Back in September I drove with a group of friends from Minneapolis to Nashville for a five-day vacation. As usual, I took my Olympus XA with me to photograph.
Camera: Olympus XA
Lens: Standard Olympus F-Zuiko 35mm 1:2.8
Film: Kodak Portra 400 & 800
It’s a little embarrassing to admit that the morning after we went out on Broadway was the most hungover I’d been since college, but I suppose to some that might be the promise of Nashville. It is the bachelorette party capitol of the world, after all.
In the morning, I got up late and had a late breakfast, and we then drove downtown to go to the Country Music Hall of Fame. There were some men drinking beer in the line ahead of us, which felt like early in the morning but truly was later in the afternoon, and I couldn’t look at them holding the BLs aloft without feeling nauseous myself. I chose to get the audio guide with museum entry – a decision which I highly recommend for anyone visiting.
The museum inside is beautiful and open-plan, with really lovely displays behind glass for almost everything. It’s sorted in a more-or-less chronological order, going through the roots and the history of country music and the different artists through the time. It makes all the musical stops on the way you can imagine, and there’s detours in to related musical territories left and right. One of the things I generally appreciated most about the organization is how multi-media each display was, using both music and video to show the history of the genre as well as having artifacts of all different shapes and sizes that told different parts of the story in different ways – from instruments themselves to the stage costumes to the props for videos, to Elvis’ pearl and gold car with the television in the back. Another thing I really appreciated is that the women of country were fully integrated with the men. There was no ‘women of country’ section at all, but instead they were chronologically lined up with the men performing at the same time, and often to draw contrast between the musical topics being covered and the different philosophies of country music at any individual point. On the architecture of the building, the archives are glass-walled and you can see right in to them through the museum floor. I would love to have been able to see the archives themselves, and listen to all of the records and rare recordings and touch the history for real; but it was good enough to just see it and know that behind the glass it was there.
Truthfully, I didn’t expect to love it as much as I did. The audio guide was well-narrated and I particularly loved being talked through the hall of fame itself by Dolly Parton. I get the feeling Dolly could talk me through almost anything. Altogether I think we planned on seeing more museums that same day, but ended up spending much more time at the Country Music Hall of Fame than expected, and for that I have no complaints.
After the museum, and once my appetite had recovered some from the post-hangover nausea, we went to another area of town for an early dinner. We chose Hattie B’s Hot Chicken, a famous fried chicken place over near the Vanderbilt University. We waited in a line outside for about an hour before getting in to order, but the wait was well-worth it. I heard that hot chicken comes from a home cook getting revenge on her husband or boyfriend who asks for fried chicken after coming home very late, and to her surprise he loved it and sparked a whole Nashville food tradition. Whether it’s true or not is unknown but it was absolutely delicious and worth the wait.
With the sunlight fading for the day, we made a final stop for some ‘golden hour’ pictures near the park with the replica of the Parthenon, and we were not the only people stopping over there for pictures. There was a wedding or an event of some kind inside, but as the day cooled we took pictures by the big structure. This was the first time I saw lots of people out enjoying the outdoors – as noted before there weren’t a lot of pedestrians around town when we chose to walk to/from our destinations. Maybe in this climate they choose to hang around in parks instead of on their sidewalks like we do up north.
Regardless, once the sun set we went back to the BnB for the evening. Megan, Jess, and Taylor ended up going out for drinks again that night, in the Seven Corners neighborhood, the same place we went the first night. I chose to stay in because I was still recovering (did I mention I’m embarrassed about it? I feel like an old woman) but they said they had fun. Since it was a Saturday night the area was remarkably more populated than it was the first night that we went, which I was told when they reported back, and that one of the bars was so crowded they couldn’t even get up to get a drink so didn’t hang around all that late.
The next morning, Megan left to catch a flight home and get back for work, leaving the three of us to spend one more night in Nashville and then to drive the three hours to Memphis and spend a day and a night there before finally making the sixteen-hour drive back to Minneapolis.
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