Nashville Scene 10-1-20

CITY LIMITS: A PROPOSED METRO CHARTER AMENDMENT IS TYING CITY OFFICIALS IN KNOTS PAGE 7

OCTOBER 1–7, 2020 I VOLUME 39 I NUMBER 35 I NASHVILLESCENE.COM I FREE

MUSIC: BOBBY BARE ON HIS PARTNERSHIP WITH THE LATE, GREAT SHEL SILVERSTEIN PAGE 35

FALL GUIDE The Southern Festival of Books and Nashville Film Festival go virtual — read all about those and other art, food, music and film events slated for this fall

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NASHVILLE SCENE | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

CONTENTS

OCTOBER 1, 2020

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CITY LIMITS

Charter Chatter ..........................................7

Full ’Court Press ...................................... 19

Don’t Wanna Let You Go ......................... 36

Virtual screenings, 12 Hours of Terror and the Belcourt Drive-In, this fall at Nashville’s favorite arthouse

BY RON WYNN

Legal questions send proposed tax-limiting charter amendment to court

BY D. PATRICK RODGERS

BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT

Nashville’s 14th annual International Black Film Festival is streaming in a living room near you

A Mother Tries to Care for Her Daughter — Through Incarceration and COVID-19.......7

Return of the IBFF................................... 19

At the women’s prison in Nashville, dozens of people have tested positive, and one has died

BY ERICA CICCARONE

BY STEVEN HALE

Pith in the Wind .........................................8

Take some culinary trips from your own home this season

This week on the Scene’s news and politics blog

BY CHRIS CHAMBERLAIN

Bringing the World of Food to You ......... 20

The Frist Art Museum Bounces Back .... 22

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Three can’t-miss exhibitions give us something to look forward to

Southern Festival of Books .................... 10

Nashville’s gallery scene changes, survives and appears full of magic in a spellbinding fall art season

BY LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

COVER STORY

The lit fest goes online this year with Kiley Reid, Julia Alvarez, Erik Larson and many more

BY ERICA CICCARONE

Dim Lights, Dark Hallways ..................... 11 In Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, a neuroscientist tries to makes sense of her family’s unraveling

BY SEAN KINCH AND CHAPTER 16

The Skies Open ....................................... 12

Fall Forward With Nashville Galleries.... 24

Clifton Davis taps The Beegie Adair Trio for superb Never Can Say Goodbye

The Spin ................................................... 38 The Scene’s live-review column checks out livestreams by 12 Manos and Kelsey Waldon

BY ALEJANDRO RAMIREZ AND CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

THIS WEEK ON THE WEB: Becca Mancari, Many More to Encourage Early Voting in Harmony on the Horizon Nashville DA Says He Won’t Enforce Abortion Law

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NEW YORK TIMES CROSSWORD

Farewell, ZolliKoffee

39

MARKETPLACE

And Another Thing: The Camp Appeal of Harlots Is Through the Roof

BY JOE NOLAN

Go for a Shag........................................... 24 Curated by our own Laura Hutson Hunter, Shag: Provocative Textiles offers eroticism via conventionally wholesome media

BY D. PATRICK RODGERS

There’s Music in the Air .......................... 26

Julia Alvarez on sisterhood, global community and living by metaphor

Even though this concert season is anything but normal, there are plenty of shows to see, in person or online

BY JOY RAMIREZ AND CHAPTER 16

BY STEPHEN TRAGESER

Radical Joy .............................................. 12 In Alice Randall’s Black Bottom Saints, a dying man eulogizes the ‘Black Camelot’ of mid-20thcentury Detroit

BY KIM GREEN AND CHAPTER 16

Another Way to Be .................................. 14 Michael Ian Black makes the case for a new masculinity in A Better Man

BY MARIA BROWNING AND CHAPTER 16

Doing the Work ....................................... 14 Nikky Finney’s fifth poetry collection is an essential collage of life and art

BY CIONA ROUSE AND CHAPTER 16

Not ‘It’ ...................................................... 16 Greetings From New Nashville considers the city’s transformation and its future

BY SEAN KINCH AND CHAPTER 16

A Glorious and Invisible Map ................. 16 In M.O. Walsh’s endearing new novel, a strange machine disrupts life in a small Southern town

BY MICHAEL RAY TAYLOR AND CHAPTER 16

Having a NaFF ......................................... 18 The 51st iteration of the Nashville Film Festival goes entirely virtual Oct. 1-7

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CRITICS’ PICKS Watch Coolidge Corner Theatre’s The Shining virtual seminar, stream Talk Boring to Me on YouTube, buy stuff at the Nashville Black Market, watch the original Whose Line Is It Anyway? on Hulu, make drinks with Perfectly Cordial and more

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MUSIC

The Odd Couple ....................................... 35 A new box set spotlights the improbable partnership of Bobby Bare and Shel Silverstein

BY GEOFFREY HIMES

Finding a Spark ....................................... 36 Nehoda confronts personal loss and the weight of the world on the incendiary But Anyways...

BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

BY NATHAN SMITH

Walk a

Mile

with J.R. Lind

With feet on the street, we discover Nashville’s own unique beat – one mile at a time

Call for take-out!

Authentic Mexican Cuisine & Bakery...Side by Side!

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615-865-2646 TacosyMariscosLindoMexico

917A Gallatin Pike S, Madison, TN nashvillescene.com | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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U.S. SUPREME COURT CONFIRMATION SHAPING UP TO BE ONE OF THE MOST CONTENTIOUS EVER We’ve hardly had time to mourn the loss of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and now we must deal with what will likely be a historically contentious confirmation battle to replace her.

President Donald Trump is nominating Amy Coney Barrett, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit — a position to which Trump appointed her in 2017. He wants the U.S. Senate to confirm Barrett before the November election, and according to the The New York Times, “No seriously contested Supreme Court nominee has been confirmed so quickly since 1949.”

Ginsburg and Barrett are polar opposites. Ginsburg was a champion of gender equality. Barrett is much more conservative, particularly when it comes to issues including abortion, gun rights, discrimination and immigration. Her appointment would firmly tilt the court to the right with a six-three conservative majority, making the court the most conservative it’s been in decades. Carl Tobias, a law professor and expert on federal judicial selection at the University of Richmond Law School even said: “I do not see much hope for progressives in the short term. Barring structural changes to the court, the conservative majority could last for decades, or at least a decade.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden has even argued that Barrett, if confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, would erode health care protections legalized under Obamacare — such as guaranteeing people with preexisting medical conditions access to insurance. “The United States Constitution was designed to give the voters one chance to have their voice heard on who serves on the court,” Biden said.

“The Senate should not act on this vacancy until after the American people select their next president and the next Congress.”

Those favoring quick action on the nomination argue the American people elected Trump and the senators currently in office, and therefore we can assume the American voters also want this confirmation to be completed quickly.

But according to a Washington Post-ABC poll released last week, 57 percent of

Americans say the successor to Ginsburg should be chosen by the winner of the November election.

Democrats are in agreement with that majority consensus and with the thought that the impending confirmation needs to be slowed at least and stopped if possible.

Despite Barrett’s remark that “judges are not policy makers,” there is much angst that her confirmation will change our lives, and that’s stirring intense opposition to the nomination.

“We believe Democrats need to demonstrate that this is an illegitimate process, and all options to do so should be on the table,” said Christopher Kang, the chief counsel for progressive group Demand Justice.

Republicans point to several factors to explain their nearly unanimous support for Barrett before she was even officially nominated. Many point out that she was already vetted once for a different Supreme Court vacancy in 2018.

Democrats disagree. Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois has said, “Judge Barrett was not fit to be a Circuit judge in 2017, and she is the wrong choice for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court today.” Sen. Duckworth will be withholding her support.

Democrats are not going to stand aside and wait for this appointment to be pushed through. They will be fighting with all they have, because this decision is one that weighs so heavily on our future.

Moving to force this confirmation through quickly when polling shows the majority of Americans are opposed to that will only serve to create more discord and more challenges to our democracy than we already have. Our president and some of his most ardent followers are seemingly uncaring of those consequences.

Rushing the lifetime appointment of a 48-year-old American is not good for America.

Editor-in-Chief D. Patrick Rodgers Senior Editor Dana Kopp Franklin Associate Editor Alejandro Ramirez Arts Editor Laura Hutson Hunter Culture Editor Erica Ciccarone Music and Listings Editor Stephen Trageser Contributing Editors Jack Silverman, Abby White Staff Writers Stephen Elliott, Nancy Floyd, Steven Hale, Kara Hartnett, J.R. Lind, William Williams Contributing Writers Sadaf Ahsan, Radley Balko, Ashley Brantley, Maria Browning, Steve Cavendish, Chris Chamberlain, Lance Conzett, Steve Erickson, Randy Fox, Adam Gold, Seth Graves, Kim Green, Steve Haruch, Geoffrey Himes, Edd Hurt, Jennifer Justus, Christine Kreyling, Katy Lindenmuth, Craig D. Lindsey, Brittney McKenna, Marissa R. Moss, Noel Murray, Joe Nolan, Chris Parton, Betsy Phillips, John Pitcher, Margaret Renkl, Megan Seling, Jason Shawhan, Michael Sicinski, Ashley Spurgeon, Amy Stumpfl, Kay West, Andrea Williams, Cy Winstanley, Ron Wynn, Charlie Zaillian Art Director Elizabeth Jones Photographers Eric England, Daniel Meigs Graphic Designers Mary Louise Meadors, Tracey Starck Production Coordinator Christie Passarello Events and Marketing Director Olivia Moye Promotions Coordinator Caroline Poole Publisher Mike Smith Senior Advertising Solutions Managers Maggie Bond, Debbie Deboer, Sue Falls, Michael Jezewski, Carla Mathis, Heather Cantrell Mullins, Stevan Steinhart, Jennifer Trsinar, Keith Wright Advertising Solutions Manager William Shutes Sales Operations Manager Chelon Hill Hasty Advertising Solutions Associates Emma Benjamin, Price Waltman Special Projects Coordinator Susan Torregrossa President Frank Daniels III Chief Financial Officer Todd Patton Corporate Production Director Elizabeth Jones Vice President of Marketing Mike Smith IT Director John Schaeffer Circulation and Distribution Director Gary Minnis For advertising information please contact: Mike Smith, msmith@nashvillescene.com or 615-844-9238 FW PUBLISHING LLC Owner Bill Freeman VOICE MEDIA GROUP National Advertising 1-888-278-9866 vmgadvertising.com

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NASHVILLE SCENE | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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VE LO

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T C E P S RE

The Acceptance Pledge I pledge acceptance of myself.

I pledge to celebrate my perfect imperfection, To listen so that I may understand, To speak out for what is right, To follow with curiosity and lead with integrity.

I pledge acceptance of others.

I pledge to celebrate our shared humanity, To respect the dignity of every individual, To be generous, compassionate, and kind, To be accountable to each other.

Everyone has something to learn, Everyone has something to teach, Everyone is someone.

We are celebrating Kindness and Compassion When we take a pledge we are holding ourselves accountable. When we make it public, we let others keep us accountable and we inspire them to join us. In pledging acceptance, we are declaring that we want to live in a kinder, more just world, and that we will take an active role in creating it.

Take the pledge at acceptancepledge.com and help us grow the movement by sharing on your social media with #EveryoneIsSomeone #IPledgeAcceptance. nashvillescene.com | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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NASHVILLE SCENE | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

CITY LIMITS

CHARTER CHATTER Legal questions send

proposed tax-limiting charter amendment to court

BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT

PHOTO VIA NASHVILLE.GOV

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proposed amendment to the Metro Charter has city officials tied in knots, scared that it could drastically undermine the operations of local government.

For now, the amendment is not set for a vote, as the Davidson County Election Commission on Friday punted on approving it. The commission decided instead to ask a local court for a decision on whether the proposed amendment is valid and whether the commission is required to put it before Nashville voters. At press time, the commission was set to meet Sept. 29 to discuss next steps.

Members of the commission, many Metro officials and charter experts mostly agree that the proposed amendment, spearheaded by local attorney Jim Roberts, presents a number of legal issues.

Roberts and his group, backed by conservative political advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, are seeking dramatic changes to the way Nashville government operates, and they turned in enough signatures to get their measure on the ballot. They want to require a countywide referendum when the city seeks to raise property taxes by more than 2 percent, with the requirement dating back to Jan. 1. The group also wants to require a countywide referendum when the city seeks to issue more than $15 million in bonds for a project, also dating back to Jan. 1. They also want the city to reclaim property used by professional sports teams if the team stops playing for two years.

“I don’t think there’s any of the various four or five provisions in it that at the end of the day will pass constitutional muster or state law,” said Dewey Branstetter, chair of the Charter Review Commission. “And if that is the case, then I believe there is a very strong and valid argument for this charter provision not to be placed on the ballot.”

Metro officials and legal experts cite numerous potential problems with the language of the proposed amendment. For one, the state constitution prohibits retrospective laws.

State law also gives local governments sole power to set property tax rates. Lawyers also argue that the language of the proposed referendum is imprecise: It uses terms undefined in state and city codes and fails to cite where provisions of the amendment would fit into existing law, as well as which provisions of existing law they would replace.

“They came up with some real simple statements, but they didn’t really address how those simple statements would fit in the charter document,” said Jim Murphy, a Charter Review Commission member and former Metro legal director. “They’re fraught with issues.”

During the commission meeting,

MAYOR JOHN COOPER ADDRESSES THE METRO COUNCIL ON SEPT. 15 At-Large Metro Councilmember Bob Mendes compared the language of the proposed amendment, which makes use of exclamation points and all-caps declarations, to “Facebook rants.” Metro legal director Bob Cooper was more polite: He said the “political rhetoric” was “quite different in style” from past proposed charter amendments.

The election commission is seeking an expedited ruling from the Davidson County Chancery Court, but even that isn’t likely to be the end of the conversation.

Roberts signaled he was willing to take the commission to court if they decline to put his amendment on the ballot — in his words, “shenanigans.”

“The people of Davidson County want this on the ballot,” Roberts told the election commission. “Every word was chosen intentionally. I have no idea whether it will pass or not. It’s an opportunity for the people of this community to express their desires at the ballot box.”

City officials are already scrambling to prepare for the possibility that the proposal makes it onto the ballot for a special election in December and passes.

As written, it would nullify the budget Metro Council passed this summer, which included a property tax rate increase of more than 30 percent. That would leave the city more than $300 million in the hole, which Nashville leaders say would lead to cuts to essential services including police, fire and trash pickup.

“We would not be able to function unless we cut into public safety and schools,” said District 2 Metro Councilmember Kyonztè Toombs, chair of the Budget and Finance Committee. “This would set us back tremendously.”

Metro finance director Kevin Crumbo

outlined a series of steps his office is taking in preparation for the possibility, including a hiring freeze — the second of the year.

“If this matter is placed on the ballot and it passes, our progress as a great city will end,” Mayor John Cooper told the Metro

A MOTHER TRIES TO CARE FOR HER DAUGHTER — THROUGH INCARCERATION AND COVID-19 At the women’s prison in Nashville, dozens of people have tested positive, and one has died

BY STEVEN HALE

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he road ahead for Michelle Griffin and her daughter was already long and daunting.

A little more than two years ago, Griffin’s daughter began a 32-year prison sentence, and Griffin took on two new roles: the mother of an incarcerated woman and the primary caregiver for a 6-year-old grandchild.

Then the pandemic came.

Griffin already had reason to worry. Her 26-yearold daughter struggles with a variety of mental health issues. She also has asthma, a heightened concern given the deadly respiratory virus that threw the world into crisis earlier this year.

Council in September. “It takes the problem of financial weakness and makes it chronic and permanent. … Your property values are at stake. Home values go down in a city too broke to pick up trash.”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

After an initial stint at CoreCivic’s Metro Detention Facility, Griffin’s daughter — whom she asked the Scene not to name, fearing she’d face repercussions — moved to the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center (formerly the Tennessee Prison for Women) in Nashville on Aug. 13. She was quarantined for 14 days, Griffin says, and has largely been in some form of lockdown ever since as cases at the prison spiked.

Then, on the night of Sept. 22, Griffin’s daughter called her with the news: She’d tested positive for COVID-19.

“Being locked down like that, not able to get a shower every day, coming out 10 minutes to get on the phone,” Griffin says. “That’s already tearing her mental state down. Now, to find this out. She told me last night she really doesn’t have any symptoms. But she’s discombobulated because of the lockdown.”

As of Sept. 22, Griffin’s daughter is one of 64 incarcerated women at the prison who have tested positive for COVID-19. The Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center currently has the largest outbreak of any Tennessee prison. Statewide, 19 incarcerated people have died after testing positive for the illness, including Dadra Porter at the women’s prison in Nashville.

Tennessee Department of Correction spokesperson Dorinda Carter told the Scene last month that all incarcerated people are checked twice a week for symptoms. She added: “One of the challenges we face is with inmates not being forthcoming about possible symptoms due to concerns about being placed in isolation or quarantine. We have worked to ensure that they understand that neither of these measures is punitive

nashvillescene.com | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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CITY LIMITS U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson

Investment Property For Sale

404 & 406 KC Court 2-unit duplex 408 KC Court 9-unit Former Group Home Madison, TN 37115 Time & date of sale: Tuesday, October 13, 2020 -10:30 AM Local Time Historic Davidson County Courthouse (front steps) One Public Square, Nashville, Tennessee 37201 Terms: $10,000.00 Earnest money All cash - 30-day closing | Unstated Minimum

services and utilities are the same as they would be in general population.”

Griffin says her daughter has expressed precisely that concern to her, though, describing how prison staff interacts differently — if at all — with incarcerated women who have tested positive. She says she’s been in frequent contact with officials at the prison, trying to understand the protocols that are in place and make sure her daughter has what she needs. She’s been getting help from the prison advocacy organization Free Hearts, which is run by formerly incarcerated women. But she says her daughter feels hopeless and even more isolated on the inside after testing positive.

To submit a bid: Bids may be submitted in writing or made orally at the foreclosure sale. Interested parties must obtain a bid kit before they can bid.

Download the Bid Kit & see photos at:

https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/program_offices/housing/mfh/pd/mfplist

Or request by phone by contacting the Realty Specialist After receipt of the bid kit, address questions to: Karen Davis Rabb - Karen.d.davisrabb@hud.gov Multifamily Property Disposition Division, (817) 978-5604 Note: This advertisement is placed by HUD & does not constitute the legal notice of foreclosure sale.

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT

THIS WEEK ON OUR NEWS AND POLITICS BLOG: More than 200 people marched through downtown Nashville Sept. 26 in response to a Kentucky grand jury’s decision against charging three Louisville police officers with killing Breonna Taylor.

It was the second action of the week related to the ruling, following a march throughout East Nashville that was organized on Wednesday night, just hours after the grand jury’s decision was announced. The Louisville medical professional and her boyfriend were asleep in bed when police entered her home on a no-knock warrant, startling the couple awake.

Taylor’s boyfriend has said he thought the intruders were burglars, and fired a gun at the police. The officers fired back, shooting Taylor six times and killing her. Only one of the three officers on the scene was charged by the grand jury — and not for killing Taylor, but for firing recklessly into her neighbors’ home. Officer Brett Hankison was charged with

MARCH FOR JUSTICE FOR BREONNA TAYLOR, SEPT. 26 IN DOWNTOWN NASHVILLE

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“I HAVE A LOT OF QUESTIONS BECAUSE I DON’T WANT TO LOSE MY DAUGHTER TO COVID. OR DEPRESSION. OR WHATEVER ELSE IS GOING ON IN THAT JAIL.” —MICHELLE GRIFFIN

three counts of wanton endangerment. The Sept. 26 march traveled to Lower Broadway, where many bystanders outside honky-tonks filmed or took pictures with their phones. Some cheered, and a few heckled or shouted insults from behind barricades. After a brief pause for speeches in the middle of Broadway, the march continued back to Legislative Plaza and up the steps of the state Capitol. The stone steps leading up the building were the site of several standoffs between protesters and state troopers over the summer. … Though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continued the nationwide moratorium on evictions, Nashville’s evictions court was still crowded last week, the Scene’s Stephen Elliott reported. The CDC’s intention is to keep people from ending up in more congregate living situations.

Nevertheless, dozens of Nashville tenants showed up to Davidson County General Sessions Court for detainer warrant hearings, at which landlords were seeking back rent or permission from the court to evict them. Dozens more did not show up, meaning the court in some cases granted the landlords a default judgment, with evictions possibly to follow in as soon as 10 days. The landlord with the most cases on the docket: the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency. MDHA is not evicting residents for nonpayment through the rest of the year, in accordance with CDC guidelines, but is still pursuing evictions for

“I was telling her that I had talked to the assistant warden and that she was gonna come talk to her,” Griffin says, recalling a recent conversation with her daughter. “She said, ‘Well Mama, she’s not gonna come talk to me now.’ ” For Griffin — a mother determined to stay involved in her daughter’s life and get to the bottom of any predicament that lands in front of her — the pandemic has only added to a list of worries that was too long to begin with.

“I have a lot of questions because I don’t want to lose my daughter to COVID. Or depression. Or whatever else is going on in that jail. Because I really don’t know.”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

other reasons, such as criminal activity; however, that was unclear to the many tenants who showed up at court, indicating a lack of effective communication. … Davidson County District Attorney General Glenn Funk declared in a court filing that he will not enforce a law that requires doctors to tell women that chemical abortions can be reversed — a claim that is unproven at best and contradicts the views of doctors and medical experts. Funk wrote he believes two provisions of the law are unconstitutional — both requiring abortion providers to inform women that chemical abortions may be reversed after the first treatment is taken. The ACLU has called the idea that a chemical abortion can be reversed a “debunked claim based on junk science peddled by anti-abortion researchers.” A doctor who performs an abortion without making those statements can be charged with a Class E felony. Gov. Bill Lee called Funk’s decision a “grave matter” violating the tradition of the rule of law. … The Tennessee Titans moved to 3-0 with a 31-30 win over the Vikings, once again relying on the heroics of kicker Stephen Gostkowski, who had six field goals — including the game-winner, his third such kick of the young season. The Titans have not started at 3-0 since 2008.

NASHVILLESCENE.COM/PITHINTHEWIND EMAIL: PITH@NASHVILLESCENE.COM TWEET: @PITHINTHEWIND

PHOTO: MATT MASTERS

HUD.GOV

NASHVILLE SCENE | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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nashvillescene.com | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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FALL GUIDE The Southern Festival of Books and Nashville Film Festival go virtual — read all about those and other art, food, music and film events slated for this fall

F

or decades, the Southern Festival of Books has been a huge and fundamental part of the literary scene in Nashville. Similarly, the Nashville Film Festival has offered local moviegoers the opportunity to see spectacular new works from an array of international filmmakers, right here in our own backyard. Of course, 2020 and its infernal ongoing pandemic have done their best to shut these two institutions down. But rather than give up entirely, organizers of both festivals have taken their events online, promising a bevy of virtual happenings.

In this year’s Scene Fall Guide — a Fall Guide unlike any of its predecessors — we’re offering rundowns of the aforementioned fests and much more. In addition to write-ups on NaFF and the SFOB — not to mention several reviews and interviews focusing on participating authors from the latter — this week’s issue features details about online food events, virtual music happenings, socially distanced art exhibitions and much more. Read on to see what autumn in Nashville has to offer.

SOUTHERN FESTIVAL OF BOOKS

BY ERICA CICCARONE

A

to each other or the organization.”

On the bright side, the festival will not require us to make impossible choices between sessions. You can stream them all in real time via Attendify, Facebook and YouTube, or check out recordings of each session, which will be archived for later viewing. Gerbman notes that if attendees would like to interact with authors during Q&As, they can only do so via Attendify, so definitely get that set up.

The roster is intensely good — so much so that the task of summarizing the lineup was quite daunting. As Scene contributor (and 2020 festival author) Steve Haruch wrote two years ago, think of the Fall Guide’s coverage “as a smattering, a leafing-through, a quick scan of the most notable of the notable from this year’s festival.” You’ll find an overview of the fest below, followed by seven reviews and Q&As that go deeper into some of the authors and titles in the fest. Then, visit humanitiestennessee.org/sfb2020 to see the full schedule and access and download the Attendify app.

utumn in Nashville is a fickle mistress. We never know when she’ll tuck us into her embrace — and when she’ll shove us back into the sweaty bear hug of summer. But in this singularly awful year, she’s granting us a reprieve. The weather is temperate, the breezes are plentiful, and nights are darn near chilly. It’s perfect festival weather, even if the festival is at home. The 32nd annual Southern Festival of Books kicks off online Thursday, Oct. 1, and runs for 11 author-packed days. And it’s completely free!

Though we won’t be able to roam the stalls of booksellers and literary organizations at Legislative Plaza this year, or congregate in the lobby of the Nashville Public Library downtown, the folks at Humanities Tennessee have chosen an excellent platform on which to execute their book festival. Signing up for Attendify is easy — just create an account with your email address — and it offers clean design and user-friendly functionality for streaming author talks and readings and connecting with other festival attendees. he fest kicks off and closes with two “Obviously you can’t have the same sense of this year’s biggest fiction hits. of community online that you might have in Yaa Gyasi will discuss her recently an in-person festival,” says Serenity Gerbpublished novel, Transcendent Kingdom, man, director of the fest. “But that with Ann Patchett at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, community between readers Oct. 1. The sophomore effort of Gyasi and writers is a really imfollows her critically acclaimed portant part of the festival, debut Homegoing — but there’s and so we wanted to use no sophomore slump here. Transome kind of platform scendent Kingdom addresses SOUTHERN FESTIVAL OF BOOKS that allowed people to big oppositions — faith and sciTAKING PLACE OCT. 1-11 engage with one another, ence, spirit and brain, intimacy VIA HUMTN.ORG to have conversations, and estrangement — with a tenfor there to be dialogue derness that’s just restrained as opposed to just putenough to avoid sentimentality. ting up events online that (See our review on p. 11.) Closing weren’t connected in any way out the fest at 4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 11,

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is a session with Kiley Reid, whose novel Such a Fun Age was on every most-anticipatedbooks-of-2020 list, and for good reason. It’s positively gush-worthy. Twenty-five-year-old babysitter Emira (who is Black) brings her 3-year-old charge (who is white) to an upscale grocery store, where a security guard and a concerned Karen accuse her of kidnapping the child. And of course, it’s caught on camera. The story is lovingly told with heaps of empathy — and a fierce interrogation of whiteness.

Also on the fiction docket is powerhouse Dominican American author Julia Alvarez, whose long-awaited novel Afterlife hit

shelves in April. Alvarez is a trailblazer who has made immeasurable contributions to Western literature, and listening in on her session — which takes place at 2:45 p.m.

Sunday, Oct. 11 — will be a treat. (Read our Q&A with Alvarez on p. 12.) At 7:30 p.m.

Monday, Oct. 5, catch Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar, whose autofictional Homeland Elegies is, as Scene contributor Hamilton Cain writes, a “21st-century version of a Twain-like tall tale.” At 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 9, Nashville author Alice Randall will discuss Black Bottom Saints. The novel swirls fact with fiction as Randall pays tribute to the Black luminaries — artists, athletes, entertainers and more — who traversed

NASHVILLE SCENE | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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SOUTHERN FESTIVAL OF BOOKS

Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood in the mid-20th century. (See our review on p. 12.)

Another highlight will be Bobbie Ann Mason’s conversation with chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities Jon Peede at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 8. Mason’s latest novel Dear Ann sees its protagonist indulging in what might have been if she had taken a different route in life.

History buffs will have their fill at the fest, most notably with Erik Larson at 12:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 8. The Devil in the White City author is touring with his latest tome The

Dim Lights, Dark Hallways In Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, a neuroscientist tries to makes sense of her family’s unraveling

BY SEAN KINCH

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aa Gyasi’s new novel, Transcendent Kingdom, confronts the venerable question of whether science or religion better reveals the truth about life’s enduring mysteries. Gyasi’s protagonist, Gifty, a first-generation American whose family immigrated from Ghana, learns as a child that religion can neither explain her family’s misfortunes nor provide comfort for her grief. When faith fails her, Gifty turns to neuroscience for answers, only to find that her quest will require years of dedication and discipline, not unlike the devotion of a novitiate in a monastic order.

Gifty is too clever to think the answers will come easily. Her high school biology teacher warns her that the process is long and uncertain. “The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know,” the teacher says. “We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That’s science.”

Undeterred, Gifty studies at Harvard and then Stanford, worlds away from her upbringing in Hunts-

Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz. Larson is brilliant at bringing complicated historical figures into sharp focus by using novel-like pacing and scenes. At 4:15 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 3, don’t miss Nashville author Jordan Ritter Conn and Riyad Alkasem, who will discuss The Road

From Raqqa: A Story of Brotherhood, Borders, and Belonging. With great tenderness and un-

flinching realism, Ritter Conn tells the story of Alkasem and his hometown of Raqqa, Syria, which became the so-called capital of the Islamic State group from 2014 to 2017. Al-

kasem owns the delightful and delicious Café Rakka in Hendersonville, so there’s plenty of local flavor to spare.

No nonfiction roundup would be complete without a collection of essays or two.

A Measure of Belonging: New Writers of Color on the American South, edited by Cinelle Barnes, collects 21 essays by writers of color living in the South, among them festival participants Jennifer Hope Choi, Minda Honey and Scene favorite Tiana Clark. Tune in for that at 1 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 4. If you’ll allow

ville, Ala., where her mother is a home health aide. Her father has long since returned to Ghana, leaving her mother alone to raise Gifty and her older brother Nana, a high school basketball star who ultimately succumbs to opioid addiction. After his death, which Gyasi reveals in the opening chapters, Gifty’s mother plummets into catatonic depression. “Gifty, I’m sick,” her mother tells her. Gifty accepts that diagnosis but reflects, “the how of her sickness, the why of it, I didn’t understand.”

Transcendent Kingdom can be read as a preface to Gifty’s doctoral project at Stanford (where Gyasi attended college). Gifty’s experiments involve making mice dependent on sweet milk and then performing brain surgery to shine microscopic light on clusters of neurons to alter their behavior. “Could optogenetics be used to identify the neural mechanisms involved in psychiatric illnesses where there are issues with reward seeking, like in depression, where there is too much restraint in seeking pleasure, or drug addiction, where there is not enough?” In other words, could science save her family?

Gyasi peppers the narrative with memories of Gifty’s childhood — particularly her parents’ separation and her brother’s athletic prowess — so that Transcendent TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM opens an unfathomable abyss.

Kingdom tells several stories simulBY YAA GYASI On another level, Gyasi’s novel taneously. Alongside Gifty’s arc is KNOPF illustrates how meaning accrues, her family’s story of immigration, 288 PAGES, $27.95 ———— not in tidy lessons, but indirectly from the tightly woven social fabGYASI WILL DISCUSS TRANSCENDENT through experience and associaric of Ghana to the isolation of a KINGDOM ONLINE WITH ANN PATCHETT tion.

Long after Gifty loses her reSouthern state in the U.S. It’s also AT 7:30 P.M. THURSDAY, OCT. 1 ligious faith, she continues to use a study in loss, how the reduction Christian language and mythology to of one parent leaves the children make sense of life. She feels drawn to adrift, how the death of a brother

us to be a bit solipsistic, we recommend Scene contributor and former staffer Steve Haruch’s conversation with Margaret Renkl at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 6. (Renkl is a former Scene contributor.) Haruch’s essay collection Greetings From New Nashville: How a Sleepy Southern Town Became “It” City is a smart exploration of our town’s transformation, with essays from Ann Patchett, Steve Cavendish, Betsy Phillips and more. (Read our Q&A with Haruch on p. 18.) Also, be sure to catch New York Times critic-at-large Wesley Morris in conversation with New Yorker staff writer Masha Gessen at noon on Wednesday, Oct. 7.

And that’s to say nothing of poetry. The fest includes two United States Poets Laureate: Joy Harjo (An American Sunrise), who will appear at 11 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 3, and Natasha Trethewey (Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir), who will appear at 11 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 10. Hear from Bill Brown (The Headless Angel), Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum (Visiting Hours) and Linda Parsons (Candescent) at 1:15 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 3. And attend a “late-night” poetry reading organized by local artist Daniel Pujol at 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 10, for the linguistic stylings of locals Meg Wade, Destiny O. Birdsong, the Scene’s own Advice King Chris Crofton and more.

Check the schedule for dozens of other appearances, including middle-grade and YA authors like Ruta Sepetys, Andrew Maraniss, Erica Waters, Kim Johnson and Courtney Stevens.

Be sure to grab some merch designed by local artist Bongang. As the kids say, it’s gonna be lit.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

the story of Lazarus, the man who visits the afterlife and then returns. “I wanted an entire book of the Bible to be devoted to him and to how he must have felt to be the recipient of God’s strange and amazing grace,” Gifty says.

Though her biologist’s mind fixes on the physical realm, Gifty remains convinced that her work has a spiritual dimension, even if she must hide such feelings from her materialist colleagues.

She observes: “The more I do this work the more I believe in a kind of holiness in our connection to everything on Earth. Holy is the mouse. Holy is the grain the mouse eats. Holy is the seed. Holy are we.”

Similarly ecstatic passages appear throughout the novel, lightening otherwise somber subject matter. Though Gifty has endured tragedy, she views human existence as a cause for celebration and her vocation as a testament to our remarkable complexity. She studies the brains of mice “in order to apply it to … the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom,” Gifty says. “That belief, that transcendence, was held within this organ itself. Infinite, unknowable, soulful, perhaps even magical.”

