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April 15th 2011

Published: January 27th 2012

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Hank Williams

Suit and guitar of the legendary country songwriter

Country Hall of Fame

Today I explore an aspect of the American experience I know little about, country music.

A place to do so is the Country Hall of Fame in Nashville.

The Hall has been around since the 1960s, but the building is quite new.

One warning: if one is allergic to tour buses, this may not be the place.

The hall traces the history of the country music industry, rather than country music as a whole.

I found this a little disappointing.

It starts roughly at the period when country radio started.

Country music grew out of English and Scotts-Irish folk songs played by rural farmers and miners in Appalachia.

The exhibit opens with a black and white photo from the Depression of a mountain farmer holding his guitar, staring directly into the camera.

Eventually, people started travelling from town to town playing, usually at church events.

When rural AM radio started, these groups became a programming staple, and the industry was born.

It grew in fits and starts.

Investors were not convinced that music popular with a poor rural audience would sell

Country Music Hall of Fame

Entrance to the Country Music Hall of Fame. The windows are designed to look like piano keys

well.

A million selling record by early star Jimmy Rogers convinced them otherwise.

The hall has a booth to listen to it.

The western music often associated with country started in the Depression.

During this time people wanted music to escape.

Depressed rural Appalachia was definitely NOT what they had in mind.

The west, however, was still seen as a mythic landscape, and many acts chose to exploit this in their songs.

The singing cowboy, personified by Gene Autry, became popular in this era.

The next big change happed in the early 1950s with Elvis Presley.

Elvis had grown up with country music.

He merged it with percussion driven Mississippi blues to create what is now called Rock and Roll.

Country artists and writers responded to this challenge in different ways.

Some created music that emphasized the folk roots, now called bluegrass.

Others added Elvis’s slick production to their music to create the so-called smooth Nashville sound.

Others still added percussive elements to create rockabilly.

The most famous star of this era merged traditional country with social protest folk songs

Jimmy Rogers Memorbelia

Items belonging to Jimmy Rogers, the first country star.

to create a sound all his own; he was Johnny Cash.

The most famous country star is probably Hank Williams.

He wrote songs of heartache and loss that are still beloved by fans.

He was also a serious alcoholic who lived most of what he wrote about so well.

He drank himself to death at age 29 after taking prescription narcotics for chronic headaches.

The museum has an entire room on his life.

Before his death, he had three children, one of whom became the country star Hank Williams Junior.

The younger Hank struggled with his father’s long shadow for decades.

People wanted to see him as a substitute for someone who died to soon rather than a songwriter in his own right.

He branched into rockabilly after nearly dying in a mountaineering accident in 1976, and finally found acceptance outside his father’s legacy.

During this time, he wrote a song called “Rowdy Friends Come Over Tonight”.

A decade later, the ABC TV network asked him to rewrite it for their NFL broadcasts.

He agreed on the condition they hire him to sing it on

Conrad Twitty

Custom car of country star Conrad Twitty. Note the saddle in the center, the pistol door handles and hood ornament, the cowhide seats, and the silver dollars on the dash.

camera, and “Are You Ready For Some Football?” entered the pop culture lexicon.

It’s rather ironic that Hank Williams Jr is better known for a pop culture artifact than anything else he did.

Late Update: Hank Williams Jr. was fired from Monday Night Football in 2011 over controversial comments he made.

Of course, the museum mentions the most famous country radio program of them all, the Grand Ole Opry.

It started as a local music program in Nashville.

The name started as a joke in 1927, when the host quipped that the previous hour had been the grand opera, and this hour would be the Grand Ole Opry instead.

It stuck.

The show became a fixture throughout the South and broke many country stars.

It’s still a radio programming fixture.

As one should expect for a Hall of Fame museum, this one is filled with memorabilia.

The most unusual artifacts have to be the two custom cars.

A country star from Texas named Conrad Twitty had a Cadillac Coup De Ville turned into a cowboy machine.

It has a pair of horns on the front,

Chet Atkin's guitar

He considered this instrument better than a Rolls Royce

pistols for door handles, a silver plated shotgun on the front hood, and another on the trunk.

In place of the usual center armrest was a miniature saddle.

The coup de grace were the hundred silver dollars that he glued to the interior.

