Blood Harmony 17: Tennessee Travel Notes
I recently returned from a week long road trip adventure across the very long state of Tennessee with one of my best friends, Nicola. After not going anywhere new for two years, it was a joyful and sometimes overwhelming experience for two soul-weary healthcare workers. We started off in Dollywood riding roller coasters (so many great ones!) and checking out Dolly memorabilia. The woman who gave us our tour of Dolly’s now retired tour bus (2 bathrooms, one bathtub) told us how Dolly’s friend Judy came on every tour with her to keep her company. To which we responded “What about Judy’s life? Didn’t she have one?” Incidentally, Dolly slept in a comfortable-looking double bed and Judy slept on a narrow bunk bed with “Judy” embroidered on the pillow. We spent some time Googling Judy and there are all sorts of rumors that she was the Gayle to Dolly’s Oprah but I believe Dolly when she says they were simply best friends. I just think being best friends with a celebrity must be pretty fucking weird (wait until I get to Graceland!). And I have a lot of additional questions. Did Judy have a salary? Did Judy get health insurance? What if Judy didn’t want to go on tour?
I told Nicola that even if she became a wildly famous singer I wouldn’t drop everything to go on the road with her. She said she felt the same. We rounded off our Dollywood experience with a trip to Dolly’s Stampede (formerly “The Dixie Stampede”, as described in the podcast Dolly Parton’s America). It was like Medieval Times but with some incredible horseback riding, pig races, children chasing after chickens for prizes and non-Native people performing “traditional Native American” dancing to a Dolly Parton song. It was strange. We also ate tacos at a place called The Taco Bus on our way to Dollywood. The bus was parked next to a building and housed the kitchen. You went inside the building, walked up a few steps, opened up the bus window and gave your order. Then you ate your tacos while watching telenovelas. Fantastic.
Next stop: Nashville.
We went to four different music venues in Nashville: The Grand Ole Opry, an old school bluegrass venue, a cool neighborhood spot in East Nashville and Robert’s Western World on lower Broadway. The music in all of these places was superb. Five years ago, I saw Margo Price perform in Boston. Much of the concert is a blur because I was still in the throes of postpartum sleep deprivation but I remember her band launching into a flawless rendition of “Cissy Strut” by The Meters during a vocal break. As someone who grew up seeing mainly hip hop and rock shows, the idea of a band having the ability to casually shift from country to funk mid-concert kind of blew my mind. Now I get it. As one of our Nashville bartenders told me, “Everyone here is the best at music from wherever they’re from.” There was a really lovely collaborative spirit to all of it as well. People on stage kept inviting friends or the fiddle player’s wife or their new boyfriend who just arrived from New York to come up and sing a song and they were all amazing.
Something that moved me was how many older musicians were on stage not just at The Opry but at all the venues. At the singer songwriter show in East Nashville, two of the bands were made up of 50% 20-30 year olds and 50% 50-60 year olds. You don’t see that very much in rock or hip hop. I would argue because rock and hip hop as genres are deeply ageist. Generally speaking, either you’re young and hot or you’re a legacy act for old folks. There was also something powerful about seeing older performers at this particular time in history. Older people have born the brunt of restrictions, illness and death during COVID. Seeing these folks living vital lives as performers and being treated with respect by both audiences and their peers was good for the soul.
My favorite act from The Grand Ole Opry was Riders in the Sky (who have been around since the late 1970s!). They were so charming and great. Take it away boys!
I love museums so Nicola and I went to both The Country Music Hall of Fame and the National Museum of African American Music. The former is huge, sprawling and wonderful and the latter is more intimate and equally fantastic. At NMAAM, there are listening stations all over the museum with a program that connects an artist with their influences and who they influenced in turn and then plays music from everyone in the chain. You can save the songs you like to a playlist on your wristband which is so nerdy and great. The central lobby of the museum has a huge screen and an excellent sound system. At one point, they played Prince’s performance of “Purple Rain” from the Superbowl and I stood around with about 20 strangers and watched the whole thing. People wept (not just me).
Our final meal in Nashville was at Audrey, Sean Brock’s new restaurant. I’ve been a fan of Sean Brock since he showed up on The Mind of a Chef. I’d never heard anyone talk about Southern cooking and heirloom ingredients like him. When my Mom and I went to Charleston several years ago, we ate in a different Sean Brock restaurant every night. In 2016, he was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, which is a rare autoimmune disease. He lost the ability to cook and began drinking very heavily (and he was already known as a hard-drinking kind of guy). Eventually, his loved ones intervened and he agreed to go to rehab for alcohol addiction. Brock ended up shutting down his eight restaurants across the South and gradually opened up three new ones in Nashville once he was feeling better. Audrey is newest of the three and includes two restaurants, a R&D lab and a bar in a large space influenced by Japanese design elements and Southern folk art. Our entire experience there was relaxed and joyful. It was easily one of the best meals I’ve ever had in a restaurant. And Sean Brock was in the kitchen! Which is open so we we were able to covertly watch him cook! He greeted us at the beginning of our meal and thanked us for coming and could not have been nicer. Afterwards, I found a great interview with him on the podcast Eat(in)g Isolation, which is about mental health and the food industry. It’s a beautiful interview and worth a listen.
Final stop: Memphis
Everywhere we went in Tennessee before we got to Memphis, people told us to wait and eat barbecue there. Did we listen? No. But we did eat a lot of barbecue in Memphis? Yes. Did you know that there are four predominant types of American barbecue? You do now. They are Memphis-style, Carolina, Kansas City and Texas. Memphis-style barbecue is slow cooked in a pit and can be dry or wet. Ribs are the main thing but all the meats are on the table. I’m going to put forth a controversial opinion: the Memphis style chicken wings are where it’s at. The pit cooking melts away all of the tendons and such leaving only crispy skin and juicy chicken.
Besides endangering our cardiovascular health, we spent our time in Memphis at the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel (powerful), Graceland (bizarre) and walking along the Mississippi (very large!). We were planning to go see some music on Beale Street but we overloaded our music brains in Nashville so we watched Bridgerton while eating barbecue instead.
I’m not an Elvis aficionado per se but I like a lot of his music and I have watched a decent number of his silly movies. My main takeaways from Graceland were:
Fame is a prison.
Elvis was a strange man.
Elvis was an extraordinarily talented and influential performer.
Interior design in the 1970s was completely insane.
There’s a new addition to Graceland’s cemetery. Elvis’s grandson, Benjamin Keogh, committed suicide in 2020 and is buried there now along with Elvis, Elvis’s parents and Elvis’s grandmother. The cemetery comes at the end of the house tour (which is actually very upbeat). But then you remember that you’re at the house of man who died of a drug overdose at 42 years old. Talent, fame and wealth didn’t protect him from struggle nor have they have they protected his family. It’s a weird place.
I don’t want to end this on a bummer note because the trip was anything but! Let’s wrap it up with some movie previews.
Baz Luhrman has a movie about Elvis coming out this summer! I, of course, will be there with bells on for both artists.
And now for the movie I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life for and I just didn’t know it: