SOUND OF SUCCESS
Famous for music, Nashville is also a hit when it comes to tourism, tech and tantalising tastebuds
You can’t talk about cosmopolitan Nashville – the centre of Southern haute cuisine and the engine room of Tennessee’s healthcare and high-tech businesses – without considering country music. As much as the movers and shakers of modern Nashville try to tell you that this attractive, diverse city is so much more than the musical genre for which it is internationally famous, the roots of country run so deep that they are both the foundation and the living exemplar of everything that is good about this city.
How the city’s money-making music machine arrived at this place was explained to me one morning at the Country Music Hall of Fame by Michael McCall, writer and editor for the Country Music Foundation.
The museum, an essential port of call for any first-time visitor, traces country music chronologically, so you start with the growth of the radio stations in the 1920s and move on to the advent of the mass-produced motor car, which allowed artists to tour the South with live shows. Then to the movie-star singing cowboys of the 1940s and on and on through the ’50s with Louvin Brothers and Hank Williams, the ’60s with George Jones, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, then to the big stadium country rockers of the noughties, and through to Taylor Swift and the country-pop modernists of today.
The difference between the early days and now, according to McCall, is that it is no longer a down-home, folksy Southern cottage industry. Today this is big business.
“Back then, people like George [ Jones] and Tammy [Wynette] toured in buses with their names painted on the side,” he said. “They came from poor stock and were very grounded. Now, country stars grow up in the suburbs with cable TV and travel to concerts in their own private jets.” It was McCall’s tour through the wonderful displays in the Hall of
Its reputation has led to an influx of big stars buying homes, including Nicole Kidman, Ed Sheeran and Johnny Depp
Fame that gave me my first basic lesson on the rise and rise of Nashville. Those impecunious country folk of the ’50s and ’60s suddenly found untold wealth and went out and spent like crazy before they developed anything like good taste.
Thus, the array of rhinestonecovered Nudie suits and luminous spangly dresses, and if you were looking for the best/worst examples of barking mad Southern consumerism then look no further than two convertibles sitting noseto-tail on the second floor – Elvis’s garish Cadillac featuring crushed diamonds in the paintwork, and, even more ostentatiously, Webb Pierce’s Bonneville complete with pistols for door handles, a silver-dollar encrusted saddle separating the two seats and gigantic bull horns adorning the front bumper. These days, we associate that kind of bling with hip-hop stars.
BOOM TOWN
The city is set in a low-lying basin beside the Cumberland River. The centre is a collection of skyscrapers gathered around the AT&T Building, aka the Batman Building, so-called for reasons that are obvious as soon as you see it. Spreading out from the centre are low-rise suburbs of which some, like Music Row, where many of Nashville’s prolific songwriters ply their craft, are tree-lined and with turn-of-the-20th-century houses.
MUSIC MUSTS
Live music, mainly country-oriented but not exclusively, plays 24/7 in Nashville. The Lower Broadway honky tonks are in the centre of the touristy downtown area and are an essential stop. This is where the music hopefuls play for tips; the standards are largely outstanding.
Nearby is the mother church of country, the Ryman Auditorium, home of the Grand Ole Opry until 1974. It still hosts Opry events several times a week as well as welcoming everyone from blues group the Tedeschi Trucks Band to Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds. A little further out of the centre is the legendary Bluebird Café, where songwriters play in the round.
If you’re here on a Monday night, visit 3rd and Lindsley, where the Time Jumpers play. A collective of Nashville’s top veteran session players, they include country star Vince Gill (infrequently now as he tours with the Eagles) and the brilliant steel guitar virtuoso Paul Franklin. This is pure Western swing, or cowboy jazz as the band members describe it; genteel, lilting, melodic.
Then there are the excellent museums. As well as the Country Music Hall of Fame, there are the Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline museums side-by-side, and RCA Studio B, where Elvis, the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison recorded.
Don’t miss the city’s two great music shops, Grimey’s and Third Man Records. The latter, owned by Detroit migrant and music superstar Jack White, is now much more than a record store, more a sprawling creative Aladdin’s Cave that features, among other things, the world’s only live music venue with direct-to-acetate recording capabilities.
A short drive beyond the centre are the rolling Tennessee Hills, bucolic countryside that could be the America of Norman Rockwell paintings.
Nashville has come a long way since country music catapulted it on to the world stage. Today, its image is that of a Southern renaissance city, with healthcare by far the number one revenue producer – more than 500 companies earn a global revenue of more than US$40 billion annually. Tourism, which includes a steady growth in the business and convention sectors, brings in 14.5 million visitors a year, earning the city US$6.5 billion annually, while the music industry earns just under US$6 billion.
Tied to all of these industries is technology, with tech-based start-ups a major growth area – the city is ranked 13th out of 25 rising US tech hubs, according to the US Chamber of Commerce. Nashville has the fourth-strongest economy in the US and the lowest rate of unemployment, while Forbes polls have rated it the fifth best place for business and careers and the fourth best city for white-collar jobs. Basically, it’s a boom town.
The boom has seen a wave of migrants from more crowded, less user-friendly US cities, running at more than 100 arrivals a day for many years. Only this year has that number plateaued and the population appears to have stabilised at just under two million – which is double the population in 1990. And its reputation for being friendly, manageable, well run and well groomed – it consistently tops “favourite city” polls – has also led to an influx of big stars buying homes in the city, including Nicole Kidman, Ed Sheeran and Johnny Depp.
SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY
That UK travellers, both business and leisure, have embraced the Tennessee state capital is evidenced by the success of British Airways’ direct B787 Dreamliner services from London. Launched in May last year as a five times-weekly service, the route is to go daily at the end of next month, adding a First class cabin to the mix.
Simon Brooks, BA’s senior vice-president of sales for North America, says: “London-Nashville is the quickest new route that we’ve moved to a daily service in the past ten years. Its success is largely down to the fact that for more than two decades business and leisure travellers in the city didn’t have a direct flight to Europe. It’s certainly a city on the rise and a great part of the success of this flight is down to the revived convenience and efficiency for travellers. Going daily will further support this.”
With the boom has also come a transformation from small city with too few hotel rooms and plain Southern restaurants serving high-cholesterol food to a modern metropolis that is a foodie capital with rooms to spare. Over the past five years, more than 5,000 new hotel rooms have opened in the city centre and, according to Butch Spyridon, president and chief executive of the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corporation, another 5,000 are under construction, representing the largest growth anywhere in the urban US.
“In 2004 we launched a strategic plan that focused on big events, a new convention centre and building a true, authentic music brand, and it is the development of these three things that has contributed greatly to the city’s success,” he says.
Hotels available to the visiting business traveller range from trendy boutique boltholes (Thomson Nashville in the Gulch area, the new Fairlane hotel, the high-fashion 21c Museum hotel, and the retrocool Noelle) to large, classic city hotels (the 533-room JW Marriott Nashville, which opened in July last year, and the 376-room Westin) and historic properties that reflect the Old South (the Hermitage, which opened
‘London-Nashville is the quickest new route that we’ve moved to a daily service in the past ten years’