Years of Midwest Radio had me ready for Nashville

Last weekend, for the second time in a year, I was in Nashville. I’d gone alone last time but this time there was a gang of us, and I got to see a whole side of it that I’d missed last time. Nashville’s in Tennessee and it’s the home of country music, but it’s also Mecca for hen and stag parties. It’s like a smaller, more contained, less mental and cheaper Vegas and anyone going to America should tack on the price of the flight and go. Nashville’s not all that big and its heart is Broadway, a bawdy, gawdy, loud avenue lined with bars and neon signs. But it’s also a great place to people-watch, especially to observe what version of America sells best with white Americans (tourists to Nashville are overwhelmingly white). Nashville caught us by surprise though, in how much it conjured up memories of childhood amongst those of us who grew up in rural Ireland listening to Shannonside, Highland or and Midwest Radio, or the same three country music tapes in the car. How every second town in Ireland isn’t twinned with Nashville I cannot understand.

Morning, noon and night in the bars that line Broadway, the potential stars of the future belt out country classics and a few of their own songs in the hope of becoming the next Dolly Parton, Taylor Swift, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash or almost any other country music star you’ve heard of. It’s all an audition; they don’t get paid by the venues and like in New Orleans, they play for tips and the dreams of stardom. Newbies start at the bottom with the Monday afternoon slots and work towards a Saturday night in Tootsies or Kid Rock’s Honky Tonk or wherever else. Karaoke is zero-craic there because anyone drawn to a microphone is stupidly-talented and does a better job of Loretta Lynn’s back catalogue than she did herself. Broadway is about as authentic as Temple Bar, a pastiche of its own culture, and anything that’s not a bar is selling cowboy boots and or mac&cheese by the pint and barbeque by the pound. The last time I was there I took in all the sites and museums (the Country Music Hall of Fame is an impressive place) but I didn’t really experience the night life. This time we patronized every bar on Broadway, drank crap beer, hoovered up the macaroni and cheese, sang karaoke, had a mechanical Willie Nelson tell our fortunes and sang along to every song we knew – which, as it happens, was a lot of them.

Last time I was there I got to go to a concert at the Grand Ol’ Opry and marvelled at all the people there wearing Stetsons and cowboy boots in a non-ironic way, but that wasn’t something I took much notice of downtown or on Broadway. This time though my eyes were opened. Nashville is a superstore and its sole product is the America of John Wayne and Adelaide Adams; lawless, rebellious, pioneering and southern. It sells what you imagine Texas to be. Johnny Cash is huge there, but it’s the rugged American outlaw Cocaine Blues version of Cash that sells, not the pacifist of Man in Black or the Christian of Rugged Cross. Several times over the weekend we had to stand for the troops, and in one pub, Redneck Riveria, the band’s frontman announced that anyone who didn’t support the troops was in the wrong place. (Fair dues to anyone who decides to join the military but c’mere Redneck Riviera, how about voting to keep them out of wars instead of glamorising military sacrifice?) Anything that can be red-white-and-blue is red-white-and-blue, including a stars and stripes flag made of cans of Bud Lite. Men wear their shirts tucked into their jeans over cowboy boots, and the women wore theirs under skirts – but sure you could tell from the accents that they no more wore them daily than I do. That said, I was in a boot store and seriously considered buying a pair of boots, reasoning that they’d look good under skirt and I’d get the wear out of them… in Ballinlough?? In Dublin?? I’d look as daft as the last person in my family who thought the same thing and whose boots are presumably still in their box, where they belong.

But for all that, for all the wandering around mouth agape and sniggering at its absurdity, I couldn’t believe how much of it was relevant to me and my rearing. I can’t remember my online banking password but turns out I know every word of Garth Brooks’ Much Too Young (To Feel this Damned Old). I wandered through the Johnny Cash museum and had his hits down, word for word. I forget my siblings’ birthdays but have retained every word of Trisha Yearwood’s Believe Me Baby (I Lied)?? Teenage memories of collecting my grandad from town on Saturday nights flooded back to me in the Patsy Cline museum because whoever had the Saturday late-night show on Midwest played her all the time. Over beers, we talked for ages about the phenomenon – for ‘phenomenon’ is the only word to describe it – of line-dancing in rural Ireland in the early 1990s. American country music was so present in our lives as children in the west of Ireland, but how and why was that? Obviously, because we’re such absolute doses, we analysed that to death, but we came up nothing. Answers on a postcard I suppose…

So yeah, solo Nashville was great last March but it was a whole different experience sharing it with mates.  That’s the thing about the ol’ solo travelling; sunsets are grand but they’re beautiful when you’ve someone with you to nudge and say, “that sunset’s beautiful isn’t it?”. Nashville is jammers with hens and stags but, if like me, you think that Kid Rock’s Honky Tonk is the seventh circle of hell, there’s always the Opry, museums aplenty and the Station Inn where there’s live bluegrass every night so it’s not a bad spot for a honeymoon (all the Irish people I happened upon were on honeymoons). Nashville is loud, crass, bawdy and all a bit ridiculous.

I couldn’t recommend it highly enough.