20th Anniversary Adventure 2016 - Day 11

The Parthenon in Centennial Park

I woke up this morning to see Chad staring down at me, his face 6 inches from mine.

“Are you ready?” he asked. “Let’s go! Let’s go!”

He was ready to visit more country music museums, so we ate breakfast at our hotel’s restaurant, 1808 Grille, and then went to the hop-on/hop-off trolley station downtown. The trolley tours stop at 16 locations, but we were interested in exploring just a few of them. Our first stop was The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum where we spent over 3 hours. We saw the most lengendary memorabilia; one new exhibit, “Dylan, Cash, and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City,” chronicled Bob Dylan’s 1966 decision to record an album in Nashville and how his paternership with Johnny Cash in 1969 ultimately changed the face of music by bringing together artists of different genres and changing music culture. Every exhibit we looked at gave us chills until we started getting to the new stars of country music and then our reations were more like, “Meh.” There is no way I could describe to you the iconic things we saw and how they affected us without blathering on, so I’ll let the pictures show you some of the highlights. At one point, I got a text from Chad that just said, “I’m in a corner crying.”

Elvis's custom limo
The 40-coat sheen is from a mixture
Of crushed diamonds and fish scales.
Inside the limo is a gold-plated TV and record player

Just some of the 854 gold and platinum
Country music albums awarded in the 20th century

Johnny Cash recorded Bob Dylan's
"Wanted Man." Here, the first 2 verses and chorus are
In Dylan's handwriting, the last verse in Cash's

Guess whose dress this was

The original lyrics to "Jolene" handwritten by Dolly herself

For lunch we walked to Barlines, a restaurant at the Omni Nashville Hotel, where a live cover band called Mike McAtee and The Eventuals was playing. We ordered our lunch and listened to what sounded like a song request list we would have picked ourselves. We chatted with our waitress, who is from Olympia and used to work at Dirty Dave’s, ten minutes from our house. We could’ve sat all day, but we got antsy to see the next top on the tour, the Ryman Auditorium.

This iconic theater, built in the 1880s, housed The Grand Ole Opry for thirty years. It was also the location of Country Music Association Awards, and it’s where Johnny Cash filmed his variety show in the 60s. The list of apperances at this theater, from Booker T. Washington to Houdini, from Louis Armstrong to Elvis, is unbelievable. We sat in the balcony for a while, looking down at the stage as I wondered if Dolly Parton had ever used the same toilet I used in the lobby.

Eventually, we’d seen everything we could, so we hopped on the trolley and rode it to the Parthenon. Our youngest daughter Ashley is a Greek mythology fanatic and was excited for us to explore this full-scale replica of the ancient temple in Athens. This Parthenon was built in 1897 for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition. We walked up the stairs to where a 42’10” statue of Athena stood. It was a stunning work of art. She is gilded in 8 pounds of gold leaf, her shield is 15’ in diameter, and as I looked up at her, I wondered if people in ancient Greece stood before their version of the statue the same way we stood in front of Johnny Cash’s guitar. With 10 minutes before the Parthenon closed, we played hide-and-seek behind the giant pillars and then had a stairs vs. elevator race. Another thing ancient Greeks did at the Parthenon, I’m sure.

Athena, Greek goddess of wisom

We finished the afternoon on the trolley tour and disembarked at the riverfront. We strolled through downtown, past the honky tonks. It was 5:00 and the sidewalks overflowed with drunk people. Many of them already stumbling around, eyes half-mast, their faces telling me they realized they’ve made a huge mistake. The music pouring out of every bar and restaurant became this racket that drove me crazy, so we called our hotel shuttle and bid farewell to Nashville’s own Bourbon Street.

We wanted to eat our last dinner in Nashville where there were no drunk people acting like fools and where we didn’t have to avoid stepping in vomit on the sidewalk, so we chose Sambuca in a neighborhood called The Gulch. We made reservations, put on our nicest vacation clothes, and headed to dinner. We ordered from the small plates menu: brussel sprouts, tuna tartare, and buca beignets. Dinner arrived as the band started, and to our surprise, it was Mike McAtee and The Eventuals. We were seated upstairs on the patio, but could watch the band via live-stream TVs. 

We lingered over dinner before finally deciding to go downstairs and watch the band. People were calling out requests and the band knew every song. We were seated near an obnoxious bachelorette party, so we called our shuttle and went back to our hotel and watched Full House and Friends. We live like rappers, Chad and I.

“Johnny was and is the North Star; you could guide your ship by him. The greatest of the the greats then and now.”

    -Bob Dylan on Johnny Cash

-Rachel