Transcendent Kingdom, Gyasi’s sophomore effort, appears to be a radical departure from her debut, Homegoing, which follows the disparate fates of two branches of an African family. What unites the novels is the author’s presiding belief in the irreducible wonder of the world, a realm that, in a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins that Gyasi uses as an epigraph, “is charged with the grandeur of God.” For more local book coverage, please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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The Skies Open

Julia Alvarez on sisterhood, global community and living by metaphor

BY JOY RAMIREZ

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n Afterlife, the latest novel by Julia Alvarez, the recently widowed protagonist Antonia Vega finds herself unmoored and alone, forced to figure out her way in the world after the sudden loss of her husband. An immigrant herself, Antonia ends up befriending and helping the undocumented worker who lives on the farm next door to her Vermont home.

At the same time, the oldest of her three sisters suddenly disappears, sending her on a quest to find her and reimagine her role in the fractured family.

It’s familiar territory for Alvarez, an award-winning Dominican American author and a pioneer among Latina writers in the U.S. In the 1990s, she helped pave the way for Latina writers to enter the literary mainstream with novels like How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies. She is also the author of numerous books for young readers, as well as collections of poems and nonfiction. In 2013 she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama.

Julia Alvarez recently spoke with us by phone in anticipation of her appearance at the 2020 Southern Festival of Books.

Sisterhood — and in particular immigrant sisterhood — is a long-running theme of your work.

Does this have anything to do with your own family history? Why the importance of female bonds in particular? Yes, I am from a family of all

In Alice Randall’s Black Bottom Saints, a dying man eulogizes the ‘Black Camelot’ of mid-20th-century Detroit

BY KIM GREEN

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Politics and important historical events are essential background for much of your work. Afterlife is no different. Can you say a little more about how the times we are living in now informed this novel?

girls. It also has to do with missing books on the shelf in terms of stories about Latinx and Latin Americans in English. When you Well, one of the things that gives me shivers think of the big names, Mario Vargas Llosa, is how much it speaks to this moment, alGabriel García Márquez, all of them were though I had no idea the pandemic was commale. I am interested in those gaps, the stoing. I think that as writers, one of the things ries that haven’t been told. The ones I wish I that we do is pick up a lot of things as part of had had to read when I was coming up an artistic sensibility. We writers pick as a new reader. up the zeitgeist — a feeling of the With Afterlife, I was really moment. I felt like we were livinterested in the idea that ing in elegiac times. By that AFTERLIFE now that we know about the I mean that we were seeing

BY JULIA ALVAREZ Latina sisterhood, what is the end of so many things: ALGONQUIN 256 PAGES, $25.95 the aging story, as they get climate change, species ———— older, how would that play going extinct, huge storms ALVAREZ WILL DISCUSS HER NOVEL out? I was shocked when caused by these environONLINE AT 2:45 P.M. SUNDAY, OCT. 11 my publisher sent me the mental changes, coastal PR [for Afterlife] and said, towns and impoverished “It has been countries finding themselves threatened with their coasts going underwater, and also the end of a kind

Radical Joy

lice Randall’s fifth novel, Black Bottom Saints, is the fictional last will and testament of a real-life Motor City culture maven.

Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson emceed at storied show clubs, wrote a gossip column for the Michigan Chronicle and founded a beloved school of dance for Detroit’s Black daughters.

In the novel, it’s 1968, and from his deathbed, Ziggy composes paeans to his “saints.” Inspired by Catholic lives-of-the-saints books, Ziggy’s manuscript highlights artists, entrepreneurs, educators and strivers who hailed from Detroit, performed there or loved the place — who “suffered so much, and so differently, but who had each found a way, or made a way, to experience radical joy.”

Outside the walls of Black-owned Kirwood Hospital, his shining adopted city is also expiring, “dynamited to pieces in the name of urban renewal, singed in the embers of righteous rebellion.” Ziggy’s gilded-era Detroit goes by various aliases: Black Camelot, Motown, the “largest and most important city in Alabama.” And then there’s “Black Bottom,” the name of a once-thriving, now-razed African American community on Detroit’s East Side, so called for the dark loam where early settlers planted farms. But to Ziggy, the name evokes more than map boundaries or demographics. He defines its essence with a quote from Lew Massey, his Patron Saint of Lawyers and Fix-

15 years since her last novel.” It took me this long because I didn’t want to keep repeating what I’d already done. I wanted to write from this stage of life, and I didn’t see that many books with older characters as the protagonists, especially older Latina characters, unless they were the airbrushed abuelita, you know?

ers: “Black Bottom ain’t a place. Black Bottom an attitude. A Detroit attitude.”

Ziggy describes that attitude, born of the Great Migration and new wealth seeded by the thousands of factory workers he calls the “breadwinners,” whose wages supported all-Black businesses, hospitals, private schools, a booming lake resort called Idlewild and a vibrant live music scene. The breadwinners’ expanding prosperity and stylish swagger lifted up a generation: In Black Bottom, charm and squalor, nature and industry, opportunity and obstacles, citified and country-time, got all shook up into a strong cocktail that made a person believe they could do what they wanted to do, they could be who they wanted to be.

That confidence cocktail produced Randall herself, a Detroit native who attended the real-life Ziggy Johnson’s dance school for five years. (Her mother left for Washington, D.C., with her when Randall was in grade school, but the threads back to Detroit, her father and Ziggy held firm.) Ziggy’s articles, read aloud to her by her dad, seeded Randall’s writing as-

of civility.

Antonia, a recently retired English professor, frequently uses literature as a way to access her own humanity. At one point, she is reminded that “we have to live as if, in other words by metaphor.”

What does this mean for you? And how do you access creativity in the midst of so much doom?

Antonia is always dependent on this little firewall of words and literature to protect her, to give meaning to moments that are terrible. But what happens when that breaks down? You build it up again, as in the epigraph of the book [a quote from T.S. Eliot: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”]. They’re fragments, but there’s a beauty to them that reminds us of what’s important. This is what I mean by living by metaphor. Martin Luther King used to say this, and John Lewis: You live as if it’s already happened. The world that you want to create, you live as if, and that is the world you are acting out of rather than reacting to the old paradigm that keeps you trapped within it.

And that is the thing about literature, that it creates other paradigms. You get out of the historical moment you are a part of, and the skies open and you see other possibilities.

Making a leap of the imagination towards what is possible. As if it is already a reality.

The minute you start being an activist for that world, you are creating it.

To read an extended version of this interview — and more local book coverage — please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.

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resilience through self-invention and a series of roadmaps for the breadwinners’ children that would guide them from the auto plants to any theater of operations they chose.

This novel is also Randall’s articulate and soul-elevating witness, a song of gratitude to the man whose “citizenship school” gave her the tools to channel her own suffering into the radical joy of writing. And in an inspired creative twist, Randall writes a proxy of herself into the narrative: “Colored Girl” (C.G.), a former Ziggy protégée whose aloof and abusive mother spirited her away to D.C. as a child, has been entrusted with the task of finishing his manuscript.

C.G.’s biography seeps into Ziggy’s saints’ book in the form of a parallel third-person narrative — set apart in italics as a prelude to each saint’s chapter — chronicling her coming of age and her discovery and curation of this nearly lost fictional BLACK BOTTOM SAINTS

BY ALICE RANDALL manuscript. It’s an initially confusAMISTAD ing device that unfolds slowly to 362 PAGES, $26.99 reveal a deeper layer of story. pirations, as she explained in an ———— Of course, the real-life Randall interview with Marcus Whitney on RANDALL WILL DISCUSS HER NOVEL ONLINE AT 7:30 P.M. FRIDAY, OCT. 9 gave herself this assignment. his YouTube channel in February.

She spent years poring through More crucial still were Ziggy’s Ziggy’s columns and Black newspaper lessons, which went far beyond archives and interviewing witnesses ballet or tap. In the highly anticipated to the boomtown years of Black Bottom in spectacles he mounted every Father’s Day, his order to compile these 52 mini-biographies, one for girl-pupils danced with (and for) luminaries like The each week of the year. This feels, to me, like the book Four Tops and The Supremes and learned to perform Randall’s whole life has prepared her to write, her elegance and self-possession until they owned those own origin story folded into an elegiac, literary time traits outright. Ziggy’s in-class storytelling of the lives of capsule of the Detroit That Was — a cultural artifact his saints, who had risen from humble and sometimes that might one day serve as a blueprint for that lost tragic roots, offered the girls a stealth education in world’s reinvention. how their forebears transformed grief into music and To read an extended version of this review — and poetry, movement and action — how “a body can bear more local book coverage — please visit Chapter16. articulate and soul-elevating witness.” That’s the inheriorg, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee. tance that both the real and the fictional Ziggy hoped to bequeath: inspirational morality tales, lessons in EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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Music is an open book, wearing its heart on its sleeve. At its best, it is purely honest.

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum reveres that honesty—and vulnerability—every day as it translates its piece of the great American story.

Our doors are open, and we invite everyone to explore the galleries and the music, observing our newly established protocols.

Visit CountryMusicHallofFame.org for details.

nashvillescene.com | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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SOUTHERN FESTIVAL OF BOOKS

Another Way to Be

Nikky Finney’s fifth poetry collection is an essential collage of life and art

Michael Ian Black makes the case for a new masculinity in A Better Man

BY CIONA ROUSE

BY MARIA BROWNING

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n his introduction to A Better Man, Michael Ian Black tells the story of sending his young children off to school one morning and a short while later seeing reports that shots had been fired at another school nearby.

That school was Sandy Hook Elementary, where 20 children and six adults were gunned down by a 20-year-old man. Black uses the trauma of that day as a way into thinking about how our culture damages boys and men. “Mass shootings,” he writes, “are only the most sensational manifestation of our peculiar male dilemma: traditional manhood funnels the full range of less masculine than Dell’s branding, which male emotion into two channels, anger and is more generic “work.” Also, I’m touchwithdrawal.” typing these responses, which is less masIn spite of that grim beginning, A Betculine than not knowing how to touch-type, ter Man is a tender, funny, hopeful book, because competent typing is still associconceived as a letter to Black’s 18-year-old ated with traditionally female occupations son and dedicated to “tomorrow’s boys.” like secretary and administrative assistant.

Through a mix of memoir, comic comYou can pick out anything and do this mentary and fatherly advice, same exercise. Breakfast cereals, Black makes the case against word choices, colors, etc., etc., the cultural pressures that etc. It’s insane.

A BETTER MAN: A (MOSTLY harm men, from impossible The book is bracketed by stoSERIOUS) LETTER TO MY SON

BY MICHAEL IAN BLACK ideals of strength and inderies about mass shootings, and ALGONQUIN BOOKS pendence to what he sees you talk about the “astonishing 304 PAGES, $24.95 as damaging rhetoric about arrogance” of such an act. If ———— toxic masculinity. (“You’re the culture feeds white male BLACK WILL DISCUSS HIS BOOK ONLINE AT 7:30 P.M. THURSDAY, not toxic, although I admit, arrogance — and it sure seems OCT. 8 you don’t always smell so to — how can a parent combat it

great after track practice.”)

A comedian, actor, screenwriter and director, Black is the author of 11 previous books, including Navel Gazing and A Child’s First Book of Trump.

He answered questions via email.

You write that traditional masculinity is a form of drag and that “the only thing separating RuPaul and Chuck Norris is glitter.” Gay men have always recognized and played with macho stereotypes. Is it possible for a straight guy to put on masculine drag in a healthy, self-aware way? Absolutely. There’s no getting around the fact that all of us “present” ourselves. We adorn ourselves in whatever costumes we choose to communicate things about us we wish to communicate. You can wear the boxiest suit and tie every day and still understand that you’re playing a role to a certain extent, because all of us are, all day and every day. That doesn’t mean it’s artifice. It just means that we understand we’re always communicating with other people.

Your idea of the “Infinite Axis of Manliness” might be the funniest (and saddest) thing in the book. Can you explain it a little and tell us about the genesis of it? Sure. Imagine everything — everything — arrayed on an infinite line, which represents degrees of masculinity. By his early teen years, every boy understands where everything belongs on that line. For example, I’m typing these responses to you on an Apple laptop, which is less masculine than, say, a Dell, because Apple’s branding is creativity, which is

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Doing the Work

in a child? I wish I knew. I talk in the book about modeling. Being the person you want your child to become. (Or at least pretending to the best of your ability.) And I do think that’s important. But a parent can only model so much. There are so many other influences out there, some of them apparent, like friends and peers. Some are less visible: the culture in which we are born and the deep histories to which we all belong. It’s very hard to escape that stuff. And honestly, I’m not even sure the goal is to escape so much as it is to understand, acknowledge and learn.

You write, “Men often end up stifling the best parts of ourselves ... to maintain our place in a pecking order that serves no purpose.” Can a society exist without its pecking orders? What does your ideal world look like when it comes to gender roles? I don’t envision a platonic ideal of gender equality, just as I don’t envision a platonic ideal of social equality or income equality. Those goals are unattainable because the ideal is always unattainable.

What we can do, though, is rethink traditional gender roles so that we inch closer to a world in which men feel free to be their full selves, which means understanding, accepting and even welcoming their own vulnerabilities.

To read an extended version of this interview — and more local book coverage — please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

“A

poet’s autobiography is his poetry,” said Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. “Anything else is just a footnote.” In her fifth poetry collection, National Book Award-winning poet Nikky Finney says no to this. She stacks new poems alongside artifacts of her life, handing us an immaculately curated book that integrates her “footnotes” into an essential collage of life and art.

Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, the poet’s first new collection in nearly 10 years, demonstrates how Finney continues to push herself and expand our idea of poetry’s scope.

Poems written to commemorate a particular event or milestone are known as “occasional” poems, and Finney fell into composing such poetry early in her life as a “girl with pencils Finney’s father died in 2017, and these notes in her hair and behind her ear,” she writes, called threaded throughout the book let us grieve alongto commemorate notable moments. Many of the side her. He reminded her of his love on Post-it poems included in this collection were commisNotes, letterhead of the courts, random pieces sioned to mark public occasions; others are of cardstock and yellow pages ripped simply Finney practicing what she calls from legal pads. He sent birthday “good devotional work” by allowing LOVE CHILD’S HOTBED OF messages, notes of pride about her moments with art (ekphrasis) and OCCASIONAL POETRY: POEMS first book, tender reminders that personal and collective history to & ARTIFACTS testify to how language always create the occasion for a poem.

BY NIKKY FINNEY existed in her blood: “You are Nestled among these eleNORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS 264 PAGES, $29.95 with me, wherever I am and I gant poems we find essays and ———— know if you had not been born “hotbeds.” A hotbed, as Finney FINNEY WILL DISCUSS HER to us I would still be looking for defines it, is “heated earth (soil) COLLECTION ONLINE AT 6:30 P.M. you,” he writes in one note. Most … used for germination of seeds, FRIDAY, OCT. 9 of these messages he addressed to favoring rapid growth.” A keeper of “Love Child,” his affectionate nickname journals most of her life, Finney confor Finney and the inspiration for the title siders these creative entries her decadesof this book. long hotbeds and includes more than 30 of them.

Finney elevates art with ekphrastic pieces based As in much of Finney’s previous work, she invites on photographs, and she delivers one of the more us into her vision of race, gender, family, love and haunting poems of the book through a visual image relationship to the land. But this collection is different. Part lyrical insurgency, part memoir, part fantasy, as well — on the occasion of Polly Sheppard surviving the massacre at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel it tells us how Finney came to be a poet and shows AME, in “Miss Polly Is Akimbo underneath the us the land, people and artifacts that helped her get Mother Emanuel Collection Table”: there. This collection is as much about South CaroThe one who came to start the next Civil War lina as it is about her father as it is about her heroes Speaks to her directly. Have I shot you yet? as it is about the weight of the pencil in her Black There is no one else left to answer. hands in a hurting United States: I asked my father what an insurgent was.

I heard Finney read from this collection-inIt had been the word used in the play to deprogress last year, before Toni Morrison’s August scribe Lorraine Hansberry. He looked at me.

2019 death, and I remember being especially a He looked away from me. He looked out of fan of “Hotbed #58,” a whimsical tale — part fact, the window. I knew he knew what it meant. He part fiction — about Finney driving Morrison around didn’t want to say. He didn’t want me to know, Sweden after the Nobel Prize ceremony. It’s another not yet. standout toward the end of Love Child’s, which feels especially poignant following Morrison’s death.

But early flirtations with insurgency help her write Finney begins the collection with the legacy of writmuch-needed work, like the nine-page poem on the ers who inspire her and ends with this dreamlike occasion of Tamir Rice’s public slaughter and the moment. “You working?” Morrison asked her, birthnearly 20-page poem about 14-year-old George J. ing a personal mantra.

Stinney Jr., electrocuted in South Carolina in 1944.

