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Hotel U. 7
The national college housing crisis looks a little different at TSU
BY MARGARET LITTMANTwo Months in, 988 Hotline Levels Out 8 At least 90 percent of the calls to the mental health crisis line were answered locally, state officials say
BY HANNAH HERNERPith in the Wind 8
This week on the Scene’s news and politics blog Republican Leaders Take Aim at Vanderbilt Pediatric Transgender Clinic ... 9 Conservative media figure prompts Bill Lee to call for an investigation into the clinic
BY HANNAH HERNER
The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s Western Edge exhibit traces the deep connections and powerful influence of Los Angeles country-rock
BY BRITTNEY MCKENNA
Elton John, Marcus King, the Latin Party, Convergence, Aida: In Concert, Margo Price’s book launch, Mahalia, Earth, Wind & Fire and more
Town & Country: Dining in the Delta What to eat, drink and do in the Mississippi Delta, from Clarksdale to Oxford
BY ASHLEY BRANTLEY
ART
Crawl Space: October 2022
This month’s creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky First Saturday events include Art of the South at Zeitgeist and Electioneering at Unrequited Leisure
A Liberation of and Lyric A Beat Beyond a wealth of prose from poet Major Jackson KASHIF ANDREW GRAHAM AND CHAPTER16.ORG
In the Valley Nas X his haters’ gumption
BY JASON SHAWHAN
Lake Effect............................................... 33 Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner headed north to write The Bible
BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN
Another Look 34 The Scene’s music writers recommend recent releases from Virghost, Lou Turner, Peachy and more
BY EDD HURT,
BY JOE NOLAN BOOKS
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Cheekwood Estate & Gardens / Caitlin HarrisNashville Ballet / Karyn Photography Humanities Tennessee / David Duplessis of Tennessee Photographs HARVEST - Featured MichelleChandler Holt wasn’t expecting to live in a Best Western the first semester of her sophomore year at Tennessee State University. But twoand-a-half years into these “unprecedented times” of ours, perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that things still aren’t back to normal.
Holt, who is from Birmingham, Ala., and comes from a family of TSU alums, is one of more than 1,000 TSU students living in a hotel this semester, with thousands more doing so across the country. Many colleges and universities nationwide are facing housing shortages, explains Craig Goebel, a principal with education consulting firm Art & Science Group in Maryland. Freshman classes are larger than usual, in part because some students deferred starting college during the pandemic. Being isolated from their peers made many students — freshmen and upperclassmen alike — crave the full collegiate experience, and thus embrace living on campus. Goebel says schools in metropolitan areas, particularly in areas like Nashville that are popular destinations for both school and careers, are more likely to see upticks.
TSU is also facing a unique set of challenges making its housing shortage more acute. Historically Black colleges and universities are seeing what’s being called an “HBCU Renaissance.” Applications and enrollment are up due to a number of factors, including attention thanks to highprofile football coaches like Eddie George at TSU and Deion Sanders at Jackson State. In May, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at TSU’s commencement, further raising the school’s profile. TSU has the largest freshman enrollment of any HBCU in the country at 3,567 students.
“It’s a good problem to have,” says Frank
Stevenson, associate vice president of student affairs and dean of students at TSU. “But it is a problem.”
TSU’s housing shortage is exacerbated by Nashville’s affordable housing shortage. “Other HBCUs, including Howard [University] in Washington, D.C., are seeing it too,” says Stevenson. “It is anywhere that housing prices are bananas.”
It’s not unusual for many upperclassmen to live off campus, but this year many who intended to do so experienced sticker shock when they saw how much apartment rents had increased over the past two years. So they requested on-campus housing. Of TSU’s 7,500 undergraduates, the school now houses 5,000, both on and off campus.
(Stevenson says TSU’s graduate school programs see an opposite enrollment trend due to housing prices — graduate students who may be interested in attending TSU opt to go elsewhere because of Nashville’s high cost of living.) Goebel points out that nationally some schools (including TSU) offered refunds and credits to students who had to leave on-campus housing during the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Students who lived off campus still had to pay landlords, even if they were not in their apartments. So, he says, some students may see on-campus living as an insurance policy if a pandemic wreaks havoc on in-person learning again.
One of the tricky parts of anticipating how many students will want housing, Goebel says, is that historic models and formulas don’t necessarily line up in the post-pandemic world. At TSU, typically 31 percent of students who apply actually show up on the first day of class. This year that number is 41 percent. And that difference is part of what forced TSU to look at hotels and other options for student housing.
Other schools in Tennessee are facing
housing shortages to different degrees. State-funded institutions like TSU and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville need to go to the State Building Commission for approval to rent hotels or other additional housing space. Private universities, like fellow Nashville HBCU Fisk University, have to find funding, but don’t need to go to the state for approval.
Stevenson reports that TSU has now found housing, both on and off campus, for all the students who requested it before the July deadline. Some students (fewer than 100) who submitted their forms late remain on a wait list. This summer, when TSU staff realized the school would need more housing, they requested funding for 12 hotels from the State Building Commission. In August, funding for five was approved, and several members of the commission, including Republican state leaders Lt. Gov. Randy McNally and Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton, asked what administrators planned to do to prevent this need in the future.
