Nashville, Music City, USA

Nashville, Tennessee. Music City, USA. The Heart of Country Music. This was the place I visited last week.

The three of us, my husband, my son and I, went downtown on the first night. Broadway was the main drag in downtown Nashville, full of honky-tonk bars and music halls, open to the street with one place’s music blended into the next as you walked by. Sometimes, there were two bands playing in the same place – one upstairs and one downstairs, so what we wound up hearing was a loud cacophony of sounds, a deluge of noise that engulfed relentlessly. And it wasn’t just the bars and that street – some of the Uber and Lift drivers had the radio turned up to an unpleasant (to me) level, including one that blasted modern Christian music at me. My biggest regret was not wearing ear plugs, or having my earbuds in – not for my own music, but to just block the sound. It would have made Music City that much more tolerable. That said, I am glad I got to experience and shop downtown, because now I can say that I did it (and never have to do it again).

It was different for Jeff and our son, Sam. They soaked it all in, going to the Station Inn to hear blue grass, and went to see Ray Stevens perform. They visited Jack White’s Third Man Records and visited two guitar shops.

I found Nashvillians uniformly friendly and outgoing - from one Lyft driver with whom I…