A Shirt on Sunday: Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, TN – 26/5/2014

We pulled into Nashville feeling about a half past dead and in need of a laundrette. We’d spent a day on the road, driving up the Mississippi River to where it meets the Ohio at Cairo (pronounced ‘Kay-ro’). We went there because of Neil Gaiman’s ‘American Gods’, where the town is the home of some unusual undertakers. Driving through the town, we were struck by the utter poverty. There were few shops and fewer diners on the highway. Indeed, the only sign of money that we saw was an undertakers, with flowers in the freshly cleaned windows.

Nashville is more self-conscious about its musical heritage than Memphis, and also seems to have music bars everywhere. There was one across the road from the laundrette, so we visited for a beer and some Saturday afternoon music – a bit of country blues from an anonymous band. Outside the bar was telegraph pole tattooed with staples from a thousand flyers, but at that moment there was nothing posted, just the tangle of tarnished metal.

In the evening we walked the area of the music bars. A similar size to the Memphis Beale Street area, but here there was no clearing of the roads for pedestrians, and there was a constant stream of enormous SUVs and trucks, more in the evening than during the day when the area was deserted. In every bar a man wearing a cowboy hat and a Martin guitar sang songs of trucks and motherhood.

Legends Corner bar in Nashville

The next morning we started with a tour of the Ryman Auditorium. This was the most famous home of the ‘Grand Ole Opry’. For over thirty years the Ryman hosted the weekly country music show broadcast around the country. It made stars of its cast and guests. Johnny Cash met June Carter there – they were both part of the cast. The programme now broadcasts from some enormo-dome on the edge of town, but occasionally from the Ryman. The place is now a regular concert venue, but in a total planning failure there were no gigs while we were in town.

Ryman Auditorium

The Ryman looks and feels like a church, from the peaked roof to the pew seating and stained-glass windows. The acoustics are excellent and it’s a real shame we didn’t get to catch a gig there. The tour took us all over the backstage areas and onto the stage itself, with its backdrop of a red barn. We declined the opportunity to pose with a guitar for photos for ‘a small fee’, but were probably the only ones on the tour to decline. There were also little booths where you could record a song for a definitely not small fee.

Ryman Auditorium

More magical was the RCA Studio B tour we took in the afternoon. The Country Music Hall of Fame is a contributor to the preservation of the building where Elvis, Johnny Cash and their contemporaries cut classic singles after the Sun era. There’s not much to see, but a whole musical history to feel. The guide was excellent and set the atmosphere. The studio room itself contained a number of instruments that had been used back in the 50s and 60s along with a microphone set up in the spot ‘where it was when Elvis first sang here’. When they played a bit of that recording through the playback speakers you felt a shiver down your spine.

Studio B, Nashville. The closest I've ever come to meeting ghosts
We weren't allowed in the control room.

My other memory of Nashville is lunchtime in ‘Legends Corner’ diner. A trio led by a female fiddle-player were paying the dues. At one point the young woman played a solo dancing on the bar – to an audience of about 25 tourists – but she was giving it her all. When the tip-bucket went around it went back rustling with $10 bills. Apart from from one guy. He’d requested a song for his companion and the band had played it. But when the bucket came around he just laughed at the waitress. The rest of the room glared at him until he relented and put some money in.

I love these old wall advertisements - this was just around the corner from the Ryman. I wonder if they still pay 'top dollar'?