American South
Camilla Swift
Landing in Nashville from London, I had lyric after lyric from country songs swirling through my head.
It’s a quaint, old mystical city / Where legends and idols have stood / It’s a place, where dreams come to harbor / A country boy’s Hollywood.
That’s what Marty Stuart sang, and so, in my head, I had an idea of Nashville as a cutesie little southern town, full of honky-tonk bars, cowboys and with wannabe Glen Campbells in every bar.
Every country singer comes to Nashville, whether that’s the likes of Taylor Swift – whose family moved to Nashville when she was 14 so that she could pursue her country music career – or Dolly Parton, who moved here the day after she left high school. Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn; there’s a reason why Nashville has taken on the name of ‘Music City USA’.
Perhaps the clue should have been in the fact that British Airways now flies direct from London to Nashville five times a week. Nashville is still very much the home of country, but it’s far from a small
town. In fact, it’s now the most populated city in Tennessee, and although it has both a thriving music and tourism industry, its largest industry is in fact healthcare.
It’s not healthcare that tourists come to Nashville for, though. In more recent years, Nashville has been rechristened ‘Nashvegas’ due to its popularity with hen parties, and at 8pm on Broadway you can certainly see why. In fact, at any hour of the day Broadway is bustling. In the mornings, groups climbed aboard Nashville’s ‘Pedal Tavern’ (a 15-person, BYO bike tour around the city, with multiple bar stops). In the afternoon, both the shops and bars were bustling (as Jimmy Buffett says, it’s five o’clock somewhere), and in the evening every saloon was blasting country music.
I steered clear of an earlymorning margarita, and instead plumped for breakfast at the 24-hour Sun Diner for a pile of bacon, sausage, fried potato and waffles, washed down with cinnamon coffee. Not my usual fare it has to be said, but as a one off, it sure tasted good. Next stop was the Country Music Hall of Fame – Nashville’s number one tourist attraction, and probably something of a cliché. Then again, there’s a reason it is the top stop in Nashville. Telling the story of country music from its roots in fiddle tunes and folk ballads which were transported over the pond by British settlers back in the 17th and 18th centuries, to the first recordings of country music in the 1920s, through honky tonk, rockabilly and the likes of Johnny Cash and Elvis, until in the 1990s, country pop hit the mainstream. The museum has a huge collection of country memorabilia, and I found it easy to while away a good couple of hours here. I finished off the visit with a trip to RCA Studio B, Nashville’s oldest surviving record studio, where
Nashville has been rechristened ‘Nashvegas’ due to its popularity with hen parties
we tried to summon up the sounds of the studio’s previous occupants; the likes of Dolly Parton, The Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison and Elvis, who recorded over 200 records in this studio.
I might love country music and have longed to visit Nashville but this was something of a whistlestop tour. Actually, Tennessee wasn’t even my main destination. I was really in the US to watch the Kentucky Derby – the highlight of the American racing calendar, and the highest attended horse race in all of the US. With Louisville just a three-hour drive from Nashville, I hopped into a car from downtown Nashville where my driver was ready and waiting. ‘I’ve never spoken to someone with an accent before,’ my 20-somethingyear-old driver exclaimed, before proceeding to regale me with stories about his football coaching job and his dog for the entire journey…
When we did pull up in Louisville – the largest city in Kentucky and home to the Kentucky Derby – it was outside the Seelbach Hilton, an early 20th-century hotel which both inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and played host to Al Capone, who would sneak out through the hotel’s hidden tunnels and stairways when the police came calling.
In Derby week, however, the hotel is full of pop-up hat shops and racing aficionados. The Derby bus leaves from just outside the hotel, taking you straight to the Derby racecourse, Churchill Downs. Unlike many British racecourses, which are often surrounded by grassland, Churchill Downs is surrounded by parking lots
14 The Oldie GO AWAY January 2020
and branches of KFC. It feels more like arriving at a football or rugby match than a race meeting, and the differences continue once you get inside. Where in England it’s Pimm’s and champagne, here it’s all about Mint Juleps or ‘Lilies’, which are the official cocktail of the Kentucky Oaks (as in England, the Oaks is the fillies’ equivalent, run on the Friday before Saturday’s Derby).
There are two tracks at Churchill Downs; a turf one and a ‘dirt’ track, where the horses run on what is essentially earth. It’s this dirt surface that the Kentucky Derby is run on. The wet weather which accompanied this year’s Derby meant that the race was one big ‘sloppy mess’ as the Americans would have it, with horses coming back covered in mud; it’s a wonder that any of the jockeys could see what they were doing.
And, of course, there’s the pronunciation problem. When I told people I was in Kentucky ‘for the “dah-bee”’, they looked at me blankly. Over in the US, it’s the ‘der-bee’ that everyone stakes their money on.
But many other things are the same. The fancy hats, worn with pride only once or twice a year. The love of the punters for their sport. The horses. And, perhaps, the weather. This year’s Kentucky Derby was a wipe out, with most of the talk beforehand revolving around just how ‘sloppy’ the track might be, and how the horses would handle it. But the racegoers embraced the rain, donning less than stylish plastic ponchos over their smart raceday clothes. Now that’s definitely not something you would see at Ascot! But it did the trick, and although I initially held firm and refused to put mine on, within a few hours I had been convinced otherwise, and kept dry while the rain plummeted down.
In fact, it turned out that there was far more to discuss than simply the weather, when the apparent winner of the race, Maximum Security, was disqualified, and the prize given to second place finisher Country House. To say this caused something of an upset would be an understatement. It was the first time in history that a Derby winner had been disqualified for something that happened on the track; so I suppose the one thing I can say is that when I went to Kentucky, I saw history in the making.