16 April – Nashville

It was a beautiful sunny day in Nashville, and we caught a cab into downtown to the visitor’s centre. We picked up brochures and maps and tickets for the hop on hop off bus service. We decided to ride all the way round first and get a feel for what was available before deciding where to get off.

The loop took about 90 minutes and passed:

·       -  The Country Music Hall of Fame

·       -    The State Capitol Building – new Greco style building, lots of columns. The only state capitol building to have people buried in it.

·        -  The Musicians Hall of Fame

·        -  The Farmers Market – good for food.

·        -   Marathon Motors Creative Village – the guys from the show American Pickers have a shop here.

·        -   Nelson’s Green Brier Distillery

·        -  The Parthenon - yes, its an exact replica of the one in Athens.

·        -   Vanderbilt University – apparently cost $60 - $80k annually to attend and they have a 98% graduation rate.

·        -  Hattie B’s Hot Chicken - the line was massive, and the tour guide told us it looked like an hour wait to get in, which means it’s a slow day. The hottest chicken you can get is called “Get the Cluck Out” and its lethally hot.

·       -   Music Row – several blocks of recording studios and hotels where the stars stay when they are in town to record. The guide told us that Dolly Parton was only 13 years old when she recorded her first song “Puppy Love” at the RCA studios. She was so nervous she crashed her car into the wall of the studio. We were wondering what she was doing driving at age 13…

·       -  The Gulch – restaurants and bars

·       - The Center for the Visual Arts.

After doing the loop, we decided to stop at Marathon Motors Creative Village. It’s a Motor factory that has been converted into little arts and craft shops, distilleries and antique shops. We did some whiskey tasting at 3 distilleries and bought some Salted Caramel Whiskey (yum), had lunch at a little diner and wandered around the shops. The American Pickers shop was disappointing. The interesting pieces were all marked as not for sale. There was a blurb about how all the pieces in the shop had featured on the show, so that probably justified the prices.

We did a tour at Nelson’s Green Brier Distillery. It’s a really interesting story – it was started by the Nelson family back in the days before Prohibition and grew into an international exporter because of their quality, and being the first distillery to bottle whiskey, rather than sell just by the barrels. Mr Nelson passed away and his wife continued to run the family business in an era where women were not allowed to vote or own property, much less own a business. At the peak Green Brier was providing around a third of the total whiskey production in Tennessee.

Prohibition came to Tennessee and Louisa Nelson had the foresight to load 8000 barrels onto a train and head over the state line where she traded for another 6 years until finally shut down by a nationwide Prohibition. The distillery and warehouse in Green Brier fell into disrepair, and that might have been the end of the story. Except in 2006, two brothers, Andy and Charlie Nelson were on a trip to Green Brier and discovered the story of the distillery. Intrigued by the fact that it had borne their family name, they started searching the history and found that they were in fact the great, great, great grandsons of Mr Nelson. This sparked the desire to buy the property and restart the family business. The local historical archives even revealed the original recipes, so they set to work. One brother became an apprentice distiller under a distiller for Makers Mark, and the other went to Business School. When they had both graduated, they pooled their scant resources to set up the distillery again. They were even able to reactivate the original licence – number 5 in a state that had over 4000 distillers prior to Prohibition.  They are about to release their first commercial quantity of Tennessee Whiskey, 108 years after the family business made its last batch. What a story! The Whiskey was pretty good too.

The bus dropped us back downtown, and we had a look at the Walk of Fame. Not being country music fans we didn’t recognise most of the names, but we did see Dolly Parton, Roy Orbison, Keith Urban, Elvis and Kid Rock. 

We strolled up and down Broadway, a street of pubs with live music, then headed back to the RV.