The Athens of the South

Last night Plot and Duck took a walk down Broadway, not the Theater and Times Square one but the Music City one. Nashville, Tennessee, conjures up many memories for both Plot and Duck because both lived there once, before they met each other, Ducknik first, when she was doing her year of graduate school at Vanderbilt, and Plotnik a few years later, when he arrived by himself with two guitars and left with a new band but only one guitar.

The Great Plotnik was the Lesser Nobody the day he arrived in what was then a very small city, still unaware of the hugendous Country Music waiting in the wings. Nashville still displayed the recent remnants of segregation – the Colored Only water fountains in the park, the churches where blacks still had to sit upstairs. Duck had been there the year of the first sit-ins to attempt to desegregate the Municipal Pool. When the Supreme Court enforced desegregation, the city went along with the ruling by closing the pool.



When Plot lived in Nashville the Parthenon out in Centennial Park didn't look so spiffy (did you know Nashville is known as the Athens of the South?)and downtown's Music Row consisted of nothing but one block of record stores, a few curio shops and the old Ryman Auditorium, from whose moldy stage they broadcast the Grand Ole Opry, live, every Saturday Night, just like they had done for the last fifty years.

All of that is hard to find now – they have ringed the city with freeways and a belt parkway and torn down practically everything that Plot and Duck knew. Music Row still looks the same, as long as you don’t look up. The old three story brick buildings remain, but in back of them all are enormous, brightly lit skyscrapers and hotels and a convention center and a Country Music Hall of Fame. It looks a lot like a very small Bourbon Street or Westwood Blvd.

When Plot once took his two guitars down to Broadway to play and sing, hoping to have a few tourists throw coins into his upturned cowboy hat, there was no live music in clubs on the street, none at all (and nobody gave him any money either), but lots and lots of kids with guitars and upturned cowboy hats. Last night Plottie counted at least fifteen clubs offering a gaggle of guitar players, each with their Fender Strats playing in the same key (E), competing to have the tinniest-voiced singer drawl out a tune. But there was only one skinny mandolin player busking for change, in a dark doorway out of police eyesight. When Plot passed by, he hissed “Thanks for nothin.’”



Duck met her Grad School boyfriend near a tree in the park in front of the Parthenon. Three summers later Plot probably sat under that same tree. Last night, though, there was little familiar left. The old apartments where Plot and Duck had lived have long been torn down. It was fun to tell the old stories again to each other, though, and to reflect that it was a good thing they didn't meet 'til both had moved away from the Athens of the South and into the Big Apple.