“Lt. Governor McNally’s main concern with Tennessee State University’s housing issue is that it seems to be a result of systemic poor planning,” McNally’s communications director Adam C. Kleinheider tells the Scene via email. “This is the second year in a row that TSU has brought a housing issue to the Building Commission. Last year’s approval of hotel space triggered concern but was ultimately approved as a one-time stopgap measure. When last year’s hotel leases were approved, TSU officials indicated to members of the Building Commission that they would not be asking for additional hotel leases in the future, because a new dormitory that came on line in August 2022 would be sufficient to handle any subsequent need.”
Sexton says commission members have received emails from parents expressing concern about their kids’ housing and what they say is limited communication from the TSU administration. While the volume of correspondence is not substantial, it is unusual for state legislators to get those kinds of emails at all, Sexton says. Stevenson concedes there was a lot of anxiety at the beginning of the semester, and that the school could have done a better job defining exactly what certain status, such as being on a wait list, meant. He says his team is working to set better expectations in the future, and adds that now that housing has been found for the majority of students — and for everyone who applied before the deadline — the calls from parents have decreased.
It’s worth noting that TSU has been historically underfunded by the state. According to a 2021 report by a joint legislative committee, Tennessee owed the school as much as $544 million in unpaid land-grant funding. Earlier this year, Gov. Bill Lee committed to paying TSU $250 million for infrastructure spending.
Stevenson says new dorms are in the works, and the state has promised TSU that construction will move quickly — but quickly in this context is likely three more years, so the problem will not abate immediately. He confirms that the next freshman class will have to be smaller, as the school simply can’t house another
3,500-student freshman class in addition to a 3,500-student sophomore class from this year. (The school does have the classroom space to support the larger student body, however.) Other adjustments may include capping the size of future classes and changing selectivity requirements for admission. Deadlines for housing requests will be moved earlier in the year so the school has more time to plan.
TSU needs to give its current students the best college experience it can, and help them learn, graduate and find careers — because having the largest freshman class ever is meaningless if students don’t succeed. The school has a significant number of students who are the first in their families to attend college, and making sure they have the support they need is paramount.
For Stevenson and his team, that has meant making a hotel experience a college experience. The school leased five full hotels, meaning non-students can’t stay there while they are being used as dorms. The lobbies feature banners and school decorations, and each hotel has residence advisers and TSU staff on site. There are 24/7 security guards (from both TSU and MNPD) in the buildings and in the parking lot. Shuttle buses run students from campus to the hotels and back, with a real-time app so students can track their rides. Shuttle schedules were extended after the school got feedback from students that they wanted to be able to be on campus later to socialize, dine or study. Library schedules were adjusted as well. Events, from game nights to career counseling events, take place in the hotels as well as on campus. Students who live off campus have the option of substantial discounts (free for in-state residents and subsidized for out-ofstate students) if they choose to take online classes remotely.
Hotel living is an expensive proposition — according to the Scene’s sister publication the Nashville Post, the cost is about $7.2 million for the rooms and additional programming and services. By its spring semester, TSU plans to reduce its number of hotels to two.
To really effect lasting change, however, the city and state need to address the elephant in the room: Nashville’s dearth of affordable housing and reliable public transit. Some cities, Stevenson says, map public transit routes specifically to aid college students’ schedules and also offer discount transit prices. Such changes would also benefit students at Vanderbilt, Belmont, Fisk, Meharry, American Baptist College, Trevecca, Lipscomb and Nashville’s other institutions of higher learning.
While the hotel life wasn’t what students like Holt expected, the scenario has worked out. In fact, if she is assigned to be in a hotel again next year, she’d consider it. She likes going to a school where lots of people want to be — it makes for a good energy — and she enjoys having a single room to herself. She has a car, so her commute is about seven minutes from Trinity Lane to campus. Plus, she notes, the hotel has a fitness center, breakfast laid out every morning, and every college kid’s dream: in-room housekeeping.
EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COMIt’s been two months since the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline was launched nationally, and call volume is starting to level out. A rebrand ing of the previous crisis numbers — 615-244-7444 locally and 1-800273-8255 nationally — 988 saw a spike in calls in the days following the launch, up to more than 1,000 statewide in the first week, ac cording to state data. Before the launch, the weekly call volume was averaging around 725, and in recent weeks counts have settled around 811 on average.
In Tennessee, about 43 percent of con cerns related to calls were resolved through counseling over the phone, while 25 percent received nonemergency health referrals. Eleven percent received community refer rals not related to mental health, and 11 percent received coordination of care. Five percent of calls resulted in a face-to-face mobile crisis evaluation, whereas 2 percent were directed to an emergency department.
“A message that we’ve tried to say is, if you’re having a suicide or a mental health or substance use crisis, call 988,” says Becky Stoll, senior vice president of crisis services at Centerstone. “Don’t call the police, don’t call EMS unless there’s a medical reason to do so, and don’t go to an emergency depart ment unless there’s a reason to do so. Be cause oftentimes those are not good places for people to end up. They don’t get what they need, and sometimes they incur bills.”