Yes, Finney is working. And she’s worked for almost In addition to the lengthy poems in this collection, six decades. And she’s inspiring young poets to draw the book quite literally stands apart from her past near to their collection of pencils and do the work. Do efforts. At 264 pages, it looms taller on the shelf and the work in ways it’s never been done before. weighs more in the hand. Opening it feels like flipping To read an extended version of this review — and the lid of a small treasure box. Among the most immore local book coverage — please visit Chapter16. portant treasures are the full-color facsimiles of notes org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee. from her father, the late Ernest A. Finney Jr., a longtime justice on the South Carolina Supreme Court.

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NASHVILLE SCENE | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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OF BOOKS

SOUTHERN FESTIVAL OF BOOKS

Not ‘It’

Greetings From New Nashville considers the city’s transformation and its future

BY SEAN KINCH

W

hen did Nashville become new? In Greetings From New Nashville, editor (and former Scene staffer) Steve Haruch and 17 other contributors nominate various watershed years. Was it 1998, when a tornado’s destruction offered the city an opportunity to modernize and diversify? Or was it 1999, when the Titans began playing in Adelphia Coliseum? Music historians point to the opening of Third Man Records in 2009 as the moment when Nashville became everyone’s Music City.

Whatever its origin, the newer, shinier Nashville had certainly arrived by the mid-2010s. GQ dubbed the town “Nowville” in 2012, and a 2013 article in The New York Times announced that it was Nashville’s turn to be the nation’s “it” city. ABC launched a prime-time drama set in, filmed in and named after Nashville, and waves of bachelorette parties descended on Lower Broadway.

The essays in this collection — some of which were first published in the Scene — come from contributors including Ann Patchett, Tiana Clark, Meribah Knight and Ron Wynn. They share a cautionary theme: Nashville may have woken up from its sleepy decades, but it has a long way to go.

A Glorious and Invisible Map

In M.O. Walsh’s endearing new novel, a strange machine disrupts life in a small Southern town

BY MICHAEL RAY TAYLOR

W

ith the opening line of his second novel, The Big Door Prize, M.O. Walsh asks: “How can you know that your whole life will change on a day the sun rises at the agreed-upon time by science or God or whathave-you and the morning birds go about their usual bouncing for worms? How can you know?” Appropriately, the answer arrives on the book’s final page. In between lies much confusion, hope, odd behavior and ultimately sheer joy for the residents of fictional Deerfield, La. The action is set in motion with an air of old-fashioned sci-fi so palpable you can almost hear the theremin in the background. Consider, if you will, a small Southern town like any other, with a historic square, shops “that hang flowering baskets,” a Catholic high school, an upcoming festival and a grocery store. In this grocery appears, almost as if by magic, a cheaply constructed plywood box called the DNAMIX, a sort of Twilight Zone photo booth. Slide $2 into one slot and

16

The city enjoys a revitalized urban core, but traffic remains vexing. Nashville’s entertainment and tourism industries are rewriting the region’s economic profile (or they were, before the COVID pandemic), but affordable housing is hard to find. When Nashville loses the sheen of its “golden hour” (in Jon Meacham’s phrase), how will it redefine itself?

Haruch answered questions via email.

sider’s look into a number of local institutions. My favorite tidbit comes from Zach Stafford’s “Burned Out,” on Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack and its reverse segregation in the 1950s and ’60s: Black customers ate in the front section, while whites ate in the back. What details from this collection stand out to you personally? I love Zach’s story.

(This is neither here nor there, but did you know that Zach is an Abercrombie model now? Beauty and brains — seems kind of unfair, no?) Anyway, there are so many.

Richard Lloyd’s dramatic reenactment What factors would you highlight as critical of the inaugural Tomato Arts Fest, in the transformation of Nashville into in which some of the neighboran “It City”? It’s really imposhood’s newer residents hurl sible to point to any one GREETINGS FROM NEW rotten tomatoes at an infafactor and say, “This is the NASHVILLE: HOW A SLEEPY mous sketchy convenience one.” I think it’s ultimately SOUTHERN TOWN BECAME “IT” CITY EDITED BY STEVE HARUCH store just before it’s torn the confluence of so many VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS down, is darkly funny but things. That’s what makes 222 PAGES, $24.95 also a fascinatthe whole thing so fasci———— nating and why we like to HARUCH WILL DISCUSS THE BOOK WITH MARGARET RENKL ONLINE AT 6:30 argue about it. The global P.M. TUESDAY, OCT. 6, financial crisis of 2007, I think, is a big factor, because it really shakes up the housing market in profound ways. There’s also a kind of flattening of daily life that happens as we all start to spend so much time online, where people really start to fetishize new experiences in new locales. Cue listicles of “13 Places You’ve Never Heard of Because They Aren’t New York or Los Angeles!”

And feeding into that, there were all those articles in national publications that we liked to nitpick and roll our eyes at. But when a city gets that kind of visibility, and just enough of it rings true with visitors’ experience of a place, there’s a kind of X factor that starts to set in, I think.

Greetings From New Nashville provides an in-

a Q-tip cotton swab into another, and a hidden device analyzes your DNA before presenting a slip of paper printed with your name, age, height and “potential life station.”

Lines form in the market, and many townsfolk part with two bucks. The results cause most to question previous choices, to weigh their current “life station” against its potential. Among them is Cherilyn Hubbard, a builder of novelty birdhouses, who is married to Douglas, a high school history teacher. They are a perfectly ordinary, generally happy couple approaching 40 with a small assortment of vague regrets. He wants to learn jazz trombone. She wants something more, although she has no idea what shape “more” might take until she receives a surprising suggestion from the DNAMIX booth.

Other characters affected by the machine include two troubled teens, the town mayor, a priest, a principal and a recovering alcoholic who offers a free taxi service.

All of these characters are fully realized and artfully drawn. While some may be more central than others to the tangled web of action launched by the machine’s arrival, there is no single protagonist. What emerges instead is the life of the town, a mosaic of folks like those found in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town — neither as simple as residents of Mayberry nor as devious as those of Spoon River. (Not coincidentally, an actual mosaic photograph of townspeople, commissioned for an upcoming festival celebrating Deerfield’s founding, becomes a central plot device.) From the opening line, the reader has the sense of a wise, omniscient narrator peeking into various bars, cars and bedroom

ing microcosm of the East Side’s transition.

The fact that T Bone Burnett keeps appearing as a background character is a fun subplot.

Throughout Greetings, contributors remind us that Nashville’s boom has been a bane to Black residents. What are your own thoughts on the state of Nashville’s race problem at this moment? The protests of recent months are, of course, rooted in problems that predate the killing of George Floyd — problems that predate the killings of Jocques Clemmons and Daniel Hambrick here in Nashville, for that matter.

In August, the legislature passed new laws to criminalize peaceful Black-led protests on the plaza. Meanwhile, crowds of tourists had been roaming Lower Broadway for weeks without masks, and the first person the police arrest for not complying with the rules is an unhoused Black man? It’s not subtle.

There is a lot of love in this city that reaches across all kinds of divisions, but when the structures in place are profoundly inequitable, love can only do so much. If there is anything good about 2020, maybe it’s that the light has been thrown back on these problems and people are finding their voice in the midst of it.

If Steve Haruch were made emperor of Nashville, what current trend would you eliminate by imperial fiat? Emperor, you say? If I could shoot lightning bolts from my fingers, I’d aim them in the general direction of publicdrunkenness transpotainment and at pedal taverns in particular. If not, I would stop evictions for the foreseeable future.

To read an extended version of this interview — and more local book coverage — please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

More than half of the 37 short chapter titles are also taken from Prine lyrics: “Level on the Level,” “There’s Flies in the Kitchen, I Can Hear Them A-Buzzin’ ” and more. The book is dedicated to Walsh’s family and “the still-singing heart of John Prine.”

Just as Prine’s music critiqued modern America while celebrating ordinary Americans, Walsh portrays likeable people caught up within a shallow, materialistic culture, his voice more personal than preachy.

Plotlines that in another book would lead to divorce or violence — or even a possible mass shooting at a school — defy the odds here in ways that can’t be described without spoiling them. As when listening to Prine, the reader is likely to smile at characters and comic events, but also to think about the issues they raise long after the music ends.

One of Walsh’s memorable characters, Jacob, is a nerdy teen mourning the death of his twin brother early in the novel. He discovers at a key moment just how much he cares for his history teacher Mr. Hubbard THE BIG DOOR PRIZE

BY M.O. WALSH and for all the others in the town.

G.P. PUTNAM’S SONS “What a glorious and invisible map,” 384 PAGES, $27 he realizes. “All of us connected in ———— so many silent ways. Our friends.

WALSH WILL DISCUSS HIS NOVEL Our families. The people we are ONLINE AT 6 P.M. SATURDAY, OCT. 3 soon to meet.”

These connections lie at the heart of The Big Door Prize, and what an enormous windows, a twinkle in his eye as he heart it is. brings some mischief to the lives within.

For more local book coverage, please visit The twinkle seems to have been borrowed from Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities the late singer-songwriter John Prine. The book’s title Tennessee. is a line in the Prine song “In Spite of Ourselves”: “Against all odds, honey / We’re the big door prize.”

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

NASHVILLE SCENE | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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FILM

Having a NaFF

The 51st iteration of the Nashville Film Festival goes entirely virtual Oct. 1-7

BY NATHAN SMITH

T

hough all art forms are suffering as artists struggle to adapt to a post-pandemic world, the film-festival model has been uniquely impacted by COVID-19.

Audiences congregate annually at festivals not just for the curation, but also for the camaraderie that surrounds it, for the active engagement of discovering new voices and works, for the discussion ignited by panels and Q&As. At their best, film festivals are celebrations of social proximity as much as cinema.

The Nashville Film Festival has endured as one of the nation’s longest-running film festivals, entering its 51st year of programming this year — but in 2020 it faces a challenge like little else. Part of what gives film fests their appeal is the opportunity to see new works that haven’t been (and may never be) widely released. But that can also put a limit on accessibility; to see these films, you have to be there. Despite the tremendous setbacks and challenges faced by NaFF and every festival in these peculiar times, there’s also the potential for something new. The virtual model has expanded the idea of what a film festival can be, inviting viewers from far and wide to engage with Nashville. For years, NaFF has brought an entire world’s worth of rich and innovative programming to the Middle Tennessee region; now, it can reach back out and bring Nashville to the world.

The medium of the festival might have changed, but its format is much the same, with feature-length films spread across nine major categories: Music Films/Music City Features, Tennessee Features, Narrative Features, New Directors, Documentary Features, Graveyard Shift, Animated Features, U.S. Independents and Fringe World Cinema. There will also be a small Spotlight: Japan sidebar and, as usual, an expansive shorts program that transcends genres, forms and borders.

Though NaFF has always maintained a strong international focus, its emphasis on global stories is particularly resonant in a world that feels increasingly

FREELAND claustrophobic. This year, festival highlights and surefire crowd-pleasers are drawn from the world over, encompassing a diverse array of voices and perspectives. South Korean filmmaker Yoon Dan-bi’s Moving On is a tender portrait of a family at a point of emotional transition, reminiscent of the keenly observed dramas of Edward Yang and Yasujirō Ozu. From the Philippines, the nostalgia trip Death of Nintendo offers a DayGlo-colored twist on the coming-of-age story — director Raya Martin’s sharp and colorful visual style is as informed by the vintage video games that lend the movie its name as it is by the lush landscape of his country.

It’s perhaps fitting, if not necessarily intentional, that the festival’s highestprofile title is a tale of profound isolation and its delirious effects. Siberia, the latest collaboration between iconoclast auteur Abel Ferrara and his regular leading man Willem Dafoe, is a novelistic fever dream, somewhere in the vast no-man’sland between Jack London and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Dafoe plays a solitary tavern keeper named Clint, living out on the far reaches of the tundra, with only strangers who speak foreign tongues and traumatic visions to keep him company. Clint embarks on a journey — physically across the wilderness on a dog sled, emotionally deep into his unconscious mind — slipping

MOVING ON

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in and out of imagination and reality. The but the cast is a veritable who’s-who of resulting film is often abstract, strange American independent cinema: Kate Lyn and inscrutable, but it’s filled with images Sheil, Lindsay Burdge and Michael Chernus that sear into your mind, like the haunting — all of whom might are recognizable memories that won’t leave Clint alone. thanks to their roles in films by the likes of The Narrative and Independent Noah Baumbach and Joe Swanberg — as categories in particular showcase several well as appearances from Rory Culkin noteworthy ensembles of acting talent. and alt-country icon Sturgill Simpson. If Kate McLean and Mario Furloni’s Freeland dreamlike and dialogue-driven New York cinema is your thing, I’d point your attention is one of the most exceptional dramas in to Bingham Bryant’s “Foreign Powers” this year’s festival. Krisha Fairchild plays a marijuana farmer who has in the shorts section, a millennial been quietly and comfortably Borges story that’s one of the living on the edges of the best films in the festival.

NASHVILLE FILM FESTIVAL, law for decades, but whose For something of a totally OCT. 1-7 world goes up in smoke different flavor, Graham VISIT NASHVILLEFILMFESTIVAL.ORG as she’s forced to go legal.

Mason’s Inspector Ike is a FOR TICKETS AND FURTHER It’s a gentle, naturalistic lightly sardonic, hyperINFORMATION tragedy about a subject stylized homage to Columbo’s that’s often sensationalized, how-catch-’em-style mysteries with the always-dependable and TV movies of bygone and exceptional Lily Gladstone and decades that includes familiar faces Frank Mosley in supporting roles. David of New York’s stand-up comedy scene, Gutnik’s Materna is equal parts baffling and including John Early and Stavros Halkias.

As always, there’s strong regional beguiling, a labyrinthine tale of four women representation. Two documentaries in the whose lives collide in violent coincidence.

Tennessee Features section are of particular I’m still wrapping my head around the local interest. Drew Maynard’s Shine Service film and unpacking exactly what it means,

YOU DON’T KNOW ME

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FILM looks at something of a Nashville legend, following the long life of Robert “Percy” Person, who began shining shoes on Jefferson Street in the 1940s and today owns Percy’s Shine Service in the Arcade. Jon Kent’s You Don’t Know Me documents the long — and sadly, relevant as ever — struggle of Abu-Ali Abdur’Rahman, whose story has been documented over the years by the Scene. In 1987, Abdur’Rahman was put on death row in a trial beset by prosecutorial misconduct and racial discrimination, and he’s been fighting for his freedom ever since. Kent brings clarity and perspective, along with a wealth of archival footage and new interviews, to a case that’s sure to make you feel a righteous anger.

Given Nashville’s rich legacy as a music production mecca, rhythm and melody are always central to NaFF’s programming. This year’s Music Films/ Music City program gives viewers a look at all kinds of music — from Never Too Late, a look at the wild life of former Tonight Show bandleader (and current East Tennessee resident) Doc Severinsen, to Los Últimos Frikis, the untold tale of one of Cuba’s only heavy-metal bands. Even outside the Music Films section, the NaFF program revels in the empowering and expressive power of music, in films like Electric Jesus, a period piece about the daughter of a preacher man who hits the road with a hair-metal band, and The Night of the Beast, the story of two Colombian Iron Maiden fans’ youthful anticipation of their favorite band’s first performance in the country.

But what’s possibly the headlining musical event at this year’s NaFF isn’t actually a film at all. It’s been two decades since the release of the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, their sepia-toned and myth-tinted tribute to bygone folkways and good ol’ mountain music, with a soundtrack beloved by Americana fans and NPR listeners everywhere. NaFF celebrates that anniversary, and looks back at the impact the film and its soundtrack made on the genres it paid homage to, with a commemorative panel called

20th Anniversary O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Music Tribute featuring George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson and blues musician Chris Thomas King.

The panel will also include an exclusive performance by Carlene Carter, daughter of June Carter Cash, and her daughter, Tiffany Anastasia Lowe.

Though the future of cinema seems very uncertain — from the limits social distancing puts on production to the potential dangers of in-person theatrical viewing — the Nashville Film Festival has managed to soldier on in a slightly updated form. The physical experience may not be exactly the same, but NaFF’s commitment to new voices and original images remains the same. The format may change, but stories will continue to be told, and a dialogue around them can still unfold.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

Full ’Court Press

Virtual screenings, 12 Hours of Terror and the Belcourt Drive-In, this fall at Nashville’s favorite arthouse

BY D. PATRICK RODGERS

I

t wouldn’t be autumn in Nashville without 12 Hours of Terror, the Belcourt Theatre’s annual nocturnal marathon of fright-filled films. While the smorgasbord of spooky cinema typically takes place from 10 p.m. to 10 a.m. at the Hillsboro Village arthouse, this year’s freak fest will go down virtually from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m. Oct. 24-25 via a livestream. As always, the Belcourt won’t announce its Terror titles until closer to the event, but past lineups have offered the full run of the gore gamut, from pillars of classic horror like John Carpenter’s The Thing and Dario Argento’s Inferno to cultfave selections like Joe Dante’s The Howling and 1983’s Hong Kong horror effort The Boxer’s Omen. Count on fearsome rock ’n’ rollers The Boo Dudes, longtime local horror luminary Dr. Gangrene and more to make appearances and keep the 12HOT train on track and chugging along. Tickets for 12 Hours of Terror are on sale now.

