Saturday 23rd January 2010 - Off to the Grand Ole Opry

          I had contemplated going to Memphis for a visit, but when I have to choose between the blues and country music, country music is going to win every time.  So it's two hours down the road to Nashville.  Anyway, Nashville's pretty-well on my route to Alabama

           It's an uneventful journey.  Tennessee is long and thin, and comes in three bits.  I'm going from West Tennessee to Middle Tennessee.  The truck plates tell me this is a route from almost everywhere to almost everywhere else, inclusing some of the Canadian provinces.

 

          I've bought a ticket for the Grand Ole Opry tonight.  The Grand Ole Opry, as I'm sure you're aware, is not actually a place, it's a radio program.,  But for most of it's life, it broadcast from the Ryland Auditorium in downtown Nashville.  This is the former Union Gospel Tabernacle, with the horseshoe bench seating which everyone associates with the Grand Ole Opry.  It now broadcasts mainly from a giant resort hotel on the edge of town, but in the winter, it returns to the Ryland.  I can not only discover this from the internet, I can also find a hotel round the corner.

          I check in, and wander out on the Broadway to see what's what.  One section of the Broadway is a row of bars offering free live music, all day.  One bar, instead of offering live music, offers seventy-two draft beers.  The AT&T building in the centre of town looks to me like it something out of a Batman comic

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It turns out the natives call it the "Batman Building".

 

          The Opry is not as traditional as it used to be.  There are drummers and electric guitars everywhere.  But each act got two numbers, and it went on for an hour.  I don't suppose they actually do it live now, so they can trim at the edges, but we got about sixteen acts.  I don't of course, know how famous they are or were, but althouth some looked very venerable, they could still do it.

          There used to be a radio program in Britain which, nonsensically, featured a ventriloquist.  The Grand Ole Opry features some square dancers:

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          Later that night, testing out the bars of the Broadway, I fell in with some fully paid-up members of a Grown-up Ladies Shuffleboard Team.  For some of the busier bars, they knew where the back door was.  I found myself a mere plaything, brought along for the purposes of dancing.  Of course, in the end, I wore them out.  I don't remember getting home.