Tennessee has six call centers, and two
are in Nashville — Family and Children’s Services, which serves as the Davidson County lead, and Centerstone, which serves a few surrounding counties. The national standard is to have 90 percent of the calls answered locally without relying on a na tional backup. Tennessee is reaching that rate based on August data, according to a spokesperson for the Tennessee Depart ment of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services. The department did not supply statistics on texts and chats, which are also available 24/7 through 988 or 988hotline.org.
For the caller, the experience is mostly the same as before the rebranding, except there are fewer numbers to dial. From the provider perspective, the funding is much better — that’s thanks to the Lifeline Improvement Act of 2021 and American Rescue Plan dollars, says Stoll. Before the number change, the hotline was an under funded and mission-driven voluntary initia tive. She says her organization got a stipend of just $1,500 dollars for participating.
“The volume really was increasing year over year, and we really realized at the top of this body, it’s pretty large and heavy, and it’s balancing on these really small spindly legs, and it’s not going to be sustainable,” Stoll says. “At some point, something was going to have to give.”
At first, some organizations hesitated to even publicize the hotline because they feared there wouldn’t be enough capacity, Stoll says.
Federal funding allowed Family and Chil dren’s Services to add four full-time crisis line staff members, as well as a coordinator to help with the well-being of the staff in an attempt to reduce burnout and high turn over rates.
“I hate to say, but that’s one of the wins of the pandemic,” Stoll says. “Mental health is being paid attention to in, I think, unprec edented ways — rightfully so. Behind that has come funding, so you really do have money to hire people to be on the other end of those calls and chats and texts, and be able to help people. Especially given what this pandemic is showing it’s leaving in its wake in terms of mental health.”
Stoll says another important aspect is the capacity to follow up with users of the line.
“The mental health system is rough to nav igate,” Stoll says. “Until they are connected, we’re going to try to keep following up.”
While the line is most closely associated with suicidal ideation and suicide attempts, those at the call centers emphasize that it’s there for any mental health or substance abuse crisis.
“988’s national promotion is targeted to people in ‘emotional distress,’ which includes callers that are suffering from anxiety, depression, isolation, bereave ment, relationship and family issues, job loss and other significant life events, to name but a few of the reasons why people call,” says Shannon Huffman, director of crisis services at Family and Children’s Services.
“There’s not this guardrailed defini tion of what a crisis is,” Stoll adds. “If the person themselves experiencing it or the people that care about them define it as a crisis, call or chat or text. Then it’s a cri sis. I think that allows for the flexibility of people getting what it is they need when you allow it to be self-defined.”
EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COMTHIS WEEK ON OUR NEWS AND POLITICS BLOG:
A Metro Council debate on a proposed countywide indoor smoking ban sparked an existential conversation last week, with some legislators crying for Nashville’s soul and others explaining the obvious and destructive consequences — for health and business — of smoke-filled commercial establishments. The legislation was deferred. Debate will continue. … At the same Metro Council meeting, the city approved several updates to its list of at-risk property buyouts, flood-prone properties that have been repeatedly damaged by water and sit on lowlying parcels. The council focused on property lists near Sevenmile Creek and Mill Creek in South Nashville, but according to Metro Water (which facilitates the program), the city has plans for additional buyouts near Whites Creek, Richland Creek and Browns Creek Hal Cato officially bowed out of the 2023 mayoral race after almost-butnot-quite announcing his candidacy for the past six months. The former Thistle Farms head told supporters in an email that he “could still do a lot of good in Nashville in other areas without trying to push it through Metro bureaucracy.” Former city executive Matt Wiltshire and Councilmember Freddie O’Connell remain frontrunners (and the only official candidates) in the race to unseat Mayor John Cooper next summer. Cooper has not formally announced a bid for reelection. … Islamophobe Laurie CardozaMoore was reappointed to the state’s Textbook and Instructional Materials Quality Commission for a term lasting until 2025. She publicly accused Nashville Public Library Director Kent Oliver last year of promoting “pornographic, racist, antiSemitic and anti-American content” in an unhinged Tennesseean op-ed that had the daily’s David Plazas doing damage control.
… Speaking of the Nashville Public Library, an emailed bomb threat closed locations across the city last Thursday. It followed similar threats that closed libraries in Denver and Fort Worth and came midway through Banned Books Week, a featured event series on reading material that has been suppressed or marginalized. Libraries continue to offer the popular city service that allows residents to access these books, along with a slew of other informational resources, for free. … Development firm The Mainland Properties has purchased the Chestnut Hill site of adult entertainment club Pure Gold’s Crazy Horse for $15.3 million. Mainland is planning a 20-story building with retail and apartments.
… Contributor Betsy Phillips explains the importance of gender-related medical care while dismantling far-right provocateur Matt Walsh, a regular for The Daily Wire, who instigated a media frenzy last week against the Pediatric Transgender Clinic at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital
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At least 90 percent of the calls to the mental health crisis line were answered locally, state officials say
Gov. Bill Lee has called for an investigation into the Pediatric Transgender Clinic at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt after right-wing activist and media figure Matt Walsh posted a thread on social media calling into question the clinic’s actions.