Another effort you can count on this fall from the wonderful nonprofit film center is the Belcourt Drive-In series. Taking place in the Belcourt’s parking lot, the series

KAJILLIONAIRE has proven to be a smash hit over the past several weeks thanks to repertory titles like The Birds and Stop Making Sense alongside new releases including First Cow, Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President and Kajillionaire. The latter, which is the latest from arthouse darling Miranda July, has a few more screenings set for this weekend, though they’ve all sold out. A little piece of evergreen advice? Become a Belcourt member if you haven’t already. It’ll put you at the front of the line for Drive-In tickets and get you discounts on events like the aforementioned 12HOT. Plus you get to support a priceless local gem. Wins all around, folks.

According to Belcourt staff, October Drive-In screenings will include Lost Boys, Poltergeist, Beetlejuice and Psycho, not to mention The Rocky Horror Picture Show on

Halloween weekend. Also planned for midOctober at the Drive-In: the Bill Murraystarring On the Rocks, the latest from Sofia Coppola. Expect a special repertory screening or two to accompany that one as a “double Bill,” so to speak.

The Belcourt has plenty more on offer via its Virtual Cinema in the coming weeks. There are documentaries about influential cultural figures (Herb Alpert Is …, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life) as well as the kind of intriguing international fare (Sibyl) the film buffs among us would no doubt line up to see at the theater were it not for this infernal pandemic.

Freshly announced titles in both the Belcourt Drive-In series and the Virtual Cinema will keep on coming this fall, so keep your eyes trained on belcourt.org and the Scene’s pages for more about those.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

Return of the IBFF Nashville’s 14th annual International Black Film Festival is streaming in a living room near you

BY ERICA CICCARONE

T

he International Black Film Festival lands this week, offering films from a bevy of up-and-coming filmmakers. Here’s a quick rundown of what we’re looking forward to at the Nashville-based festival. You can access the full slate of streaming features and shorts — and view the schedule, which was not released at press time — via REMEMBERING ANARCHA the organization’s website, ibffevents.com. This year, IBFF is asking for donations to the organization in lieu of selling tickets. and into concert halls and stadiums.

Among the more topical entries, After Selma 1st Forgotten Champions: The Legacy of Jerry examines the history of voter suppression and the C. Johnson, directed by native Memphian Morreco Coleman, tells the story of Jerry C. Johnson, the unfulfilled promises of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. first African American basketball coach to win an Director Loki Mulholland, the son of the white civil NCAA Division lll National Basketball Championship rights activist Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, takes the in 1975. As the head coach at Memphis HBCU struggle into the present day, examining how our LeMoyne-Owen College for 46 years, Johnson led federal, state and local governments have continued the team to more than 800 wins, leaving an to strategically keep people from participating in indelible mark on Bluff City. the franchise.

The crowdfunded Rooted and Reports of alleged forced sterilization of Latina women by ICE are indeed Grounded: The Evolution of Gospel horrifying — and sadly, this isn’t an Music by Derrick Williams tracks INTERNATIONAL BLACK FILM FESTIVAL issue that’s new to our country’s the cultural impact of gospel music STREAM THE FEST SEPT. 30-OCT. 4 history. Remembering Anarcha, across genres and generations.

VIA IBFFEVENTS.COM Gospel’s traditional forms and directed by Josh Carples, profiles influences run deep, but it’s also the so-called “father of modern evolving to meet diverse audiences, gynaecology” James Marion Sims, having expanded outside of churches who performed experiments on

enslaved women in the American South, often without anesthesia or their consent. Sims is memorialized in monuments around the country, but the stories of the women whose bodies were sacrificed for science remain untold. The film aims to uncover one such story about a woman named Anarcha.

There’s also a bevy of enticing IBFF shorts.

Symone Baptiste’s “Sixteen Thousand Dollars” imagines that a college student wakes up one morning to find that reparations have finally been paid to descendants of American slaves — a paltry $16,000. Two documentary shorts are about Black girls and beauty, Sesethu Mcoyana’s “Miss Heritage Capetown” and Mona-Lisa Misme’s “Brown-Skinned Girl.” Find relationship drama in “Beauty Mark” and “#Anniversary,” and family issues in “A New Chapter,” “DVD & Chill” and “Brother.”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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Bringing the World of Food to You Take some culinary trips from your own home this season

BY CHRIS CHAMBERLAIN

J

ust because international travel is currently discouraged doesn’t mean other cultures can’t share their worlds with us, especially when it comes to food. Organizations across the city are keeping the lines of culinary communication open with a series of virtual events and carryout options designed to expose interested diners to unique cuisines.

A group that has been doing this since long before Coronatimes is Gigamunch, a unique meal-delivery service launched in 2017 by a group of entrepreneurs who met in college at Tennessee Tech. The service has partnered with local immigrant communities to showcase multicultural cuisines through weekly meals delivered directly to subscribers’ homes. Each week features a different country, with a multicourse meal prepared by a Nashville immigrant familiar with the cuisine. Recent national cuisines highlighted have included Syria, Cameroon, Trinidad and Tobago, and Vietnam, and upcoming meals will take visitors to Bangladesh, Grenada and Peru.

You can see everything that’s scheduled and sign up for 50 percent off your first delivery at gigamunchapp.com.

Meals arrive packaged with clear reheating instructions — along with a suggested playlist to accompany your meal, a biography of that week’s chef that describes their connections to Nashville and their home culture, and a general overview of the featured destination. The meals are sized to feed two or four people at less than $15 per person, and they usually include a starter or side dish, some sort of salad, a main course and something sweet. Vegetarian options are generally available, and there’s no more delicious weekly geography lesson in town!

An ongoing series that highlights different international foods is the InterNASHional Food Crawl. The event is organized as a benefit for the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition. In past years, the InterNASHional Food Crawl was a physical tour of international eateries, either selfguided or as part of organized excursions to a list of restaurants kept a delicious secret until attendees boarded the bus.

For 2020, however, the veil of secrecy has been lifted a bit in favor of arranging some curated carryout baskets created by notable local cooks. This year’s virtual crawl, which spans several weeks, kicked off Sept. 5 with a Persian Picnic Basket prepared by chef Louisa Shafia (author of The New Persian Kitchen) and chef Lokelani Alabanza, creator of Saturated Ice Cream.

A virtual cooking class with Chef Yassin Terrou, owner of Yassin’s Falafel House in Knoxville, took place Sept. 16.

There are still two delectable opportunities coming up — a Dumpling Drive-Up on Oct. 4 and an InterNASHional Brunch Box available on Oct. 17. Both meals feed two for $50 and have been created to offer treats from a variety of destinations. Dumpling Drive-Up

PROST IN PLACE: OKTOBERFEST 2019

patrons will pick up their baskets at Lucky Bamboo on Charlotte Pike, with that restaurant contributing the Chinese version of dumplings to the basket. But don’t think that those, the most familiar of dumplings, are your only option. Also included will be varieties from Nepal, Laos and Kurdistan.

(At press time, Dumpling Drive-Up was sold out, but it might be worth checking the website to see if tickets have been added.)

The brunch event will be hosted by the popular Murfreesboro Road coffee shop The Horn, and tickets were still available at press time — visit nashvillefoodcrawl. com to get yours. (All the food is prepared under safety guidelines set out by the CDC, the city and the state.) Harkening back to the tradition of secrecy, organizers won’t

A BANGLADESHI MEAL FROM GIGAMUNCH

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PHOTO: AERIAL INNOVATIONS

FOOD

release the exact menu in advance, but you can bet that this vegetarian-friendly sampling of breakfast items from favorite international restaurants around town will be delicious and fascinating.

A much-lamented loss during this pandemic will doubtlessly be the chance to rub shoulders with thousands of neighbors at the annual Nashville Oktoberfest in Germantown, an event that has been a tradition since 1980. But the organizers haven’t completely abandoned the fun, thanks to their planned Prost in Place virtual event, landing at 5 p.m. on Oct. 10. Sign up at thenashvilleoktoberfest.com and you’ll be invited to take streaming online tours of two famous breweries — the iconic Paulaner Brewery of Germany, and last year’s winner of the People’s Choice award, Sierra Nevada. Viewers can pick up some of the two breweries’ autumnal beers from local markets and sip along during an online tasting. There will also be door prizes and some special surprise visitors during the hourlong presentation.

Additionally, you can order the official Prost in Place Box for $59 (plus shipping) to make sure you have all the accoutrements for a proper at-home Oktoberfest experience. The box will include a commemorative Nashville Oktoberfest beer stein, a collector’s pin, a pretzel necklace (plus some German mustard to dip it in), a beer token and a coupon for 25 percent off the VIP experience for next year’s Oktoberfest (Gott willing!), a #TNStrong bracelet to support those affected by the March 3 tornado, and a bottle of hand sanitizer, because everything now includes a bottle of hand sanitizer.

Other beloved Nashville Oktoberfest traditions that have gone virtual include a self-paced 5K run, which you can complete anywhere indoors or out on Oct. 10 — just post your time online afterward.

What’s more, the fantastic Dachshund Derby has morphed into an online wiener dog beauty pageant. Dress up your pooch and film him or her running 10 yards (or really, just doing anything) for the chance to win prizes in categories like “Best Dressed,” “Speediest” and “Ms./Mr. Congeniality.” It’s gonna take a lot more than some virus to keep Nashvillians from having fun this fall.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

NASHVILLE SCENE | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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years John Guider 10am CDT Oct. 3

Steve Haruch 6:30pm CDT Oct. 6

Thomas Burton 3pm CDT Oct. 10

Michael Ray Taylor 12:30pm CDT Oct. 9

Southern Festival of Books congratulates the University of Tennessee Press and Vanderbilt University Press as they each celebrate 80 years of publishing.

UTPRESS.ORG VANDERBILT.EDU/UNIVERSITY-PRESS

Join the presses and meet the authors of these books at this year’s festival @sofestofbooks nashvillescene.com | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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The Frist Art Museum Bounces Back

Three can’t-miss exhibitions give us something to look forward to

BY LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

I

is likely to be a showstopper. The great volume of works on display are organized around the theme of religious turmoil that’s reflected in its title, Albrecht Dürer: The Age of Reformation and Renaissance. Dürer (1471–1528) lived during the Protestant Reformation, which greatly affected both the artist and his art. The Frist’s tradition of mounting exhibitions with Christian themes to coincide with the Christmas season continues here — one of Dürer’s most enduring images is his engraving of Adam and Eve, created in 1504.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM “LEARN OF THEIR DISCOVERY . . . ,” RINA BANERJEE; IMAGE COURTESY OF GALERIE NATHALIE OBADIA, PARIS/BRUSSELS

n my imaginary fall season, there are plaid blankets and thermoses full of hot cider, and I can see my breath as I laugh freely, without any thought of diseases or shitty politics or the broken system that’s failing us all. But let’s be honest: That’s not likely to happen this year. It’s fortunate that the Frist Art Museum has a plan to make the best out of this likely-to-be-fraught season: A talented artist duo will present work in the courtyard, a contemporary artist will mount a survey of her 20-year art career, and an extensive exhibition of work by an early Renaissance master of printmaking will sate the appetites of old-world-art lovers.

The tree-lined courtyard at the Frist Art Museum is the ideal setting for a socially distant, thoughtfully articulated art presentation. That’s the backdrop against which Nashville-based artist team EXO:DUS will stage their monthlong immersive installation of Blood at the Root, an investigation of the racially charged undercurrents that flow through American homes — even the home the artists share.

EXO:DUS is Elisheba Israel Mrozik and Aaron Mrozik, an interraccial married couple whose practice involves an examination of their individual heritages, how they blend together and how they clash. Blood at the Root works to subtly uncover the facets of racism that aren’t screamed at political rallies or in social media posts. Their artist statement lays it out: “Our worldviews; our paradigms are built slowly, over time, in direct and passive actions. One of the most influential areas this happens is within our homes. This is an exploration of the vulnerability within the great American home to be exposed to covert and overt displays of racism and white supremacy.”

Rina Banerjee is an artist whose work defies categorization — she is a painter, a sculptor, a mixedmedia installation artist.

OCT. 1-NOV. 1, BLOOD AT THE ROOT Throughout the many EXO:DUS (ELISHEBA ISRAEL MROZIK artistic disciplines she AND AARON MROZIK) practices, a refrain of THURSDAYS-SUNDAYS, 1-4 P.M. socially constructed TURNER COURTYARD identity continues.

OCT. 9-JAN. 10 Culturally loaded items RINA BANERJEE: MAKE ME A SUMMARY OF THE like cowrie shells, symbol, she says in an WORLD Chinese umbrellas exhibition statement, of NOV. 6-FEB. 7 and epoxy buffalo-horn the ideal of egalitarian ALBRECHT DÜRER: THE AGE replicas frequently communication that is OF REFORMATION AND appear in her work, and at the core of her work.

RENAISSANCE what some might see as The artist will engage in a cultural disarray in fact serves discussion of her work with Frist as a comforting reminder of what the chief curator Mark Scala via Zoom exhibition statement calls “the tantalizing on Oct. 7 — it’s a must-see for anyone possibility of a more inclusive and openinterested in how art can map out social ended future.” Her exhibition, Make Me a progress.

Albrecht Dürer is without equal in art Summary of the World, takes on an added layer of meaning at the Frist, which occupies history, and the Frist’s exhibition of more Nashville’s former main post office — a than 100 engravings, etchings and woodcuts

“BLOOD AT THE ROOT (DETAIL),” EXO:DUS; PHOTO: AARON MROZIK

ART

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An Independent Bookstore for Independent People

AppeAring At Southern FeStivAl oF BookS Sat. Oct 3, 4:00 pm

Mary Bohlen

Heritage Cooking Inspired by Rebecca Boone

Sat. Oct 10, 2:15 pm

PhiliP lee WilliaMs

In Conversation with Johnnie Bernard

Sat. Oct 10, 3:00 pm

Wayne Winkler

Appalachian Voices Past and Present

Sat. Oct 10, 3:15 pm

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In Conversation with Charlotte Pence

Sun. Oct 11, 1:15 pm

The 32nd annual Southern Festival of Books: A Celebration of the Written Word will be held online October 1-11.

Join us for the FREE livestreaming sessions.

Check out the offerings from the Scene’s Southern Festival of Books Partners

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www.mupress.org nashvillescene.com | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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Nashville’s gallery scene changes, survives and appears full of magic in a spellbinding fall art season

BY JOE NOLAN

S

am Dunson’s Black Flower is a season-

spanning display that’s my don’tmiss pick among Nashville’s fall gallery offerings. The show opens at The Rymer Gallery Oct. 17, and runs through Dec. 26. Curator Herb Williams is still working out the details regarding how the exhibition will be viewed in light of Nashville’s evolving COVID-19 public safety measures. In-person viewing, a virtual walk-through and a live and/or online talk with Dunson are planned to ensure that all Nashville art lovers can access this stunning show.

Black Flower is a deep display of sculpture and painting that resonates with identity themes like family and race. But looking deeper, Dunson’s Flower represents the kind of personal growth that takes place within the unknown. Dunson is a Black artist and educator, and one of the founders of North Nashville’s celebrated contemporary art scene. But in this show, the color black represents the choice between the thanatotic allure of decay and death, and the leap into the void that’s required of every artist, person or country that aspires to ascend into the next-best version of themselves. Highlights here include “The Try Cycle,” a midcentury tricycle bedazzled with faux flowers, costume jewels and colored thread. Keeping with Black Flower’s twin themes, the baby

cludes happenings at OZ Arts, a project from Poverty and the Arts, and the latest display at Raven & Whale in East Nashville. The Virtual Art Crawl video goes live Oct. 3 at 6 p.m.

Julia Martin Gallery will host Shift Your Paradigm, an all-star group show including work

by Beizar Abdi, Benjy Russell, Betty Turbo, Bryce McCloud, Jon Langford, Kate Csillagi, Nuveen Barwari, Marlos E’van and Savithri Velaga, as well

Quilting, crafting, knitting — these means of expression have long held wholesome connotations. But Shag offers textile pieces by a baker’s dozen of artists who clearly revel in toying with the conventional understanding of this kind of work. Take, for instance, the embroidered fabric work of Brooklyn’s Sophia Narrett, whose provocative scenes are imbued with mys-

Katarina Riesing, which offer intimate glimpses of the human body at its most candid — exposed backs, breasts, asses, all of them with cellulite or hair or blemishes, glorious in their unapologetic asymmetry.

Chicago artist Chiffon Thomas’ embroidered fabric pieces, meanwhile, take an abstract approach to depicting the human form — body parts rendered in pastel thread are bulging and bulbous, but somehow also graceful and sleek.

