Nashville Brash

In Nashville, everybody’s looking for a lucky break. Here in in MUSIC CITY, USA the Capital of the State of Whiskey on the buckle of the Bible Belt, women ain’t afraid to spell out their first names in the phone directory.

Everybody in Nashville is singing and song writing in everyday places—taxicabs, laundromats, bus stations and Burger Kings. The waitresses who serves up my biscuits and red-eye gravy, and the cabbies and cowboy boot sellers who proffer their homemade demos—they’re all talkin’ cuts, charts, flacks, hair acts, pitches and pluggers; trades, spec deals, skins, bullets and singles and looking for a lucky break in MUSIC CITY, USA — Capital of the State of Whiskey, on the buckle of the Bible Belt, where women ain’t afraid to spell out their first names in the phone directory.

I feel like singing the phone book propped on my Opryland Hotel bed. It reads like the cast of a giant country ballad, with names I heard back when I was an eight-year-old Tennessee cowgirl in a fake buckskin jacket—names like Earl and Bertalee, Clydie, Flossie and Fannie-Mai. Heft it into the shower - and why not? You could sing the Nashville phone directory and it would sound just dandy if you gave it the proper twang. That’s one thing I’ve never lost—the ability to reproduce from childhood memory the twangiest east Tennessee hillbilly drawl, and to pronounce my name: Nain-cee Lah hnn! But I was feeling very disoriented coming back to see the city of my birth after a coon’s age.

Outside, the leaves are flamey reds and oranges but November is as balmy and zingy with cricket song as July. In my room was a promotional Easter basket stuffed with chocolate bunnies, jelly beans and tulip bulbs, (which I took for chestnuts) and literature about the 3 day/2 night “Easter in Song and Story” spring package. Inside the atrium of the 1,891-room Edmonton-Mallesque Opryland Hotel—where I should have requested roller blades with my room key—I was in a tropical rain forest and it was Christmas. Santa’s sun-bleached plastic reindeer are littered around the banana trees, and fallen elves are floating in the reflecting pools of the four-acre, six-storey jungle sprouting more flora than the Montreal Biodome; while tourists with New Joy-zee accents stroll around in ten-gallon hats and snakeskin cowboy boots singin’ the Whitey Shafer hit All My Exe’s Live in Texas. 

Where’s Elvis? Where’s Davy Crockett? The house where I’d lived on Gale Lane was still in one piece, but my childhood idols had kicked the bucket and now haunted the fridge magnet shops. Oh god, is Nashville brash.

Nashville is brash, with its hip now Grand Ole Opry, its Opryland USA Theme Park, and glitzy tee-shirt temples to local deities. There’s Conway’s “Twitty City,” the House of Cash (Johnny’s) the Jim Reeves Museum, the Elvis Presley Museum, Roy Acuff’s Museum and Minney Pearl’s Museum, Barbara Mandrell Country, Marty Robbins’ Gift Emporium, the Hank Williams Jr. Museum, Music Village, U.S.A., and all those worshipful wax museums. “Tinker-toy Kingdoms” jokes my friend Louise Dugas, a Montreal pop music critic born-again to Country Music after three days in Nashville. But that’s the fun of being in Nashville—watching country fans at the glittering altars of their idols, and catching the song-writing hysteria in the air. 

You gotta sing your way around this town of one million when 25,000 are in the music biz and the rest are breakin’ their necks tryin.’Singing for tips at Gilley’s Bar eight hours a day, busking around Music Row in a cowboy hat, hanging out at Shoney’s Hotel, the crashpad of the stars and wannabe-stars. And dodging scam artists and recording sharks promising overnight Fame ‘n Fortune.

How many country songwriters does it take to change a light bulb?

Three: one to change the bulb and two to write songs about how much we’re gonna miss the old one.

Only three ? The figure in that local joke is out of date, if I’m to believe James Breedwell, who peddled me his demo one night at the Silver Dollar Saloon. This was the old whorehouse which distiller George Dickle of Tennessee sippin’ whiskey— “ain’t nothin’ better”fame—had paved with silver dollars before the turn of the century. It’s now one of eight Nashville venues, like Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge and the Bluebird Cafe where songwriters strut their stuff every week. 

James, who auditions the Saloon’s singers, came to Nashville from “Cincy” (…natti) with only $30 in his pocket, “ready to duck knives to write songs.” I thought he meant ducking knives at a local carnival booth, but he meant mugger’s knives—Nashville muggers mug for hot new lyrics!

“You gotta earn trust in this town, ‘cause lottsa people are scared their songs’re gonna be stolen,” James informed me in a gravelly whisper. 

“Everybody here wants to have a cut. With Garth. With Travis. With Reba. The way to get your name known is to write with everybody in town, so I write with 75-80 different co-writers, sometimes four to a song.” 

“Sounds promiscuous,” I say. “What do you use for protection?”

“Numbers...safety in numbers. Somethin’s gotta hit. Listen, we got country music fanatics comin’ here from Oklahoma, Florida, Alaska, to Russia to Paris to Zabway…”

“…you mean Zimbabwe?” 

“…Yeah, whatever it’s called. You have people who can’t even speak English trying to sing Country. One of the guys I write with is from Czechoslovakia.”

Will Breedwell sell? He had a nice Elvisque kinda voice, but his demo had only three songs, including When the bottle’s dry, you’re gone. Go figure.

Let’s face it, nobody will ever replace The King. How many Elvis impersonators does it take...to prove this?

Most of the Elvis memorabilia is stashed at Graceland, his gold-plated estate in Memphis. But at the Nashville Country Music Hall of Fame on Music Row, I pay homage to Elvis’ 24K gold-plate trimmed 1960 Caddy with 24k gold-plated black-and-white TV, and gold-plated ice cube trays. And on a tour of RCA’s legendary Studio B, a songwriter named Doak Sneed showed me where Elvis recorded Christmas songs in July by turning the air conditioning up to “crop kill’ to put him in a frosty snowman mood.

I can hardly believe it now, but I became an Elvis impersonator at the age of 12 in Indianapolis, Indiana. At a ceremonious dinner for 50 tax attorneys and their wives, where my father Elmer Lyon was guest of honor, I slicked on some pomade and sang “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog” with hip gyrations and a Sears Roebuck guitar. Not for my father. For Elvis.