“The ‘pediatric transgender clinic’ at Vanderbilt University Medical Center raises serious moral, ethical and legal concerns,” Lee said in a statement to The Daily Wire, which recently relocated to Nashville and where Walsh hosts a podcast. “We should not allow permanent, life-altering decisions that hurt children or policies that suppress religious liberties, all for the purpose of financial gain. We have to protect Tennessee children, and this warrants a thorough investigation.”
Past what he shared with The Daily Wire, as of press time, Lee has not released an official statement on the matter.
Walsh tweeted Sept. 20 about his own investigation into the clinic, accusing VUMC of getting into genderaffirming surgeries for the money and criticizing its Trans Buddy program.
“Vanderbilt University Medical Center is now the subject of social media posts and a video that misrepresent facts about the care the Medical Center provides to transgender patients,” the hospital said in a statement. “VUMC began its Transgender Health Clinic because transgender individuals are a high-risk population for mental and physical health issues and have been consistently underserved by the U.S. health system.”
Boston Children’s Hospital was the target of a similar far-right campaign against trans health care, and last Thursday the FBI made an arrest in a bomb threat against the hospital. Last week, a Metro Nashville Police Department spokesperson said the department had not received any threat reports “regarding this topic.”
One video Walsh highlighted features Vanderbilt University law and genomics professor Ellen Clayton, who discouraged physicians from religious objections to transgender surgeries.
“Saying that you’re not going to do something because of your … religious beliefs is not without consequences, and it should not be without consequences,” she said in the undated clip. “I just want to put that out there. If you don’t want to do this kind of work, don’t work at Vanderbilt.”
Vanderbilt responded to say that employees can decline to participate in care they find “morally objectionable” or that goes against religious or personal beliefs, including for transgender patients, and that the institution does not permit discrimination against employees who do so.
In another tweet, Walsh refers to gender-affirming hormone therapy as chemical castration and says VUMC employees “now castrate, sterilize, and mutilate minors as well as adults.” Walsh previously advocated against mask mandates in Nashville schools by arguing that kids were almost as likely to die from COVID-19 as from “a rock from the sky.”
In another attached video, a nurse practitioner cites information from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health about top surgery for transgender
males, which can be performed on minors if the clinic receives parental consent and a “letter of persistent, well-documented gender dysphoria” by a clinical mental health provider. VUMC’s statement reiterated that the hospital “requires parental consent to treat a minor patient who is to be seen for issues related to transgender care and never refuses parental involvement in the care of transgender youth who are under age 18.”
Gender-affirming surgeries are on the rise, though often aren’t explicitly taught in plastic surgery programs. A student and professor in the Department of Plastic Surgery at Vanderbilt authored a paper earlier this year advocating for adding these surgeries to the curriculum.
“For some of our patients, their gender dysphoria [is] so severe that their quality of life is just so bad anyways without these surgeries,” VUMC medical student Rishub Das told Scene sister publication the Nashville Post. “Even if it does mean that they have a small complication or if they have an extended hospital stay, they’re willing to take that risk. Because they just need it.”
Tennessee legislative leaders including House Republican Caucus Chair Jeremy Faison (R-Cosby) and House Majority Leader William Lamberth (R-Portland) spoke out in support of Lee and pledged to introduce legislation to ban gender-affirming treatment for transgender youth in the next legislative session. Walsh said in a tweet that he has since met with Faison and state Sen. Jack Johnson (R-Franklin) to work on a bill to “shut down Vanderbilt’s child gender transition program and ban the practice in the state.” Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District also expressed his support for Walsh & Co.
“Giving hormone replacement treatments to minors is unconscionable but threatened doctors with ‘consequences’ who have religious objections is against everything this country stands for,” Faison wrote on Twitter. “The Legislature can and will act to correct this next session and I will lead that fight.”
Lamberth added: “This type of child mutilation should be illegal and soon will be in TN.”
American Academy of Pediatrics president Moira Szilagyi said in an earlier statement: “There is strong consensus among the most prominent medical organizations worldwide that evidence-based, gender-affirming care for transgender children and adolescents is medically necessary and appropriate. It can even be lifesaving. The decision of whether and when to start gender-affirming treatment, which does not necessarily lead to hormone therapy or surgery, is personal and involves careful consideration by each patient and their family.”
EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
Conservative media figure prompts Bill Lee to call for an investigation into the clinic
THE COUNTRY MUSIC HALL OF FAME AND MUSEUM’S WESTERN EDGE EXHIBIT TRACES THE DEEP CONNECTIONS AND POWERFUL INFLUENCE OF LOS ANGELES COUNTRY-ROCK BY BRITTNEY McKENNA
PHOTO: DELEVANTE
THE FLYING BURRITO BROTHERS’ NUDIE SUITS
To talk about Los Angeles country-rock is to talk about community. The artists of that scene — which first emerged in the ’60s and saw a massive resurgence in the ’80s, albeit in an evolved form — found success through a wealth of artistic talent, to be sure. Their music drew from West Coast country like the Bakersfield sound as well as traditional bluegrass and early rock ’n’ roll, and they catapulted it from a niche scene to a vibrant, diverse assemblage of country music whose roots extend well into the present day. That’s thanks in large part to a concerted effort by the genre’s pioneers to come together, col laborate and lift each other up.
