes, the one that starts with “Hey!” and which our mums and grandmas adored – he was back in his lyrical, lovelorn youth. We all were.
Nashville, known as “Music City”, serves up heaps of great live gigs every night
It was surely a quintessential Nashville moment, catching the deeply familiar at its source, and being moved, albeit briefly. The gig also had me – even more briefly – fantasising about becoming a singer-songwriter. It’s one of the consequences of visiting a city with deep cultural clout: you want to become part of the scene, change your life. Visitors to the Holy Land talk about Jerusalem Syndrome, an emotional religiosity that affects even atheists when they’re surrounded by fervent believers. Well, in Nashville, you get Gee-tar Syndrome, and dream about blowing a wad on a Gibson steel-strung, and a bit more on a rhinestone shirt and some serious boots, even if you’re tone deaf and arrhythmic by nature and would look ridiculous in the get-up.
‘In Nashville, you get Gee-tar Syndrome, and dream about blowing a wad on a Gibson steel-strung’
Nashville and its skyline are changing. About $2bn of construction projects are making everything vertical and huge. The handsome red-brick edifices along the Cumberland river cower beneath glass-and-steel towers including AT&T’s striking 617-foot “Batman Building”, and 5,028 rooms are under construction at 33 new hotels. The most stylish place to stay is The Noelle, a 1930s art-deco beauty in pink Tennessee granite that reopened last year with a sultry cocktail bar and fab coffee shop.
‘Nashville and its skyline are changing. About $2bn of construction projects are making everything vertical and huge’
Cranes clutter the backstreets. Not even the Ryman Auditorium – former home of the Grand Ole Opry – is exempt. A luxury apartment tower partially blocks the view of the gothic facade of this temple of country and cradle of bluegrass – which is still worth an hour of anyone’s time, not least to see Johnny Cash’s suit.
Gourmet soul food for the price of fast food at ‘hot chicken’ hotspot Hattie B’s
There are subtler evolutions afoot. In Pie Town, music – in the shape of Jack White’s Third Man record company, vinyl store and 1947 recording booth – combines with high-end retail. Central St Martins-trained Savannah Yarborough crafts bespoke leather garments at AtelierSavas. Any Old Iron, run by British designer (and former scrap dealer) Andrew Clancey makes sequinned suits, dresses and show clothes for Beyoncé and Kesha, among others.
‘In Pie Town, music – in the shape of Jack White’s Third Man record company, vinyl store and 1947 recording booth – combines with high-end retail’
“I moved here not for the music, but for the musicians,” says Clancey. “Many of them want to look more contemporary without having to go to New York or Los Angeles. With every genre recorded here, we felt we could offer something unique. Nashville’s fashion week has just had its eighth year – there wasn’t a stetson in sight.”
Rhinestone paradise
You can still find scores of sequinned jackets in Nashville but increasingly the city is home to contemporary fashionistas
Photo: Chris Moss
In the suburbs of Germantown, Five Points and The Nations, food is the motor of a more familiar metamorphosis, as pioneering restaurateurs – from veteran Margot McCormack (Margot Café, Marche Artisan Foods) to newcomers Bryan Lee Weaver (Butcher & Bee) and Julia Sullivan (Henrietta Red) – challenge the hegemony of “hot chicken” and “meat and three” (for which I personally recommend Edley’s Bar-B-Que and Hattie B’s).
June restaurant in East Nashville showcases the new culinary artistry thriving in the city
I devoured a fair section of a suckling pig wrapped in honey – and sensually unwrapped for carving by a waiter who clearly loved his job – at Martin’s Bar-B-Que Joint, before hitting a couple of Bourbon distilleries.
Nelson’s Green Brier Distillery was founded in the late 1800s by Charles Nelson and became Tennessee's largest distiller at the time. It was shut down in 1909 – following the passing of a Prohibition bill in April of that year – and largely forgotten. Then one hot summer’s day in 2006 Bill Nelson and his two sons, Andy and Charlie went to see a butcher in Greenbrier, Tennessee. As the three men drove down, they recalled the stories that had been passed down to them about the family whiskey business. When they started asking questions around town, the butcher, Chuck, pointed across the street and said: “Your granddaddy built that warehouse. This street is Distillery Road, you know, and that spring, it’s never stopped running. It’s as pure as pure can be.”
