Articles, USA East, Midwest, South

Country Music and a Civil War Battlefield in Nashville, Tennessee

by Lee Foster

A traveler who wishes to understand the South might well start with a look at Nashville, Tennessee.

Nashville offers two cultural windows–Country Music and a Civil War battlefield–for the visitor who wishes to comprehend this enigmatic region of the country, so rich in culture.

You can read a dozen novels by William Faulkner and find the process of understanding the South still in its infancy. A visit to Nashville lends tactile assistance to the quest.

COUNTRY MUSIC

Nashville is the cultural capital of Country Music, a music whose themes have a universal reach, but whose style is especially evocative of the South. In Nashville, it seems, every waiter is an aspiring song writer. It is said there are about 50,000 actual songwriters in the Nashville region. The Nashville Songwriters Association International has 16,000 members. An average successful professional song writer, one who collects royalties from the licensing organizations, makes about $4,700 a year. Even the pros need to have their heart deeply into this priesthood of music creation.

The Nashville song writers produce songs for any number of “non-country” recording stars, so it is best to broaden any narrow sense of “country” music. Every Nashville lyrical music success story starts with a song, some aching record of loving and leaving. The sadness and loneliness of the human condition are constant themes. The constant search for love and the occasional redeeming human connection are the repeated subjects. Overall, there is often a foreboding sense of inevitable tragedy in country music lyrics, just as there is on a Civil War battlefield in the South. When asked “What is country music?” the famous songwriter Harlan Howard once replied, “It’s three chords and the truth.”

One major recent development in Nashville music was the opening in 2001 of the new Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. This entity has been around since 1967, but now resides with its collections in a major architectural space with state-of-the-art presentations. The new building itself has musical motifs in its architecture. The front windows look like piano keys. A tower recalls the radio transmitters that first beamed the music around, creating the audience.

Inside there is a treasure trove of artifacts on display, from a guitar owned by Mother Maybelle of one of the earliest country music groups, the Carter family, to the stage costumes of the greats, such as Hank Williams. There is Elvis Presley’s solid gold Cadillac, and even a nod to such parallel music figures as Ray Charles and Bob Dylan. As you stroll through the facility, you can listen to music, hear documentaries by people like Garth Brooks on what the music means to them, and even cut your own souvenir CD of songs from the earliest recordings to the most recent Lee Ann Rimes. On display is the poignant painting by Thomas Hart Benton titled “The Sources of Country Music.”

Any time of the year is a good time to experience Nashville’s music scene, but a particularly choice time is each April when the songwriters gather for their Tin Pan South annual celebration. The historic Nashville downtown performance location, the Ryman Auditorium, is the venue for a reflective live performance by some of the legends of song writing. In 2002, for example, the show featured Johnnie Wright and Kitty Wells, John Bettis, Graham Gouldman and Andrew Gold, Bill Anderson, and the America group duo, Dewey Bunnell and Gerry Beckley. Successive nights gather further major song writers in various venues. For example, in 2002 there was a singer-songwriter-pianist evening featuring Randy Goodrum, Mike Reid, and Ronnie Milsap. It’s a thrill to hear songs you may be familiar with, as popularized by major performing artists, but sung here by their actual creators, who describe also the song-writing process.

On any day of the year, and possibly at any hour of the day, you can wander the honky tonks of Broadway in Nashville between Third and Fifth Avenues and listen to music. On a given night there might be five bands playing simultaneously in this two-block stretch. You might start at Tootsie’s, the watering hole near the historic Ryman Auditorium, where performers hung out between shows. This music “District,” as it is called, has some interesting places to explore. Stop in at Jack’s for downhome barbecue. Visit Ernest Tubb’s Records for every vinyl, tape, and CD collectible you might want. Hatch Show Print is the poster printing facility whose art works announcing shows is a visual record of the music scene. Hatch posters are appreciated by many graphic arts collectors. They still print the posters in the traditional manner. Gruhn Guitars has a large selection of contemporary and high-end collectible guitars.