And what is L.A. country-rock? Take a good look at some of the artists involved: Linda Ronstadt, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Emmylou Harris, Ricky Nelson, The Byrds, Dwight Yoakam, The Blasters, Los Lobos and many more. The classification feels more nebulous with each name-drop, functioning more as an umbrella beneath which genre cross-pollination can thrive than as a fixed categorization. The closest current-day analog might be Americana, though the geo graphic constraints of Los Angeles countryrock make for a more cohesive movement than the now-international scope of what is currently considered Americana music.
On Friday, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum will unveil Western Edge: The Roots and Reverberations of Los An geles Country-Rock, which will open with a star-studded concert in the museum’s CMA Theater. Celebrating the heritage of this fer tile music scene, the exhibit is the museum’s first new major installment since Outlaws & Armadillos: Country’s Roaring ’70s opened in mid-2018. It’s a deeply researched, decadesspanning collection that focuses primarily on the country-rock scenes of the ’60s and ’80s. It also charts the rise of country-rock-influ enced commercial pop in the intervening de cades, zooming in on acts like the Eagles and some of Emmylou Harris’ later work.
The co-curators of Western Edge are long time museum staffers Michael Gray, whose title is executive senior director of edito rial and interpretation, and onetime Scene staffer Michael McCall, who is senior editorwriter. They drew from hours of inter views with members of the scene, amassing more than 100 artifacts on loan for the three-year ex hibition and sharing their own individual wealth of personal knowledge of and passion for the music in question.
“I graduated high school in 1975, so this was the music of my youth,” McCall tells the Scene. “At least it’s the beginning of it, especially as you get into Neil Young and Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Ronstadt. I had a lot of these albums on 8-track. [Laughs] Then I lived in San Francisco in the ’80s, so Los Lobos and The Blasters and Lone Justice — all those bands were coming up to play and playing in San Francisco.”
“The Blasters were a big part of my entry point into country music,” Gray adds. “Get ting into The Blasters got me into rockabilly, which got me into country music, which led to my job [at the museum]. So, they were a good gateway for me into roots music and country music. I’d say right around that same time I was getting into Los Lobos. And
when I discovered Sweetheart of the Rodeo in high school, it really opened me up to country music, and to The Byrds’ music.”
McCall and Gray began planning the exhibition in late 2019, following an artistin-residence performance at the museum by Marty Stuart that included The Byrds’ Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn as guest artists. Gray and McCall traveled to Los Angeles in early 2020 to secure artifacts, to visit key scene sites like long-running venue the Troubadour and to conduct interviews with artists like Hillman (who also played in The Flying Burrito Brothers, Stephen Stills’ supergroup Manassas and The Desert Rose Band) and pedalsteel guitarist JayDee Maness (whose résumé includes Gram Parsons, The Byrds and Vince Gill). As the familiar story goes, the COVID-19 pandemic quickly made further travel next to impossible for several months, leading the team to pivot to virtual research and conversations.
Fortunately, many of the exhibition’s fea tured artists now live in or frequently visit Nashville, allowing the team time and access to interview Emmylou Harris, Taj Mahal, Graham Nash, J.D. Souther, Rosie Flores and many more artists key to the formation of country-rock. Many of these extensive inter views — a total of 23 as of press time — will be available in video form as you navigate the exhibition, adding intimate firsthand context to an already impressive collection of physical artifacts. Among those are instru ments, stage clothing (Nudie Suit fans, get
ready to be dazzled, pun intended), original show posters, handwritten lyrics and previ ously unseen photographs.
IT’S HARD TO CHOOSE a handful of high lights from the truly astounding collection of artifacts, but lay country fans and genre obsessives alike are sure to find pieces from country-rock history that speak to their in terests. The late Gram Parsons’ famed Nudie Suit from the cover of the Burritos’ 1969 debut The Gilded Palace of Sin — the white one with the marijuana leaves, pills, naked woman and enormous cross — is on display next to Hillman’s brilliant blue suit and the black one that belonged to “Sneaky Pete” Kleinow. They showcase the craftsmanship of creator Manuel Cuevas as well as the personality of each band member. (For the completists, Chris Ethridge’s suit, white and decorated with roses, is unfortunately lost to history.)
A signature look from Dwight Yoakam — a Manuel-designed, rhinestone-studded bolero jacket and a Stetson hat — connects the style of the ’60s to that of the ’80s, with instru ments like Yoakam’s 1989 Martin HD-28P guitar on display, too. Each member of Los Lobos has an instrument featured, like the custom jarana jarocha built for Louie Pérez by Candelario “Candelas” Delgado, whose son Manuel Delgado operates Delgado Gui tars in East Nashville.
“That guitar just reeks of history,” says Pérez. “Candelas Guitars was a fixture in East Los Angeles. It served mostly mariachi musicians. We were rock ’n’ roll kids and we knew it was there, but when we had our own
renaissance and discovered the music of our culture, we were looking everywhere for these instruments that we would see on the cover of these old records. So where did we go? We went to Candelas Guitars and talked to Candelario. We said, ‘Hey, we’re local rock ’n’ roll guys. We’re not the type of people you would usually work with. But we’re really interested in this.’ He was impressed by that and helped us out. … Because of him, we were able to get through those early years of learning the traditional music of Mexico.”