Shaken all over
Take a break from all the bourbon with a drink in one of the city’s many atmospheric cocktail bars, such as Late Great Cocktail
The Nelson brothers revived the business – Nelson’s Green Brier Distillery – and it’s now going strong – 91 proof or 45.5 % ABV strong. Filtered through a mellowing bed of sugar maple charcoal and aged in new charred oak barrels, the drink is a slow B7 chord on a 12-string. Complex and rich and a tiny bit dirty-sad. At Belle Meade, which Nelson Green supplies the grog for, I allowed myself to suffer a full mid-afternoon tasting session. I sampled Single Barrel Bourbon, and Madeira Bourbon, and XO Cognac Cask, and Nelson’s 108 Tennessee whiskey; hey, and then Louisa’s coffee caramel pecan liqueur and a single slug of Schatzi vodka. In for a penny, in for a million dollars.
‘I like bourbon like Proust liked his madeleines; it stirs the old hopes in me. It’s music and youth. Danger and comfort’
Bourbon: the thing is, it’s how I discovered whisky, back in the 1980s, around the time I also discovered the Stooges, Neil Young, Meat Puppets. Call me sentimental, but I still like the stuff like Proust liked his madeleines. It stirs the old hopes. It’s music and youth. Danger and comfort.
‘In for a penny, in for a million dollars’: Nashville gets under your skin, says the author; photo Chris Moss
After downing the sour mash and variations on the theme, and pigging out on the pig, I hit another gig – at 3rd and Lindsley. Who should appear on stage but the waiter from the Station Inn – who turned out to be singer-songwriter and rising star, Ben Danaher. “Lots of dive bars are becoming karaokes,” he said, before dedicating a song, Silver Screen, to “all the hipsters”. Another Nashville moment: toasting the guy who served your drinks, who’s now under a spotlight.
I’ve long been intrigued by country music, not least because it is so utterly different to British folk. So much bigger, covering the gamut from moody alt-pop to cheesy slush and gush to rocking outlaws. If it looks back, it does so through Bourbon-tinted glasses, vaguely and not too earnestly.
High Church of Country: Ryman Auditorium, original home of the iconic Grand Ole Opry, from 1943-1974, and now a must-visit venue in its own right
Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame and museum reminded me that the genre has a history of strong women. From Kitty Wells, who proved women could sell records in the 1950s, to the footage of Wanda Jackson out-Elvising Presley on Hard Headed Woman, to Shania Twain’s establishment-shocking outfits. Behind the Hall of Fame is Hatch Show Print, celebrating Nashville’s history as a centre for letterpress printing from the 1870s to the rock ‘n’roll era. Its walls are plastered with early flyers for Hank Williams and Dolly Parton. Country was as important here as the Factory was for New York.
Taylor Swift has been known to turn up unannounced to play at the Bluebird Café
At my final gig, at the Bluebird Café, the most intimate of all Nashville’s musical experiences, I caught Danaher again – weirdly, amazingly. He was sharing the bill with three women singer-songwriters: Alex Kline, Erin Enderlin and Beth Nielsen Chapman.
They sat in a circle, backs to the audience, trying out untested and proven numbers, by turns soulful and sarky – Kline’s WTF (White Trash Female) – has to be a hit, for someone.
‘Country has a history of strong women, from Kitty Wells, who proved women could sell records in the 1950s, to Shania Twain’s establishment-shocking outfits’
A week before my visit, Taylor Swift showed up unannounced at the Bluebird: she was still breaking rules, then, as well as records. Country music is alive and well (and living in Nashville) – it’s just women who are leading the latest revival. Of course I missed her. She had taken the big bus to glory.
Photographs courtesy of Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp.