These pieces only scratch the surface of what’s represented in Shag. Featured artists like Elise Drake, Linnéa Sjöberg and Vadis Turner have unique and diverse talents and approaches on display here, from woven tapestries and knit objects to embroidery. All of them, however, are united by an almost subversive undercurrent — a desire to drive the viewer to reexamine their associations with how we express and understand desire and sexuality.

Staff and visitors at Shag will all SHAG: PROVOCATIVE TEXTILES be expected to wear masks and OCT. 22-NOV. 29 AT observe proper social distancing tery and intoxicating eroticism, like 509 THIRD AVE. S.; protocol. Capacity will be limited, a scene from Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Or VIEWABLE MONDAY-FRIDAY BY and hand sanitizer will be provided Berlin-based artist Elijah Burgher’s APPOINTMENT ONLY SHAGARTSHOW.COM on site. To learn more or make large pieces featuring and inspired an appointment for viewing, visit by sigils, symbols connected to chaos shagartshow.com. magic and the occult. There are also the embroidery-on-silk paintings of New York’s EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

Go for a Shag

Curated by our own Laura Hutson Hunter, Shag: Provocative Textiles offers eroticism via conventionally wholesome media

BY D. PATRICK RODGERS

I

n February, Nashville Scene arts editor Laura Hutson Hunter curated a Scene-sponsored art show called Nerve at Germantown’s Wilder. That exhibition seems eons ago now, particularly its opening reception — dozens of Nashvillians crowded into a three-story townhome, partaking in hors d’oeuvres and discussing the thought-provoking pieces on display in the first installment of Hutson Hunter’s Adult Contemporary series.

The second Adult Contemporary show, of course, will look quite a bit different. Taking place Oct. 22-Nov. 29 at 509 Third Ave. S., Shag: Provocative Textiles will be open by appointment from noon until 5 p.m.

Monday through Friday. While Nerve examined the female body through works by women, Shag will focus on sexuality solely via textile art.

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“THOU ART LOVED ... THOU ART LOVED,” SAM DUNSON

Fall Forward With Nashville Galleries

bike is simultaneously vibrant and funereal, and it’s the iconic work of the show. “Thou Art Loved … Thou Art Loved” doubles down on Black Flower’s bifurcations with a double portrait of Dunson’s father, and “Mama” finds Dunson himself reclining in his mother’s arms — an Afrofuturist pietà.

Frances Berry’s iconic “Hooray Face” paintings are emblematic of the programming at Channel to Channel. Berry is a Memphis-based artist, and At Your Convenience is a collaborative exhibition with her studio mate, Stacy Kiehl. The show runs through Oct. 31.

Channel to Channel had a socially distanced, but in-person, opening for its new show on Sept. 18. Coop — Channel to Channel’s Packing Plant neighbor — has done something completely different, deciding to temporarily transform its space into a studio hosting an artist-in-residency program.

Yanira Vissepo’s art reflects a variety of cultural influences: Vissepo was born in Puerto Rico and recently studied traditional printmaking in Japan. Keep up with her vibrant abstract botanical makings by following her Coop residency on Instagram — she’s @yaniravissepo.

The variety of strategies that Nashville gallery spaces are deploying to survive and become stronger speaks to the resilience and fighting spirit of our gallery scene.

Tinney Contemporary is doing a great job of presenting exhibitions online, and its October show is beautifully displayed at the gallery’s website, tinneycontemporary.com. K.J. Schumacher’s Rinna connects the dots between midcentury Abstract Expressionism, its echoes in the 1980s and its persistent presence — even in the practices of quarantined contemporary painters like Schumacher.

Tinney has also been instrumental in organizing and growing the Virtual Art Crawl, which consists of a video tour of current gallery exhibitions hosted at the Nashville Gallery Association’s YouTube channel. October’s Virtual Art Crawl is the biggest yet — it in-

BLACK FLOWER AT THE RYMER GALLERY as another appearance by Dunson. Shift Your Paradigm will be on view from October through November, and offers the same community-wide reflections on contemporary crises and challenges as the Breathless exhibition at The Red Arrow Gallery this summer. I’d like to see more of these up-tothe-minute group exhibitions.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

“MEAN,” SOPHIA NARRETT

ART

NASHVILLE SCENE | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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Nashville Chapter

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Three UNC Press authors to be featured at the Southern Festival of Books OCTOBER 1-11, 2020

Adam Gussow, author of Whose Blues?: Facing Up to Race and the Future of the Music, in conversation with Jessica Ingram, author of Road Through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2020 12 – 12:45 P.M. CDT Stephanie Elizondo Griest, author of All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2020 4:30 – 5:30 P.M. CDT

at bookstores or 800-848-6224 • uncpress.org • uncpressblog.com nashvillescene.com | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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MUSIC

There’s an Election Going On, in which rising soul champ Devon Gilfillian, his full band and guests including Aaron Lee Tasjan, Breland, Jason Isbell and Kyshona Armstrong perform Mar-

There’s Music in the Air

Even though this concert season is anything but normal, there are plenty of shows to see, in person or online

BY STEPHEN TRAGESER

B

ased on how 2020 has gone, you might not expect to see a music events section in our annual Fall Guide. The major tours, late-season festivals and smorgasbord of intimate club shows we typically highlight can’t happen safely while the pandemic rages on. But musicians have been trying their damndest this year to find ways to keep playing for you, largely through streaming performances. Venues, meanwhile, have stepped up to provide either a safe environment where a very small number of people can watch a show in person, a space (that’s not a living room or practice space) where an artist can perform with a full band for a streaming show, or both.

It’s been almost seven months since small and midsize venues were able to operate normally and have a regular income. In an effort to prevent the dramatically reduced cash flow from turning temporary closures into permanent ones, a group of 15 independent venues has joined forces with the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp to organize Music City Bandwidth, a festival featuring full-band performances filmed at venues around town.

Shows stream for free most evenings at 7 p.m. via musiccitybandwidth.com, where you can also find the full schedule as well as opportunities to donate to a fund that supports venues. The festival runs through Oct. 31. Highlights among the remaining shows include rock heroes Thelma and the Sleaze at Springwater on Oct. 1, country-psych rockers Teddy and the Rough Riders with Emily Nenni at Drkmttr on Oct. 14, and rap ace Tim Gent at Exit/In on Oct. 26. You have 24 hours to watch each show before it vanishes from the web.

Similarly, outstanding free festival Musicians Corner has a notable assortment of alumni for its Sundown Series. Installments stream Thursday nights at 8 p.m. via the festival’s Facebook and YouTube channels.

Among the sets to watch for is R&B and soul master Jason Eskridge’s performance, streaming Oct. 1, and one from string-band scholar Amythyst Kiah, who closes the festival Oct. 29.

See musicianscornernashville.com for the full schedule and updates. Eskridge’s muchloved Sunday Night Soul program has returned to The 5 Spot on the second and fourth Sunday of each month, showcasing top R&B and soul talent playing to an empty house.

A small number of venues are set up in such a way (read: with seating separate from the stage) that they can reopen for a small audience and still maintain social distancing and adhere to other safety guidelines. Before COVID-19, about 400 people could dine and watch a show in City Winery’s main venue, but they’ve redesigned the layout and reduced the capacity to 100 guests.

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AMYTHYST KIAH Another 100 can be seated for a concert outside in the venue’s newly opened Music City Wine Garden. The stage and seating are under a giant tent, and with the addition of heat lamps, it’s expected you’ll be able to see shows there until mid-December.

Can’t-miss concerts include inventive guitarist and composer William Tyler on Oct. 13, rock ace Lilly Hiatt on Oct. 26 and Mavericks frontman Raul Malo on Oct. 27-28. Two legends have multiple dates booked: Emmylou Harris performs mini-installments of her Woofstock festival to benefit her animal rescue organization Bonaparte’s Retreat on Nov. 9-10 (with The Red Dirt Boys) and Nov. 16 (with Marty Stuart), and Lucinda Williams plays Oct. 31-Nov. 1, Nov. 14-15, and Nov. 27-28.

Many of these shows will also stream via Mandolin under the banner of City Winery TV — see citywinery.com/nashville for the full calendar, ticketing, tech details, safety information and more.

By the same token, a reduced and masked-up crowd can see a show in the flesh at the Station Inn, 3rd and Lindsley, Acme Feed & Seed or Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge, though many performances are also broadcast online. Some recurring gigs to seek out: Old Crow Medicine Show’s bandleader is set to host Ketch Secor’s Folk City at 3rd and Lindsley on the first Thursday of each month through January, while beloved Western swing band The Time Jumpers return to their regular slot on Mondays. See the venues’ websites for all the details.

More new ideas are coming along for in-person shows on a larger scale. Pelham, Tenn.’s The Caverns, home to the PBS performance showcase Bluegrass Underground, has planned a run of outdoor shows called the Above Ground Concert Series, in which affiliated parties will be seated in isolated pods. The series begins with a four-show run Oct. 8-11 featuring Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit. A slightly different approach will be taken for the upcoming Outloud Drive-In Series, put on by the folks who routinely bring the Outloud Festival to Church Street. Guests will remain in their cars for the inaugural show featuring New Orleans bounce queen Big Freedia, which goes down Oct. 24 at the Main Event Parking Lot on James Robertson Parkway near Nissan Stadium.

It’s completely understandable if you weigh the risks of going out In These Times — even to a place where the hand sanitizer flows like wine — and decide it’s not for you.

LILLY HIATT

Streaming-only performances to watch on your computer or phone, whether live or filmed ahead of time, are still in abundance.

One outstanding stream coming up is

vin Gaye’s fundamental 1971 classic What’s Going On at 3rd and Lindsley. The event is a fundraiser for voting rights advocacy nonprofit Equity Alliance, and it streams Oct. 1 at 8 p.m. — check out Gilfillian’s site for details. Also to add to the calendar: Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s Big Night at the Museum fundraiser stream. In-demand producer Dave Cobb serves as music director, and country legend Marty Stuart hosts the two-hour program, in which musicians like Reba McEntire, Emmylou Harris, Miranda Lambert and The War and Treaty will perform on historic instruments from museum exhibits.

You’ll be able to watch the stream at 8 p.m. on Oct. 28 — see countrymusichalloffame. org for information.

Venues like Rudy’s Jazz Room and The 5 Spot routinely feature multiple livestreams per week. Rudy’s streams via Facebook, and The 5 Spot streams via either Facebook or the StageIt platform. Both offer outstanding audio and video quality and top talent, and typically announce their shows a few days ahead of time. Mando Saenz’s Live From the New Bobby’s Idle Hour features a full set from a top local singer-songwriter once per month, and other artists occasionally film shorter performances at the currently shuttered Music Row bar — see Bobby’s Facebook page for updates. Plenty of artists still stream from somewhere in their homes, too. Amanda Shires’ I So Lounging program, a daily event in March and April, now streams on YouTube most Fridays at 5 p.m. from her barn, while Emma Swift and Robyn Hitchcock’s Live From Sweet Home Quarantine happens 8 p.m. most Wednesdays and 2 p.m. Fridays via StageIt. There’s no better time to keep a close watch on the websites and social media of your favorite musicians and venues. They’ve assembled a patchwork of income sources, running the gamut from government funding to crowdfunding, to keep their heads above water. But it’s going to take a sustained effort to get them through the pandemic, and anything you can do, from buying a ticket to buying a T-shirt, makes a difference.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

DEVON GILFILLIAN

NASHVILLE SCENE | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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T H I N G S

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[HEEEEERE’S BILGE!]

LOST NASHVILLE project in 2000 when a friend was diagnosed with breast cancer, has facilitated more than 1,000 casts, which has resulted in more than $500,000 in donations. The idea is to remove the shame that some people associate with breasts and breast health by

casting the chests of all kinds of women, hoping to eliminate any stigma that’s been attached. For the Nashville iteration of Keep A Breast, a bevy of notable locals have participated — including model Karen Elson, former Mayor Megan Barry, and

musicians like Mickey Guyton and Margo Price. The casts have been decorated by a variety of artists, including more Scene faves than we can mention in a single Critic’s Pick — David Onri Anderson, Julia Martin, Andra Eggleston, Donna Woodley, Elisheba Israel Mrozik and more. The exhibition will be open to the public 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily for the duration of the show, and the virtual auction runs Oct. 6-28. Find more information at the Keep A Breast website, keep-a-breast.org. Oct. 2-31 at Riverside Revival, 1600 Riverside Drive

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Adult-themed plaster casts are no longer the provenance of famed groupie Cynthia Plaster Caster alone. The new queen of casting is Shaney Jo Darden, whose Keep A Breast campaign raises money for breast cancer research through fun and sexy boobcentric art pieces. Darden, who started the

PHOTO: CAILIN MANNING

WATCH COOLIDGE CORNER THEATRE’S THE SHINING VIRTUAL SEMINAR

Many of us who spend a lot of time thinking about horror films — and films in general — consider Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 effort The Shining to be among the genre’s very best. The film has landed near the top of countless critical lists, among them the American Film Institute’s “100 Years …

100 Thrills” countdown of cinema’s most exciting movies. But at the time of its release, The Shining, based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel of the same name, was far from a critical darling. Famously despised by King himself, the film deviated a great deal from its source material, and even Gene Siskel called it “a crashing disappointment.” But in the years since, Kubrick’s 11th feature and its myriad iconic shots have planted themselves firmly in the American psyche. Indeed, within the context of The Shining, even the mere mention of certain nouns — twins, elevator, carpet, typewriter, bathtub, baseball bat — conjures images most of us will never forget. On Oct. 1, prolific and talented film critic Bilge Ebiri — who’s written for New York Magazine, Vulture, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice and even a little old rag by the name of the Nashville Scene — will lead a virtual seminar on The Shining presented by the EDITOR’S NOTE: AS A RESPONSE TO THE legendary Coolidge ONGOING COVID-19 PANDEMIC, Corner Theatre in WE’VE CHANGED THE FOCUS OF Brookline, Mass.

THE CRITICS’ PICKS SECTION TO Ebiri, who first INCLUDE ACTIVITIES YOU CAN saw the film when PARTAKE IN WHILE YOU’RE AT HOME. he was 9 years old (Bilge, what?!), knows a thing or two about Kubrick’s work, and he’s assured audiences that the discussion will include dissections of how the film diverged from the novel, what’s made it such a lasting work of art and more. Visit the Coolidge’s site (coolidge.org/events/seminar-shining) to register. You’ll get a link to download Ebiri’s pre-taped lecture about the film, and at 7 p.m. Central on Oct. 1, you can join in on Zoom to discuss the movie. If you need a refresher, you can rent The Shining for $4 via Amazon Prime Video or iTunes. And while you’re at it, look up Ebiri’s killer 2019 Vulture essay “The Discomforting Legacy of Wendy Torrance.” 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 1

ART

R O U N D U P

KEEP A BREAST

MAGGIE ROSE’S CAST, DESIGNED BY LIZZY LUNDAY. PHOTO: JUDITH HILL

FILM

W E E K L Y

[GET MOVING!]

CATCH THE PREMIERE OF FOUND MOVEMENT GROUP’S LOST NASHVILLE

You can always count on artists to think outside the box. But COVID-19 has forced arts organizations to get especially creative as they explore nontraditional formats and venues — and that’s great news for those of us who’ve been itching to get out and experience live performance.

For example, on Saturday, Oct. 3, you can check out the premiere of Found Movement Group’s Lost Nashville, an original new work developed in response to iconic sites throughout the city. Presented in partnership with the Kindling Arts Festival, Lost Nashville offers what the group is calling “an elevated scavenger hunt” for arts lovers. Ticket-holders will solve a series

nashvillescene.com | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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10/12

School yourself on dry but important subject matter in bite-size bursts by binging Talk Boring to Me, a six-episode meeting of the minds between two righteous Oaklanders: comic and United Shades of America host W. Kamau Bell and director Jake Kornbluth. Inequality for All, Kornbluth’s sadly evergreen 2013 doc with economist Robert Reich, uses a shrewd combo of fast-moving visuals and engaging, trustworthy talking heads to convey information and make it stick.

Talk Boring is smaller in scale, but it still successfully reprises that tactic in fourminute segments tackling topics including the census, asylum and the gig economy.

Make it a double feature and watch TBTM in conjunction with Killer Mike’s similarminded Trigger Warning on Netflix. Stream all six episodes on W. Kamau Bell’s YouTube channel, tinyurl.com/talk-boring-to-me.

SHOPPING

CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

10/18

THE MIDNIGHT RIDERS ALLMAN BROTHERS REVUE

11/5 THE CORDOVAS

KETCH SECOR’S FOLK CITY

COMING SOON 10-13 The Mike Henderson Band / Sam Hunter : Late Nite Shenanigans w/ Friends 10-16 Fab Beatles Revue plus The ConSoulers 10-15 Bluebird On 3rd !