While assisting in the creation of the exhibition, Hillman told the museum that he viewed the term “country-rock” as “a device to sort of pigeonhole you into a more descriptive place. It’s country music to me, you know. It’s all country music to me — or music.” It was a bit of a revolutionary term at the time of its coining in the early ’60s, as rock ’n’ roll was still relatively new — several artists featured in the exhibition, including Hillman, cite Elvis Presley’s 1956 appear ance on The Ed Sullivan Show as a critical influence — and hadn’t yet made its way into stricter scenes like bluegrass and folk.
That would soon change as artists like Hill man, Parsons, Ronstadt and Ricky Nelson began experimenting with the boundaries of country and bluegrass, eventually deciding to eschew those boundaries altogether. This spirit of innovation spread like a virus, and soon aspiring artists were flocking to Los Angeles, hoping to be part of a musical move ment unlike anything they had seen before.
Country-rock’s bluegrass roots can’t be ignored, as pivotal figures like Hillman and Clarence White cut their
PHOTO: JIM M c CRARY;
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE COUNTRY
MUSIC HALL OF FAME AND MUSEUM
THE FLYING
tional bluegrass. Many artists especially cite The Dillards — the bluegrass project of Doug Dillard, Rodney Dillard, Mitch Jayne and Dean Webb — as integral to bringing bluegrass into country-rock. This is particularly due to the band’s dynamic live shows, which bucked the traditional bluegrass performance style in favor of movement and interaction. They’d soon land a role as family band The Darlings on The Andy Griffith Show and bring their influence to a broader audience.
“Before it was full-blown country-rock, it’s these young bluegrass bands, like The Kentucky Colonels and The Dillards and The Scottsville Squirrel Barkers,” Gray explains. “And Chris Hillman is just right there as a teenager, playing mandolin in these bands. Next thing you know, he’s in The Byrds, and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ is, in some ways, the big bang of folk-rock, bringing rock and folk music together like that.”
Another pivotal force of the ’60s scene was Parsons, whose Boston-born International Submarine Band relocated to Los Angeles later in the decade, not realizing the massive impact that move would soon have. Parsons met Hillman soon after landing in L.A., a connection that led Parsons to joining The Byrds, to whose country-rock landmark Sweetheart of the Rodeo he contributed; for
Emmylou Harris records. Then she ends up living in Nashville and leading this outstanding band that went on to have great impact in Nashville, from Ricky Skaggs to Rodney Crowell to Tony Brown.”
Harris was not the only artist to find commercial success within country-rock, as acts like the Eagles brought the genre’s sounds — albeit often slicker versions of them, and, depending who you ask, somewhat watereddown — to mainstream audiences through hits like “Take It Easy,” “Tequila Sunrise” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” The exhibition includes handwritten lyrics for songs like “Best of My Love,” a co-write between J.D. Souther and the band’s Glenn Frey and Don Henley, and “New Kid in Town.” One of the most fascinating instruments on display is Eagles co-founder Bernie Leadon’s modified 1962 Fender Telecaster, which he played on the studio recordings of the Eagles’ “Take It Easy,” among other hits. Its hollowed-out body makes space for a B-bender mechanism that mimics the sound of a pedal-steel guitar — a modification pioneered by another Byrds member, Clarence White.
THOUGH COUNTRY AND ROOTS music found welcoming homes in places like Nashville and Austin, Texas, Los Angeles was, surpris-
nently in the exhibition, including her 1955 Gibson J-200 and a Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors cowgirl outfit that was originally made for television show actress Gail
“Emmylou has had such an influence on so many musicians, within country music and beyond,” McCall says. “I wasn’t buying country music when I was a teenager, but I bought
creators of all kinds, with its artistic reputation drawing not just actors but musicians,
And California’s own long-established country music scene was anchored not just in Bakersfield to the north but within Hollywood itself — Gene Autry, after all,
As the country-rock scene began to grow, venues increasingly became crucial meeting points for both aspiring artists and industry executives hoping to find the next big star. One venue that became pivotal to the development of artists from both eras was The Ash Grove, a folk-music club in what is now considered West Hollywood. Los Angeles native Ed Pearl opened the club in 1958, naming the venue after a traditional Welsh folk song. The club was badly damaged in a series of fires, acts Pearl believed were arson in retali-
ation for his unabashed activism in the face of the Vietnam War. It closed soon after one such fire in 1973; on the site today is the L.A. outpost of comedy club The Improv.
“The first musicians I saw live in Los Angeles were Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder — together in a band called the Rising Sons — at The Ash Grove,” Ronstadt writes in her
considered West Hollywood. Los Angeles na- — at The Ash Grove,” Ronstadt writes in her foreword to the exhibition’s official catalog.