The other car is one of Elvis’s custom Buicks.

This one has a bar and TV in the back, among other things.

One section has prized instruments.

It has the guitar that Hank Williams used in nearly all his concerts.

Merle Haggard’s guitar is also there, along with Roy Roger’s.

Pride of place goes to Chet Atkin’s guitar, who many performers considered the best picker of them all (fans of A Prairie Home Companion may remember him as a frequent guest).

The accompanying quote notes that he bought the best wooden guitar available at the time, and it felt like getting a Rolls Royce.

The collection goes far beyond guitars and cars.

One entire wall is made up of gold records by country stars.

Another is made up of posters from Hatch Show Print.

This print shop made posters for virtually

Hatch Show Print posters

A small sampling of a wall of posters from Hatch Show Print

every show in Nashville, and their distinctive woodblock style became a trademark.

Many fans now collect them.

There are pistols and hats and outfits galore.

There are multiple sequined outfits from the rhinestone cowboy era of the seventies.

There are many booths where one can listen to landmark recordings.

There are tributes to stars of the past by people they influenced, including one for Johnny Cash by Bruce Springsteen.

The final part of the Hall is the actual Hall of Fame.

It’s located in a circular room with an inverse radio tower hanging down the middle.

The floor is made of lacquered wooden boards, to recall the simple rural shacks where the music started.

Each inductee has a plaque on the wall.

The expected performers are there; but also song writers, executives, producers, and session musicians who played on hundreds of records.

There are a surprising number of women, not all of whom are singers.

Three members are also members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and Sun Records founder Sam Phillips.

Inscribed on the wall above them all

Johnny Cash Plaque

One of only three men in both the Country and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame

is a quote from a famous song from the Carter Family: “May the circle remain unbroken”, our past is the roots of our future.

Music Valley

I couldn’t leave Nashville without experiencing its gaudier side.

Nashville attracts lots of music fans, and there are plenty of attractions ready to extract money from them.

Most of these sorts of attractions are located in a suburban area called Music Valley.

It began in the 1970s with a country theme park (which is now gone), and has grown into an explosion of tacky tourism.

The most astonishing thing here may just be a hotel.

The Gaylord Opryland Hotel started as a hotel for the theme park, but has since grown into an attraction in its own right.

It’s listed as such in guide books.

What makes it a Nashville institution is that the hotel is the largest and gaudiest in the world outside Las Vegas.

The entrance has seven rows of valet parking.

There are a dozen checkin desks, and five concierges.

The main hotel is organized around a series of garden courts, astonishingly large indoor places that must be

Opryland Hotel garden court

One of the garden courts at the Opryland Hotel. Note the pond beyond the walkway. Believe it or not, this is one of the smaller ones.

seen to be believed.

In the words of the designer, the goal was to bring the outside into the hotel.

These spaces give any theme park gardens a run for their money.

There are loads of tropical plants, including live palm trees.

One can walk among the plants and flowers, or above them on metal bridges.

There are artificial lakes and waterfalls.

One court has a jumping fountain that features little mounds.

Water jets launch from one mound and land in another.

Another has a fountain with water jets that jump up and down in patterns to music.

The largest court features an artificial island in the middle of an artificial lake.

The hotel offers a narrated boat ride!

If all that isn’t enough, one can partake of a recreation of a Southern plantation home that doubles as a restaurant, a recreation of a street from New Orleans (including ironwork balconies), a tiki bar among the palm trees, and dozens of other things.

There are maps everywhere, because it’s very easy to get lost in the maze.

I tired of the place soon enough, and headed on

Opryland Hotel Dancing Fountain

The dancing fountain at the Opryland Hotel, with the artificial island behind it. This entire area is indoors!

the road.

This drive was pretty ugly.

A very strong cold front was sweeping through the southeast bringing thunderstorms, wind, hail, and possible tornadoes.

I can deal with the first three, but the last one scares me witless (New England rarely gets twisters).

I kept an eye on the horizon as I drove.

As it turns out, the caution wasn’t needed.

The drive was windy, but it was manageable.

Near dark the cloud cover finally broke, giving an amazing sunset, the best so far outside Florida.

I found out the next day that North Carolina had been hit by dozens of tornadoes later that night, including several places I had been only two weeks earlier.

Scary thought.

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