When life gives you lemons, go listen to Johnny Cash
Posted on | July 6, 2009 | 1 Comment
On a trip like this it’s difficult to keep even bad experiences in my mind for long. Sleeping in a differnt hotel every night lends itself to a kind of rolling amensia. Waking up in Nashville after a rainy independence day it was hard remember that we had an axe to grind with the music city.
The Country Music Hall of Fame And Museum was really a much better museum experience than I was expecting. Most of the space was dedicated to the birth and popularity of country music through the nineteen sixties with appropriate amounts of space dedicated to Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and Hank Williams. Thankfully, guests are spared learning too much about the Judds or Garth Brooks. Most exhibitions are well considered, well written and there’s plenty of video and audio content that doesn’t require any special audio tour nonsense.
After the museum, refreshed and packing a brand new guitar shaped fly swatter we headed down to Hatch Show Print, the legendary letterpress studio that has been priting country music concert posters for decades. I knew the studio was usually open to the public but would be closed on a Sunday. The studio manager must have noticed leesy fogging up the glass and came to let us inside. The rules were simple, he was printing, there was not going to be a history lesson or a tour. We could look around, take pictures and stay as long as we wanted. After the intial awkwardness faded we felt right at home. We talked about New York, Nashville and why anyone would go to Arkansas while he set up his print. At the end of our visit we all shook hands, Leesy gave him his card and we left. We walked back to the hotel with shit eating grins on our faces. Whatever remained of our Nashville related rage had just been obliterated by the outsretched hand of one of America’s foremost letterpress printers. It was as though the universe had thought it over and decided to do something nice after the trials of the previous day.
So what do you do to top that? You go the Loretta Lynn Museum. Like some kind of redneck Graceland, the museum packs in more gift shops, ramshackle “authentic” buildings, giant indian sculptures, and country trash crap into a single location than I would have thought possible. It’s tough to describe other than to say that there’s a gift shop with Loretta Lynn embroidered throw pillows. All the exhibitions, including a section that features nothing but dresses worn by OTHER famous women, have barely legible hand written descriptions by Loretta herself. If I remember one part of this trip until I die, it will be this one. Even if you think that A Coal Miner’s Daughter is probably a strip club in West Virginia this place is worth a visit.
And what would a day of Country Music kitsch be without a barbecue dinner? As we drove towards memphis I started calling barbecue restaurants. Fortunately after a few duds someone answered the phone at Germantown Commisary one of the places at the top of my must try bbq list. I was giddy as I punched the new address into our GPS. I rarely saw it on “best of” Memphis lists but had read enough on the Internets to know that there was some great barbecue happening here. It was amazing. The cups in the restaurant say it all: “So Good You’ll Slap Yo Mama.” Leesy said it was the best barbecue that she’s had on this trip. I had to agree that my pork sandwich(chopped) was one of the best I’ve had in my life.
And so we headed to our hotel satisfied both with barbecue and with the order that had apparently been restored to our trip.
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One Response to “When life gives you lemons, go listen to Johnny Cash”
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July 8th, 2009 @ 9:29 am
“Redneck Graceland?” Isn’t that kind of like wet water?
Seriously, love the posts, keep ‘em coming. New York is subtly diminished by both of your absence.