“They had the Grove in their pocket. At that of quality.”
point I had never heard anything of quite that
PHOTO: JOEL APARICIO; PHOTO COURTESY OF THE COUNTRY MUSIC HALL OF FAME AND MUSEUM
LOS LOBOS, DWIGHT YOAKAM AND HIS BAND IN PALO ALTO, 1984NUDIE’S RODEO TAILORS COWGIRL OUTFIT WORN ONSTAGE BY EMMYLOU HARRIS
DAVE ALVIN’S FENDER MUSTANG, HIS PRIMARY GUITAR WITH THE BLASTERS AND THE KNITTERS
Mustang that Dave Alvin lent to the exhibition is still studded with shards of glass from beer bottles flung by angry punks. Soon, though, the country-rock and punk scenes found common ground, and even began helping one another navigate the crowded musical landscape. Alvin played briefly with X, and also started country-schooled outfit The Knitters with X’s Exene Cervenka, John Doe and D.J. Bonebrake; bassist Jonny Ray Bartel of The Red Devils rounded out the lineup.
“With The Knitters, we were doing things like ‘Silver Wings,’ though granted, perhaps, we weren’t doing it as well as Merle Haggard,” says Alvin. “But we were enthusiastic. And what happened, I think, for a lot of punk rock kids was, ‘Hey, this is pretty cool. I like this.’ Or, ‘My granddad listened to this, my sister listened to this. This is cool.’ We made it cool for certain people of a certain age group in the early ’80s to experience country music positively for the first time.”
It wasn’t long before ’80s country-rock found its way to the mainstream too, particularly through the success of artists like Yoakam, Ronstadt and Hillman. Hillman and The Desert Rose Band even traveled out to Nashville to perform on the Grand Ole Opry. After that performance, Opry staff guitarist Jimmy Capps told the band’s Herb Pederson, “It’s funny that it would take two guys from California to show Nashville what country music is supposed to sound like.”
LYRICS TO THE EAGLES’
“HEARTACHE TONIGHT,” ORIGINALLY TITLED “THE SHUFFLE”
The Troubadour, still going strong on West Hollywood’s Santa Monica Boulevard to this day, was a crucial hub for the burgeoning country-rock scene in the ’60s. The club’s Hootenanny open-mic on Monday nights drew throngs of musicians, fans and industry types, with each participating artist performing three songs — that is, if they weren’t booed offstage first. If an open-mic set went well, performers caught the eye of record executives and more established artists, making connections that on several occasions led to real success.
For Linda Ronstadt, the Troubadour played a major role in her decision to pursue music at all. When the now-icon was just 18 years old, she traveled to Los Angeles to visit a friend and found herself at this buzzedabout club in Hollywood. The Byrds played that night and Ronstadt was mesmerized; soon after, she dropped out of the University of Arizona and made her way back to L.A. The support of the community and its commitment to pushing the musical envelope greatly informed the sound she would develop as an artist.
“I recorded ‘Everybody Loves a Winner’ back in those early days,” Ronstadt writes, in the same essay. “The record had pedal steel guitar and bluegrass harmonies on top of an R&B rhythm section. That kind of approach came out of the routine creative exchanges we had going on in L.A. We all hung out at the Troubadour and jammed together, united by our mutual desire to weld country music songs and harmonies to an R&B — or rock and roll — rhythm section.”
By the time artists in the ’80s began revisiting this music — and rejecting the heavily commercial country-rock taking over radio charts — the venue landscape had changed, but the deeply rooted sense of community
had not. The Ash Grove was gone, but the Troubadour remained, and venues like Whisky a Go Go and the Starwood created alternate spaces for artists to meet, collaborate and grow their followings.
The ’80s country-rock scene greatly benefited from cross-pollination with L.A.’s thriving punk scene. Punk groups like L.A.’s own X and London’s Public Image Ltd (aka PiL, fronted by former Sex Pistols singer John Lydon) became friends and collaborators of many country-rock acts, like the delightfully unclassifiable The Blasters. Their guitarist Dave Alvin especially found community in the punk scene and used the success of The Blasters to lift up artists like Los Lobos.
“In the ’80s, there was a second community that came out of the Hollywood punk clubs,” Gray explains. “We have these wonderful pictures of The Blasters and Los Lobos, just hanging out together. The pictures are just so alive with, like, you know, Dave Alvin and Phil Alvin hanging out with David [Hidalgo] or Cesar [Rosas] of Los Lobos, and they’re showing each other their instruments and they’re sharing stages.”
Pérez shares that he was playing a traditional instrument, though not the jarana in this exhibit, at what he calls the band’s “coming out” show at the Olympic Auditorium, opening for PiL. “They had to pick a venue where no one could break anything,” he explains, laughing. The punk fans in the crowd didn’t take kindly to Los Lobos’ traditional sound, and Pérez says he “could feel the air moving from some thousands of middle fingers going up at the same time,” and that the crowd “threw everything they could get their hands on at us.”
Contemporaries of Los Lobos, The Blasters experienced similar reactions from punk fans at the outset of their career. The Fender
CHRIS HILLMAN AND GRAM PARSONS, 1969 PHOTO: JIM M c CRARY; PHOTO COURTESY OF THE COUNTRY MUSIC HALL OF FAME AND MUSEUM PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND
IF IT SOUNDS LIKE Chris Hillman runs through the entire exhibition, it’s because he does. The official catalog for Western Edge calls the San Diego-born multi-instrumen talist “the linchpin,” and it’s hard to argue with that assessment given his omnipresence through the scene.