Each Friday and Saturday there is also a performance known as the Grand Ole Opry, a music phenomenon that has flourished since 1925. In that year radio station WSM beamed its powerful transmitter into Southern homes. Eventually, the 50,000-watt transmitter carried music to 38 states. A new technology, the radio transmitter, created the culture. The original program followed Grand Opera on the radio, so the bucolic announcer called this country songfest Grand Ole Opry, and the name stuck. Today you can hear this performance in person or listen to it on the Internet at www.wsmonline.com, where they also have archived past shows.

As you watch this evening performance at the Grand Ole Opry House, one aspect of the experience is striking. The fans have an especially close and personal relationship with the stars. Fans run up with their cameras to take photos during the performance, something that would be gauche at other music venues, but which is an encouraged part of the scene here.

THE CIVIL WAR

If music is one key to understanding the South, the Civil War is another. Near Nashville, at Franklin, one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War occurred.

On November 30, 1864, pain-wracked Confederate General John Bell Hood, whose arm and leg had already been amputated because of wounds, ordered the Army of Tennessee to attack the Union forces. In a five-hour period, Hood ordered a charge of entrenched Union lines, engaging 20,000 troops in a decisive encounter, with waves of the South’s finest young men advancing on a two-mile front. They marched as bands played, the tooters and shooters going into battle together. The superior artillery of the North and the entrenched position of the Union soldiers destroyed Hood’s Army of Tennessee. The Confederates suffered 6,200 killed, wounded, and captured, with 1,700 killed. Six Confederate Generals perished.

The drive out to see the battle of Franklin takes you through a prosperous and rustic region of great beauty. On the eve of the battle, wealth and beauty were also elements of the scene, with the Carter House and Carnton Plantation examples of the ante-bellum fecundity of the South.

Tacticians with hindsight confirmed Union General Robert E. Lee’s assessment of General Hood as “all lion and no fox.” Hood felt that the honor of the Army would be best served by the opportunity of a charge. Hood himself had been devastated by two bullets. Bullets of the Civil War were large caliber, low velocity, soft lead that entered the body, then expanded, usually shattering the bone. Fatality was the usual result. Those who survived were customarily treated by amputation. Hood had lost an arm and a leg, taken off at the hip. His hip amputation wound had been seared shut with a hot frying pan. Strapped in his saddle, Hood had the authority to determine the honor of the South.

Fate dictated that the Carter House be caught up in the swirl of battle. Behind the house the Union forces dug in to form a secure battle line. A museum at the Carter House now conveys, in a highly personal way, the meaning of the battle. Ironically, the dead in the battle included the scion of the Carter family, Tod Carter, a member of the attacking Confederate army. A “rama”, as they call these Civil War dioramas, pinpoints, with light and video, the story of the battle. You can still see the bullet holes in the Carter House. In the museum you can gaze at the busts of the five Confederate Generals who perished that day, including General States Rights Gist, whose given name suggests the passions of the era.

Carnton Plantation, which had one of the great ante-bellum mansions of Tennessee, became the hospital after the battle. Here the five Generals lay draped in Confederate flags. Amputations at Carnton left the place awash with blood. You can still see the blood stains in the upstairs rooms. The mistress of Carnton, Carrie McGavock, spent the next 40 years of her life reburying the hastily-buried victims of the battle, aligning the Southern boys by state in a decent burial ground, and alerting the Union families as to the remains of their loved ones.

Guides in the region re-create the mood of the battle. They do not glorify the events, often reading the poignant letters sent home by the stricken Confederate soldiers, recalling in their own prose an intertwined meditation on God, a fallen country, a lamented era vanished, a cause lost from the beginning, personal tragedy, and the utter waste of war.

Nashville’s Country Music and its Civil War battlefield at Franklin are important windows through which a traveler can glimpse something of the soul of the South.

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NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE: IF YOU GO

Nashville’s tourism information source is the Nashville Convention and Visitors Bureau, 211 Commerce Street, Suite 100, Nashville, TN 37201, 615/259-4700, 800/657-6910, www.nashvillecvb.com.

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Copyright © 2012 Lee Foster, Foster Travel Publishing. All rights reserved.

This article was written by Lee Foster of Foster Travel Publishing. Contact Lee at .

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