Emma John 

Honky tonk blues: travels in Nashville

Where have all the cowboys gone, asks Emma John, as she seeks – and ultimately finds – authenticity in Nashville, the capital of country music
  
  

Emma John travel
Saturday night, Sunday morning: Emma John on stage with Daniel Martin at the Ryman Auditorium, the former home of the Grand Ole Opry. Photograph: Observer Photograph: Observer

I had been warned about Nashville. To any country-music lover, it's the ultimate place of pilgrimage: a star-making factory, responsible for Hank Williams and Shania Twain, where Johnny Cash settled down with June, where Dolly Parton is royalty. But friends who had visited spoke of a disappointing reality: soulless, tacky, a shallow theme park of a town.

I decided to ignore them. If you're taking a road trip through Tennessee inspired by the rhinestoned, tasselled heroes of your CD collection, you don't skip "Music City". But, as an insurance policy, I decided to begin in the rural northeast of the state, where the genre formerly known as "hillbilly" music originated and where the open-air Museum of Appalachia offers the opportunity to experience it in its natural environment.

Once a year, the museum's compilation of settlers' cabins – which includes one originally owned by Mark Twain's family – hosts the Tennessee Fall Homecoming, a celebration of mountain crafts and music. It's the kind of place where you eat lollipops made of sorghum, where there's a stall devoted to one man's rare-apple collection, and the sound of live bluegrass jangles continuously.

Still, a modern stomach can't live on sorghum and apples alone, and a modern ear can only take so much banjo music. Happily, Knoxville, half-an-hour's drive away, reveals itself to be a modern and surprisingly hip city, the evening streets buzzing with young people on their way to an open-air cinema in the main square.

I join the flow; it brings me past a music shop, still open at 9pm, and inside it I discover a young man rapping on a small stage in the corner, his audience of a dozen or so arranged on two large sofas as if he was gigging in their front room. I stay – it is free, after all – for the next act, a cellist singing songs inspired by Haitian folk music. Apparently the shop owner stages these informal gigs regularly; by the time the eclectic programme has finished, I am rather expecting an invite to sleep over.

I head deeper into the mountains to Bristol, which proudly calls itself "the birthplace of country music" because Ralph Peer made the first commercial recordings of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers here in 1927, launching their careers. (Its other claim to fame is that it straddles a state line, so you can walk down the main street with one foot in Tennessee and the other in Virginia.) It is hoping to attract more visitors with the opening, planned for next year, of a $10m Cultural Heritage Center. I spend a very few hours in town, enough to suggest that you needn't return until it's built.

More beguiling is the university town half-an-hour to the south along the interstate. Johnson City crops up in a number of country lyrics, thanks perhaps to its bootlegging history (it was known in the Prohibition era as "Little Chicago"). My pilgrimage is to a gig venue, the Down Home, founded in 1976 and renowned for its commitment to Americana. The simple wooden interior – tiered benches, no concession to modernity further than draught beer – reflects the seriousness with which its punters approach the music. I watch an acoustic duo called Mandolin Orange, and the audience never so much as scrapes a chair on the floor.

And then comes Nashville. If country music has a spiritual home it ought to be the Grand Ole Opry – home to the weekly radio show that has showcased the genre's greatest talents since 1925. But the Opry, a purpose-built auditorium to which the show moved in the 1970s, is surrounded by acres of parking lot and shopping mall, and it's hard to find anything spiritual about it at all. The only place within walking distance for a pre-show dinner is Gaylord Opryland, the gigantic folly of a hotel next door. It's as glitzy and impossible to navigate as a Las Vegas casino, the only difference being that the steaks here cost $50.

The show, at least, is good value – a packed three hours of entertainment, with legendary figures (Charley Pride, Jeannie Seely, "Little" Jimmy Dickens) compering each half-hour. But I am soon feeling shortchanged again. Nashville's famed downtown honky tonks, the ones that promise live music 24 hours a day, are sad, sticky affairs where never-quite-made-it bands cover Carrie Underwood numbers before an uninterested clientele. The famous Bluebird Cafe, where Garth Brooks and Taylor Swift were discovered, trades heavily on past glories and overprices its beer. There are plenty of attractions – exhibitions, studio tours, a Country Music Hall of Fame – but something is missing. Where is the vibrant new music scene that the city's famed for?

I walk along the dismal Broadway (honky tonky central) and enter Gruhn Guitars, a music shop at number 400 whose owner, George Gruhn, has been selling guitars here for four decades. We talk about his musical career ("I made $40… in my life") and the wildlife – lizards and a parrot – that he keeps upstairs.

He tells me he's going to let me in on a secret: "If you're going to go to one gig in Nashville, you should make it the Time Jumpers at the Station Inn on Monday night. And if you don't go early, you'll never get in."

It takes me a while to find the Station Inn, mainly because it looks nothing like an inn and very like an abandoned garage, possibly now in use as a crackhouse. It's the kind of place you wouldn't venture into without a couple of locals and a can of mace. It's late, and a paper plate pinned to the door tells me it's a sellout and to come back at 10.30pm. When I do, a few people have obligingly left before the band's second set, and I stand at the back of the dingy, dilapidated dive, which has checked tablecloths and the air of a pizzeria frequented by the lesser fringes of the mafia. It doesn't matter: the beer is cold and cheap, and I am listening to the best live music I have ever heard.

It seems that the Time Jumpers – a Western Swing band comprising some of Nashville's top session players – are an industry secret: the room is full of musicians (including a few famous faces). I chat to a couple: one has come to catch her break, the other is recording his second album. They both have suggestions of places to hear new music – showcase sessions in grotty Irish boozers, open mic nights in dodgy pool halls (it seems that the best music is found in the tattiest of hangouts). Another, Luke, invites me to his family's out-of-town coffee shop, where there's a weekly jam.

Most of the musicians I meet live in East Nashville, across the Cumberland River – it's where the recording studios are, and they can't afford to live any closer to town in any case. The result, I discover when I go there, is an artsy community of vintage stores, music shops and restaurants that serve far more Mediterranean fare than is normal in the South. At the Silly Goose, a modern eatery in faux-warehouse style, drinks are served in old jars, the tables are decked with wildflowers and the menu choice is between couscous and quinoa. At Marché, a patisserie further down the road, you can have your Earl Grey tea served by a waiter with a real French accent. The secret to Nashville, it seems, is getting out of it.

On my final evening, I take up Luke's invitation and drive out of town, past the strip joints, to the northern suburb of Goodlettsville. The Authentic Coffee Co is barely more than a cabin by the side of the road, with a drive-thru window at one side and an old-fashioned veranda at the front. From inside comes the thrum of guitars and a man's voice singing plaintively about a woman who's done him wrong. Everyone here is a local – many of them professionals who spend their days on the road and come together once a week just to play for fun.

Whatever their claims for their coffee, that evening of music is perhaps the most authentic moment Nashville can offer. Sure, at the museums in town I'd gone nose-to-glass with Dolly Parton's boots, Bill Monroe's stetson, Johnny Cash's black guitar. Out here, though, I can have the real thing.

Essentials

Flights with US Airways from Gatwick to Nashville (via Charlotte NC, from £588 return including taxes) and Dollar car hire (from £25 a day) were provided by Netflights (netflights.com). Accommodation was provided by Hampton Inns (hamptoninn3.hilton.com) from £109 a night. Visit deep-south-usa.com for more information

 

Leave a Comment

Required fields are marked *

*

*