10 -17 Backstage Nashville: Hit Songwriters Show / Vinyl Radio 10-18 The Cordovas 10-19 The Time Jumpers 10-20 The Mike Henderson Band 10-22 Bluebird On 3rd

10-24 Backstage Nashville: Hit Songwriters Show Resurrection : A Journey Tribute 10-26 The Time Jumpers 10-27 The Mike Henderson Band 10-28 George Shingleton FREE SHOW 10-29 Bluebird On 3rd !

10-30 1971: The Greatest Year in Music 10-31 Rubik’s Groove Halloween Spectacular 11-2 The Time Jumpers

11-5 Ketch Secor’s FOLK CITY 11-6 Pat McLaughlin Band featuring Kenny Greenberg, Michael Rhodes, Greg Morrow 11-7 John Cowan and The HercuLeon’s featuring Andrea Zonn, Matt Menefee, Seth Taylor, Ashby Frank 1-23 Anderson Council : A Pink Floyd Experience Performs “Animals”

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is originally spooned over the top of the chocolate cake batter, shifts to the bottom of the Bundt cake pan. What?! YES! (I know there is a logical explanation about how the weight and density of the flan mixture sinks through as the cake fills with air due to a chemical reaction of leavening agents like baking powder and baking soda — but quiet, you! Let me believe it’s more of Castillo’s magic.) I don’t care how, I don’t care why — just buy it. MEGAN SELING

[NEVER GO BACK]

BUY STUFF AT THE NASHVILLE BLACK MARKET

The fourth Nashville Black Market will likely be different from the previous three — social distancing guidelines and mask mandates will be in effect. But it’s still a great opportunity to support local businesses and the Black community in Nashville. Vendors and food trucks — all Black-owned — will be out in droves, and live DJs will make it feel as much like a block party as possible, all things considered. More up-to-date information will be on the Nashville Black Market’s Instagram and Facebook pages, as well as at thenashvilleblackmarket.com. Noon-5 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 3, at Music Valley Village Center, 2416 Music Valley Drive LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

FOOD & DRINK

10/10

STREAM TALK BORING TO ME ON YOUTUBE

FILM

10/1

KETCH SECOR’S FOLK CITY THE EAGLEMANIACS

[THAT’S INFOTAINMENT]

[MEX APPEAL]

BUY ESTEBAN CASTILLO’S CHICANO EATS

Don’t just buy Esteban Castillo’s gorgeous new cookbook Chicano Eats: Recipes From My Mexican-American Kitchen because it’s National Hispanic Heritage Month. Buy it because it’s loaded with Castillo’s trademark photos and recipes celebrating food with vivid colors, bold flavors and a true appreciation of each ingredient’s purpose. Buy it to learn more about how Castillo, “a queer brown boy who grew up in California,” turned his love of food into an award-winning blog (also called Chicano Eats). Buy it for Castillo’s quick, sharp rundown on all the different kinds of queso, and when and how to use them. And if for no other reason, buy it to make the Dulce de Leche Chocoflan Cake, a cake that manages to reverse itself in the oven! The deep-caramel-colored flan, which

[GETFLIX]

CHECK OUT THE STRANGER’S LIST OF UNSTREAMABLE MOVIES — AND BEGIN THE HUNT

At some point it’s happened to you — there’s a movie you want to watch, but no streaming platform’s got it. For me it was Harry and Tonto, a meditative ’70s road movie about cats, comradeship and gentrification; I ended up scoring a DVD copy on eBay, but in the process I learned about Seattle altweekly The Stranger’s column and master list of unstreamable films, with write-ups behind each. Like a great, inexplicably out-of-print record, some of the names are surprising; Harmony Korine’s transgressive ’90s indie Gummo (filmed in Nashville), for example, or the bizarro-world John Cusack coming-of-age classic Better Off Dead from 1985. But look at it like this: The hard copies are out there in the wild, and finding them will bring back some of the thrill of the hunt that streaming has taken from us. Food for thought during your next trip to McKay’s, The Great Escape or the just-opened Half Price Books on White Bridge, across from Trader Joe’s. Get the list at tinyurl.com/ thestrangerunstreamable. CHARLIE ZAILLIAN TV

THIS WEEK

STREAMING

AMY STUMPFL

GREAT MUSIC • GREAT FOOD • GOOD FRIENDS • SINCE 1991 THU

of riddles and clues, each directing them to a specific location where they will take in a brief, socially distanced performance centered around movement, music, art and history. Lost Nashville runs every Saturday in October, with performances beginning at 6 p.m. Visit foundmovementgroup.com for complete details and ticket information.

[LINE OF DUTY]

WATCH THE ORIGINAL WHOSE LINE IS IT ANYWAY? ON HULU

I haven’t been down with the current iteration of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, which airs on The CW. Ever since the show began incorporating “special guests” (that’s usually just shorthand for cast members from a fellow CW program) who pop in and take part in a game or two with these veteran improvisers, the whole thing feels like a cringe-fest. Then again, even when it was on ABC with host Drew Carey working the buzzer, the American version always paled in comparison to the British original. Airing from 1988 to 1998 on BBC’s Channel 4, the show had Ryan Stiles, Greg Proops and other

NASHVILLE SCENE | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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[DRINK YOUR FEELINGS]

MAKE DRINKS WITH PERFECTLY CORDIAL

La Croix is fine. Like so many of you, I too enjoy the first two or three sips of a sparkling, ice-cold LC. But Twitter user Daniel Tran wasn’t wrong when he said in 2018, “La Croix taste like if you were drinking carbonated water and someone screamed out loud the name of a specific fruit in the other room.” If you are a fan of fruity bubbles but tired of weak-ass seltzer, get yourself a bottle of Perfectly Cordial’s nonalcoholic mixers. There is no hint of anything, no screaming from the other room. Perfectly Cordial is all-in, full-courtpress, made with fresh juices and spices.

Owner Rhonda Cammon has taken all the big and bright flavors of her childhood in Miami and developed them into a rainbow of syrups — Strawberry Thai Basil, Southern Peach, Jalapeño Mint and more.

For a super-easy mocktail, pour one bottle of Topo Chico into a large glass filled with ice and top it off with about an ounce of the Caramelized Pineapple and Coconut Water mixer. Amazing! But I’m no mixologist — thankfully, Cammon posts both booze-filled and booze-free recipes on Instagram at @perfectlycordial. Summer may be officially over, but 2019 delivered multiple 95-plus degree days in October, so the need for

satisfying refreshment is hardly gone. Stock up at perfectlycordial.com. MEGAN SELING MUSIC

: Winners’ Reader poll

North American folk going toe to toe with British funny people, including on-the-spot songbird Josie Lawrence, Hawaiian-shirtwearing comic Steve Frost and dapper, mischievous bon vivant Tony Slattery. You can watch the original program’s last four seasons — including a final season that was shot in L.A., which proved that Stateside audiences would dig this kind of comedy — on Hulu. CRAIG D. LINDSEY

[TYLER, THE EDUCATOR]

STREAM TYLER CHILDERS’ LONG VIOLENT HISTORY AND SHARE HIS ANTI-RACISM PSA

Listen beyond the defiant chorus of Eastern Kentuckian singer-songwriter Tyler Childers’ 2018 breakout “Whitehouse Road’’ — with its proud boasts about he and his boys’ moonshine-drinkin’, cocaine-sniffin’ lifestyle — and you’ll notice the song is also a cautionary tale. (“I’ve got people tryin’ to tell me, ‘Red / Keep this livin’ and you’ll wind up dead.’ ”) Childers actually took that advice, recently announcing he’s six months sober on a taped address that accompanied the September surprise drop of his fourth LP Long Violent History. But the purpose of the clip wasn’t to hype the album, or fish for kudos. In the six-minute video, titled “A Message From Tyler,” the 29-year-old makes a succinct, sincere appeal to his sizable rural-conservative fanbase to turn off Fox News and do some personal soul-searching regarding racism and Black Lives Matter. How would you feel if the roles were reversed, he asks — suggesting the hypothetical headline “West Virginia Man Shot During Traffic Stop for Failing to Produce Valid Fishing License” — and he later invokes the late Breonna Taylor, a fellow Kentuckian, by name.

With the election closing in fast and so much hanging in the balance, it’s essential viewing for everyone — but especially your conservative relatives. Link ’em to the LVH album too while you’re at it — it’s a ninesong cycle of mostly instrumental first-take trad bluegrass that saves its best for last.

Watch and listen at longviolenthistory. tylerchildersmusic.com. CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

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MUSIC

THE ODD COUPLE

A new box set spotlights the improbable partnership of Bobby Bare and Shel Silverstein

BY GEOFFREY HIMES

T

hey were the unlikeliest of collaborators.

Bobby Bare was a country star raised on the north bank of the Ohio River. Shel Silverstein was a hipster raised in a Jewish neighBOBBY BARE SINGS SHEL borhood in Chicago.

SILVERSTEIN PLUS OUT Bare had curly FRIDAY, OCT. 2, VIA BEAR brown hair and sideFAMILY RECORDS burns spilling out of his curled-up black cowboy hat. Silverstein sported a dark beard and was as bald as a brass bullet on top.

And yet Bare released 119 songs written

by Silverstein — and a dozen of them were top 30 country singles, including Bare’s only No. 1 hit, 1974’s “Marie Laveau.” Now all 119 of those songs are included in the new eight-CD box set, Bobby Bare Sings Shel Silverstein Plus, which also includes 18 contemporaneous tracks by other songwriters and a 128-page hardcover book.

“Before I ever met Shel,” Bare says over the phone from his home in Hendersonville, “I heard that Dr. Hook song, ‘Sylvia’s Mother,’ and I thought that was a great song — the way phrases ran over from line to line, the way the words were different but flowed really well. I thought it would be a good country song, and I recorded it before I even knew who Shel Silverstein was.”

Meanwhile, Silverstein heard Kris Kristofferson’s “Come Sundown” as sung

by Bare and said, “I’d give my right arm if that guy recorded one of my songs.” On one of his periodic trips to Nashville to pitch songs, he met Bare through the latter’s producer at RCA, Chet Atkins, who warned the singer that Silverstein was “a little weird, a hippie type.”

“As soon as you talked to him,” remembers Bare, who’s now 85, “you could tell he was really bright. I soon discovered he was one of the greatest lyric guys ever.”

Silverstein’s intelligence emerged in many different ways. He wrote best-selling children’s books such as The Giving Tree and Where the Sidewalk Ends, drew cartoons for Playboy, wrote off-Broadway plays, and co-wrote the screenplay for Things Change with David Mamet. But Silverstein’s favorite singer was Ernest Tubb, and he wanted to be a country performer.

The problem was, he couldn’t sing.

“He screeched,” Bare says. “One time we were working on some songs over at the Holiday Inn on West End Avenue. I was going over the melodies to make sure I had them right. Around 11 at night, I didn’t have one right, and Shel grabbed the guitar and started singing the line. All of a sudden, a woman was banging on the wall screaming, ‘Shut the fuck up.’ I said, ‘Shel, I’ve been singing for hours and we haven’t heard a peep. You sing one chorus and you wake up the whole damned hotel.’ ” Bare, though, had a honeyed tenor that could turn the brilliant lyrics and uglyduckling vocals on demos by Harlan How-

ard, Bob McDill and Tom T. Hall into things of beauty. He had that rare combination: a good voice and good taste in songwriters.

Even rarer was his conviction that funny songs were just as important as serious songs. Silverstein could write both.

Rarest of all was Bare’s ability to listen to a Silverstein demo and discern the music that the writer had in mind, even if it didn’t all get onto the tape. Quite a few country singers recorded Silverstein’s songs — most notably Johnny Cash (“A Boy Named Sue”), Emmylou Harris (“Queen of the Silver Dollar”), Loretta Lynn (“One’s on the Way”) and Waylon Jennings (“The Taker,” a co-write with Kristofferson) — but Bare became Silverstein’s favorite interpreter.

“He couldn’t always play it or sing it,” Bare explains, “but he could hear it all in his mind, and I was one of the few people who could understand what he was hearing and translate it into a record. That’s the reason I recorded so many of his songs. At the bottom of it all was the fact that I loved Shel’s songs, and Shel loved my singing. We spent so much time together — getting to know each other and respect each other — that Shel became part of the family.”

Bare had something else as well: artistic ambition. “I heard that Joe South album Introspect, and I loved the album so much,” he recalls. “Not only did it have great songs, but they all tied together into a whole story.

Then I heard that album The Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood, which did the same thing. I was tired of putting out albums that had maybe one hit on it and the rest of the songs were rejects. Those albums were so uninteresting, but that was the standard way of doing things in those days.”

Bare asked all his songwriter friends in town — Harlan Howard, Willie Nelson and Hank Cochran — if they would write a full album of interconnected songs, but all they would offer were one or two potential singles. In early 1973, during the annual Country Radio Seminar — a time when hundreds of disc jockeys, label execs, songwriters and artists got drunk and formed bonds — Bare found himself sitting next to Silverstein at a Harlan Howard party on a Saturday night.

The singer lamented that no one would write him an entire album.

“On Monday I was at my office downtown,” Bare recalls, “when Shel called and said, ‘I’ve got your album.’ He was back in Chicago at this point. I said, ‘When can I hear the songs?’ and he said, ‘How about today?’ He flew down that same day and started singing me ‘The Winner.’ I was laughing so hard, I made him stop in the middle, so I could catch my breath and hear the rest of the song. He played one great song after another, and that became the album Lullabys, Legends and Lies.”

That 1973 two-LP set was a landmark in country music history. Not only was it a collection of songs that all related to the title track in some way, but it was also produced

by Bare himself without label interference.

It inspired other such independent, unified concept albums as Jennings’ Honky Tonk Heroes and Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger, thus setting an important precedent for the outlaw country movement. Just as importantly, it launched the Bare-Silverstein partnership that remained active through 1983.

Silverstein died in 1999.

One of the hits from Lullabys was “Daddy, What If,” a duet between a young son full of questions and his patient father, which Bare recorded with his actual firstgrader son, Bobby Bare Jr. After the tracks were recorded without an audience, Silverstein had the idea of playing the tapes for an in-studio audience that could respond to the music and to Bare’s song introductions.

The result was a “fake live” album.

In the introduction to “Daddy, What If,” Bare says, “I’d like to introduce you to the next superstar. Twenty years from now, he’s going to be so ashamed of what he has done on this record that he’s probably going to sue me. He and all of his friends will be sitting around stoned, and he’ll say, ‘Look at what the old man made me do.’ ” Contrary to his father’s prediction, however, Bare Jr. remained proud of the record, keeping a photo of his 7-year-old self onstage with his dad and Silverstein at Exit/ In through his teen years. That positive experience led him to his own career as a professional musician. The father and son co-produced the 2010 tribute album, Twistable, Turnable Man: A Musical Tribute to the Songs of Shel Silverstein, featuring lead vocals by John Prine, Ray Price, Lucinda Williams and both co-producers.

Of the 119 Silverstein compositions on the new box set, which will be released Friday via the archival label Bear Family Records, 96 were written by the man alone.

The other 23 were co-written, and the most frequent co-writer was Fred Koller. (Full disclosure: I have co-written a handful

of mostly unrecorded songs with Koller.)

Koller, who also wrote or co-wrote such hits as Kathy Mattea’s “She Came From Fort Worth” and Jeff Healey’s “Angel Eyes,” still lives west of Nashville and owns Rhino Booksellers in town. He wrote dozens and dozens of songs with Silverstein. Seven of them appear on the box set, while many are unreleased.

“Shel didn’t drive,” Koller recounts, “and one day he needed a ride out to the original Bradley’s Barn to pitch some songs to Owen Bradley during an Ernest Tubb session. If you were a young kid in Nashville, wouldn’t you want to drive Shel Silverstein to hear Ernest Tubb? We pretty much wrote our first song, ‘Jennifer Johnson and Me,’ during that ride. He was that fast, constantly throwing out ideas, completely open to however outrageous you could get. He just loved wordplay.”

“Jennifer Johnson and Me” is on Bobby Bare Sings Shel Silverstein Plus, along with the four complete Bare-Silverstein concept albums. There are also two Columbia albums full of Silverstein songs, plus two discs of Silverstein songs scattered across various Bare albums and singles.

One of the concept albums is Great American Saturday Night, the planned 1977 sequel to Lullabys. Once again, Silverstein wrote all the songs (including two with Koller), and once again the audience was added later. But Bare was on his way out the door to sign a new contract with Columbia, so RCA killed the record. It wasn’t released until this year, when BFD Records put out a stand-alone 13-track version. Bobby Bare Sings Shel Silverstein Plus has the full 16-track version.

“They needed each other,” Koller says.

“Shel wrote wonderful, wonderful songs, but Bobby took the rough edges off. He knew how to make them listenable.”

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9/28/20 3:35 PM

MUSIC

FINDING A SPARK

Nehoda confronts personal loss and the weight of the world on the incendiary But Anyways...

BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

DON’T WANNA LET YOU GO

Clifton Davis taps The Beegie Adair Trio for superb Never Can Say Goodbye

BY RON WYNN

B

ecause of Clifton Davis’ extensive background and numerous achievements as an actor in multiple television series (Amen, Madam Secretary) and films (Lost in the Stars, Any NEVER CAN SAY Given Sunday), many GOODBYE OUT NOW fans might not be aware of his equally significant musical background. But not only is Davis a songwriter — whose biggest hit “Never Can Say Goodbye” has been sung by dozens of artists from The Jackson 5 to Gloria Gaynor to Frank Ocean — he’s also a top theatrical performer who’s been featured in several Broadway productions, most recently Aladdin.

It’s that background — along with his love for the Great American Songbook and his admiration for and friendship with Nashville’s ace pianist and bandleader Beegie Adair — that culminated in Davis recently recording a new album appropriately titled

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PHOTO: ZACH GRESHAM

F

or as long as Patrick Nehoda has been alive, people have used words like “taciturn” and “melancholy” to describe his disposition. “I BUT ANYWAYS… OUT was that FRIDAY, OCT. 2, VIA OLIVE 4-year-old RECORDS who people would call an old soul,” the Franklinresiding singer-songwriter-guitarist, now 39, tells the Scene.

But Anyways…, the debut from Nehoda and his three-piece band — also called Nehoda — distills a lifetime of resilience into nine rugged songs. It’s out Friday, Oct. 2, with a ticketed, socially distanced record-release party Saturday, Oct. 10, at Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge in Madison.

Nehoda cut his teeth playing in bands in his native Northern California, but at 23 he put music on hold to become a fireman and EMT. After a too-close call battling a wildland blaze in the state’s northeastern corner, he dug deep, weighing the risks and rewards of such noble yet dangerous work. He discussed his harrowing experience at length on a 2018 episode of Crash and Ride, Athens, Ga., drummer Patrick Ferguson’s podcast about musicians and mental health.

Nehoda left the fire department and the Golden State entirely. He landed in Seattle, where he worked at a guitar shop and met

ter in March ’19, and went on to play some 50 to 70 shows over the next year. “We took every gig we could, sometimes three in a week,” Nehoda says. “We found our identity, for sure.”

In February, just before the COVID shutdown, Nehoda, Gill and Papa entered Sundog Recording Studio with producer Mike Esser and tracked 11 songs. Nine went on the album, and the other two on a 7-inch, “Dear Mr. President” backed with “Eternal Sunshine” (featured in the July edition of the Scene’s monthly overlooked-releases series).

Both were issued by Nehoda’s own label, Olive Records.

“My mom was always my biggest fan, biggest supporter, best friend … so I just thought it was fitting,” Nehoda says of his label’s name. “When I’m down or feeling like I’m waiting on something, her words of encouragement [remind] me: ‘Fuck it, don’t wait, just do it.’ Even when it feels like the world is collapsing, [she’s] pushing me forward.”

Clocking in at a perfect LP-length 40 minutes, But Anyways… includes amped-up full-band versions of Nehoda solo songs like the angsty, bluesy opener “I Don’t Know” and flannel-flying rave-up “Shakey Pop.” There’s also headier newer material like the standout “Just Another Season,” a Southern Gothic murder ballad in the vein of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You.” With little in the way of effects, solos or other excesses, But Anyways… is a moving, breathing band-in-a-room rock record, the likes of which you don’t hear often these days.

You could call it the work of an old soul.

EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

his fiancée Masha. In 2016, priced out by the city’s second tech boom, the couple relocated to Middle Tennessee with Nehoda’s father Kenneth and ailing mother Olive in tow.

“When my mom got sick, I stepped into the role of nurse,” Nehoda remembers. “It was 24/7 for 17 months, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. But it wore me out.”

While caring for his mother up until her passing in March ’18, Nehoda wrote and recorded a solo album, Don’t Forget the Hat. Through the wonders of the internet, the album’s penultimate track, an eight-minute burner called “Devil’s Bitch,” caught the ear of a radio DJ in Gloucester, U.K. The station extended an invite to play its annual summer fest, and Nehoda made a much-deserved vacation of it. The gig went great, and he came home resolute to keep momentum alive.

Never Can Say Goodbye. The session features Davis with The Beegie Adair Trio, the much-loved group that also includes bassist and Nashville Jazz Workshop co-founder Roger Spencer and drummer Chris Brown, along with multiple guest performers. It was recorded, mixed and mastered in Franklin by Brendan Harkin at Wildwood Recording. Davis calls the album one of his career highlights, and offers high praise for the trio, who he heard in concert at New York’s iconic Birdland Jazz Club with vocalist Monica Ramey as a guest. “[Adair] is amazing, a human encyclopedia of music,” Davis tells the Scene. “My wife was the one who said, ‘You’ve got to do something with them.’ So we got together, and I decided on this project I was just going to relax, be myself, do the kind of material I’ve always loved — the Great American Songbook, plus some of my own tunes — and we’d try a few things as well.”

An example of that experimentation: Davis and Ramey’s duet version of Henry Mancini’s wistful “Two for the Road,” originally the title song from the 1967 film starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney.

“I’d never really heard that song done in a duet style, but I’ve long been a big lover of Mancini,” says Davis.

“Our voices really blended so well, and it worked out great. I wanted that one because I’m also a huge fan of Audrey Hepburn, and loved that film. I think it worked out beautifully.”

The rest of the LP includes such standards as

Later that winter, Nehoda was onstage one night at Springwater, and Grayson Papa and Jeremy Gill were in the crowd. Papa (a bassist and recent arrival from Philly) and Gill (drummer for local psych crew Floridian Slim and bandleader in Kitchn) were both struck by the Californian’s imposing presence — he stands 6-foot-7 — and compelling songs.

“It was just him up there with a Les Paul and an amp, cranking it out solo, and it was awesome,” remembers Papa. Gill heard something “heavier and more grown-up than a lot of bands,” he says. “The feeling behind it, the timbre of his voice, the reality of the songs spoke to me. I was like, ‘Dude, you need drums.’ ” The trio got together to play, and the chemistry was instant. They debuted at Springwa-

BEEGIE ADAIR AND CLIFTON DAVIS

Frank Loesser’s “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” “Too Marvelous for Words” by Johnny Mercer and Richard Whiting, and “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. There are also three Davis originals, plus “Minha Alma,” a poignant number co-written by Adair with Lori Mechem that features guest vocalist Mark Kibble, who wrote the vocal arrangements for the album. Still, the tune that will always be most associated with Davis is the title track, one he acknowledges he never anticipated

becoming a worldwide sensation. On this recording, Davis takes the lead with support from the Grammywinning gospel group Take 6. This version stands beautifully on its own, but Davis has fond memories of the way the song emerged in the early 1970s.

“At the time, I was a struggling songwriter out in L.A., and Motown had just relocated from Detroit,” he recalls. “I remember going into the dressing room in Las Vegas where The Supremes were playing, because I had a song I wanted to sell them. I also had ‘Never Can Say Goodbye,’ and The Jackson 5’s manager happened to hear me play it for [The Supremes] and say ‘I want that song.’ I certainly never expected it would be that big. The Isaac Hayes version is the one that got me a Grammy nomination for Best Rhythm & Blues Song. I ended up losing to Bill Withers for ‘Ain’t No Sunshine,’ but you can’t really complain about that. It’s certainly held up well over time, and I’ve lost track of how many singers have recorded it.”

While the COVID-19 pandemic has temporarily shelved plans for Davis to do any follow-up touring or performing to support the new release, he doesn’t rule out that possibility in the future.

“I had such a great time in Nashville doing the record, I certainly would like to come back at some point. I also always enjoy working with Beegie and the trio, and really want to do some more things with them in the future if it works out.”

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taken with Waldon’s songcraft and perspective — likening her voice to the late Tammy Wynette’s — that last year he made her the first new signing to his Oh Boy Records label in more than a decade. Oh Boy released her third album White Noise / White Lines in October. When Waldon sings, the late, great Prine once put it simply, “I believe her.”

Waldon performed Sept. 23 at the Music City Wine Garden, the new COVID-safe outdoor stage at City Winery. The hour-long show, which was also streamed, hit all the right notes. It’s unusual, Waldon admitted, “going from playing 200 shows in a year to two.”

But she and her masked-up band (electric guitarist Adam Duran along with bassist Alec Newnam and drummer Nate Felty, the last two of whom round out the bossa-nova-styled

iovanni Rodriguez and the rotating cast of players that perform with him as the six-piece 12 Manos have been bringing a kaleidoscopic array of Latin music to Rudy’s Jazz Room on Monday nights for more than three years — a run that was broken by COVID-19, of course. Thanks to the Music City Bandwidth streaming concert series, an effort coordinated by the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp and 15 of the city’s independent show spaces to raise funds to keep venues from closing permanently, Rodriguez & Co. were able to get back in action on Sept. 21. It might not have been the in-person gig everyone would like to see, but they were able to bring their special blend of sounds into the digital space.

WALDON PONDERS: The modest-sized stage at Rudy’s KELSEY WALDON adds an intimacy that seems to make the band’s bold notes and timely cymbal trio Greasy Neale with Margo Price keycrashes sound fuller somehow. Propelled boardist Micah Hulscher) sounded lightby tireless percussion and sharp keyboard footed and feisty. They barreled through riffs, 12 Manos kicked off the stream with most of White Noise, plus a smattering of an energetic, charging rendition of “Artunes from Waldon’s previous two releases ranca en Fa,” a salsa number made widely and one apropos cover. popular by Colombian ensemble Sonora Waldon has understandably balked at Carruseles. being labeled a throwback act. Her classic Rodriguez, who led the band on bass, was sound is a vessel for a plainspoken progresjoined by singer Marcela Pinilla, Melvin Masive message. Waldon opened the set with the familial ode “Kentucky, 1988.” It’s a cias on piano, percussionists Yosvany Cordero direct descendant of Loretta Lynn’s “Coal and Manuel “Manotas” Ramirez, and Ernesto Miner’s Daughter” and cousin to Price’s Lago on electric violin. The bandmates hail “Hands of Time” that pulls no punches about from different places and backgrounds, poverty, addiction and other ills that are and they shouted out Cuba, Colombia, Venespecially prevalent in Waldon’s corner of ezuela and the Dominican Republic during the world. Yet it feels nonjudgmental and the stream. “We’re playing country music human, the stuff of lived experience. from other countries,” said Rodriguez, who The nervy “Sunday’s Children” lays into the Scene highlighted in an April cover the get-’em-young indoctrination tactics of story about Nashville’s emerging commusome Christian churches — sings Waldon, nity of Latinx musicians.

“Don’t have to be just like you / To underFollowing introductions, the band stand universal truth.” Another standout launched into its own arrangement of “Mawas “Tall and Mighty,” a song about keeping ria Cervantes,” a Noro Morales number perspective through highs and lows, which popularized by Tito Puente. The group includes the flawless couplet: “Hey, everyplayed songs from Cuba too, and the Dothing’s not as bad as it seems / Most of my minican Republic, where Rodriguez’s friends are on methamphetamine.” parents are from. They even performed a Waldon eventually turned her gaze northsmooth bachata-style cover of Al Green’s ward to Louisville and the family of Bre“Let’s Stay Together,” with the instrumenonna Taylor, acknowledging the dispiriting talists luxuriating in the song’s deliberate decision that came down hours earlier not pace — a great match for both bachata’s to charge the officers, who shot and killed distinctive rhythms and the genre’s recurTaylor in her home in March, with murder. ring romantic themes — supporting Pinilla’s “Been thinking about that all day, and actusurging vocals. They followed it up with an ally ever since it happened,” said Waldon. original song, “Hasta Aqui Llegue,” written She also paid tribute to her late mentor

by Pinilla.

Prine. “His songs will live on forever,” she The band appeared to be having fun, and Rodriguez encouraged his virtual audience to said, “and I’m probably going to sing one or two in every set from now on.” Wednesday’s do the same — to get up and dance, whether choice was “Sam Stone,” Prine’s 1971 hymn they were watching at home or work. to a heroin-addicted veteran, which shares Drive 25 miles west along the Ohio River a sense of compassion for its subject with from Paducah, Ky., and you’ll see the sign: Waldon’s originals. In the middle of yet an“MONKEY’S EYEBROW: HOME OF KELSEY other tough week in a soul-crushing year, it’s WALDON.” If that alone isn’t enough to essomething we could all use more of. tablish the hometown heroine’s country EMAIL THESPIN@NASHVILLESCENE.COM bona fides, this should be: John Prine was so

NASHVILLE SCENE | OCTOBER 1 – OCTOBER 7, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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Fourth Circuit Docket No. 19D1284 AMBER NICOLLE WILLIAMS vs.

SANTIAGO BRONCHALES

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Discussing Resounding comeback?

CPR pro Entry-level workers?

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Comportment “Imagine that!”

The Admiral Benbow in “Treasure Island,” e.g.

“All will be well” “Just like I told you!”

Obstacle-based competition show, informally Reply to “Can this be true?”

Term for a naval builder that looks like an aquatic insect Like some medical tests, briefly Drink once advertised as “Twice as much for a nickel” Generation ___ (cohort born in the early 2010s) Stat for a starter Staple breakfast in Scotland Cream ___ Galileo’s birthplace Windbag, as seen three times in this puzzle?

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Dickensian setting Writer DiCamillo with two Newbery Medals “Murder, ___ Wrote” Laugh uproariously U.S. city named for a European capital It doesn’t cover much Word between here and there Just starting to learn Soul singer ___ E. King White-water rental “Fold” opposite Show in parts Food that’s cut diagonally Security fig.

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It is my privilege as your elected Criminal Court Clerk to notify all citizens of Davidson County, that relative to grand jury proceedings, it is the duty of your grand jurors to investigate any public offense which they know or have reason to believe has been committed and which is triable or indictable in Davidson County. In addition to cases presented to the grand jury by your District Attorney, any citizen may petition the foreperson (foreman) of the grand jury for permission to testify concerning any offense in Davidson County. This is subject to provisions set forth in Tennessee Code Annotated 40-12-105. Pursuant to Tennessee Code Annotated 40-12104 and 40-12-105, the application to testify by any citizen must be accompanied by a sworn affidavit stating the facts or summarizing the proof which forms the basis of allegations contained in that application. Your grand jury foreperson is Parker Toler. His address is 222 Second Avenue North, Washington Square Building, Suite 510, Nashville, Tennessee 37201. The grand jury will meet at 8:00 A.M. on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays for three (3) months. Submission of an affidavit which the applicant knows to be false in material regard shall be punishable as perjury. Any citizen testifying before the grand jury as to any material fact known to that citizen to be false shall be punishable as perjury. For a request for accommodation, please contact 8624260.

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Richard R. Rooker, Clerk M. De Jesus, Deputy Clerk Date: September 11, 2020 H. Julianne Lackey Attorney for Plaintiff NSC 9/17, 9/24, 10/1, 10/8/20

Non-Resident Notice Third Circuit Docket No. 20D1183 MIGDALIA GARCIA vs.

FLAVIO ROBERTO ROCA In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a non-resident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon FLAVIO ROBERTO ROCA. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HIS appearance herein with thirty (30) days after October 8, 2020 same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on November 9, 2020. It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

Richard R. Rooker, Clerk M. De Jesus, Deputy Clerk Date: September 11, 2020 Bethany Peery Glandorf Attorney for Plaintiff NSC 9/17, 9/24, 10/1, 10/8/20 Non-Resident Notice Third Circuit Docket No. 20D1191 GLORIA MARIA MARTIN Vs. AARON MARSHALL MARTIN In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a non-resident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon AARON MARSHALL MARTIN. It is ordered that said Defendant enter His appearance herein with thirty (30) days after October 15, 2020 same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on November 16, 2020. It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE I M S E T

In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a non-resident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon SANTIAGO BRONCHALES. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HIS appearance herein with thirty (30) days after October 8, 2020 same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on November 9, 2020. It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

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Non-Resident Notice Fourth Circuit Docket No. 19D1284 AMBER NICOLLE WILLIAMS

Online subscriptions: Today’s puzzle and more than 9,000 past puzzles, nytimes.com/ crosswords ($39.95 a year).

Read about and comment on each puzzle: nytimes.com/wordplay.

Crosswords for young solvers: nytimes.com/ studentcrosswords.

vs.

SANTIAGO BRONCHALES In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a non-resident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon SANTIAGO BRONCHALES. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HIS appearance herein with thirty (30) days after October 8, 2020 same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on November 9, 2020. It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a

Richard R. Rooker, Clerk W. North, Deputy Clerk Date: September 16 2020 GLORIA MARIA MARTIN, pro se Attorney for Plaintiff

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Public Notice – Request for Comment Reappointment of Henry Martin United States Federal Public Defender Middle District of Tennessee Please visit our website at www.ca6.uscourts.gov for detailed notice.

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