When Ronstadt saw Hillman playing with The Byrds, she recognized him from his earlier gigs with ’grassers The Scottsville Squirrel Barkers. As she writes: “I thought one day, ‘Well, if he can change from mando lin to electric bass and be folk-rock, then [my band] the Stone Poneys can do that, too. ”
Hillman’s musical talent was immediately apparent to anyone who encountered him, including Bill Smith, a custodian at San Di eguito High School who was also a musician and became one of his first mentors. When Hillman was just 16 years old, his father died by suicide, giving the mentor relationship new layers of meaning. Hillman and Smith remained in touch until Smith passed from complications due to Parkinson’s disease in 2017. Then, Smith’s wife presented Hillman with his 1958 Martin D-28, a particularly meaningful piece of Hillman’s on view in the Western Edge exhibition.
“He started taking me under his wing, and showing me guitar stuff and guitar styles,” Hillman says. “And he knew that I really liked bluegrass. And that was cool, because he was basically a country singer. … I hadn’t seen him for years, and one night The Desert Rose Band is playing. It was 1986 or ’87, and we’d had some success on the radio. And out in the audience is Bill and his wife Darlene. And I said, ‘Bill!’ And he said, ‘I’ve been watching you. I’m really proud of you.’ … I went to see him a week before he died and sang some songs … and I told him, ‘If I hadn’t met you, and you hadn’t helped me out when my dad died, I don’t know what would have happened to me.’ ”
The full scope of Hillman’s influence is difficult to sum up. Dwight Yoakam, writing in the foreword to Hillman’s excellent 2020 memoir Time Between, gives it a try. “In spite of Chris’s varying degrees of chagrin through the years at being given the title,” Yoakam writes, “to me and millions of other fans, he will remain forever immortal as one of the principal architects and a founding father of country-rock.”
Whether Hillman would agree with this sentiment is another story. “I give great credit to Ricky Nelson,” he says. “He was do ing country-rock in the sense of ‘Hello Mary Lou.’ That’s pretty straight-on, if you want to label it as country-rock. So he was ahead of
all of us. And he stayed true to his guns. His stuff was just brilliant.”
In the exhibition catalog, an essay defining country-rock concludes thusly: “The first country-rock song according to Hillman and Yoakam? Rick Nelson’s 1961 hit ‘Hello Mary Lou.’ ” Artifacts of Nelson’s in the exhibition include handwritten lyrics to his 1972 song “Garden Party” and his 1969 Gibson Les Paul Custom.
Accordingly, Hillman is not just a through line within the exhibition but also helped to bookend it. He was one of the first artists interviewed for the project; his wife, Connie Pappas Hillman, was invaluable in gathering artifacts and information for the exhibition. As the museum sought a natural ending point for the display, which proved difficult in light of the scene’s many meandering paths out ward, Gray and McCall landed on Hillman’s late-’80s commercial country success as a marker for the end of this era and the start of a new one.
Several veterans of this scene see simi larly exciting invention happening among to day’s roots and country artists. Billy Strings in particular stands out to Hillman, who says of the rowdy young singer-songwriterguitarist, “I think he’s really drawing on old bluegrass, but he also is very well aware of all kinds of music, and incorporates heavy metal, all this kind of stuff is good.” Pérez cites bluegrass guitarist Molly Tuttle as an especially exciting young act, saying of her, “She is something else. Listening to the stuff she’s playing, it’s like, ‘My goodness, who can pick like that?’ And she’s also writing these intensely personal songs.” Alvin was reluctant to name any specific artists for fear of leaving anyone out, but noted that today’s batch of up-and-comers has him feeling as optimistic as ever.
The exhibition itself makes Alvin feel hopeful for country music, too.
“In the past, there was a sort of rivalry between the West Coast scene and Nash ville,” he says. “And to me, music is all about connections. So an exhibition about the con nection between Tennessee and California, between rock and roll and country, between the Pacific Ocean and the Cumberland River — they may be 2,000 miles apart, but there’s certainly cultural connections that I think have been overlooked.”
It feels only fitting to let Hillman have the last word. Sharing his thoughts on the state of country and roots rock today, he offers a simple, emphatic answer: “This music is alive and well.”
EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
“In the past, there was a sort of rivalry between the West Coast scene and Nashville. And to me, music is all about connections. So an exhibition about the connection between Tennessee and California, between rock and roll and country, between the Pacific Ocean and the Cumberland River — they may be 2,000 miles apart, but there’s certainly cultural connections that I think have been overlooked.” — Dave Alvin
Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony blast off this weekend with a program of otherworldly beauty. The highlight of their concert will be Gustav Holst’s The Planets, a seven-movement orchestral showstopper that leaves no cosmic tone unexplored. Completed in 1916, the work captures in sound the spirit of the seven planets then known, along with their corresponding astrological characters. “Mars, the Bringer of War,” for instance, is filled with angry, ominous sounds, while “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity,” is delightfully lyrical and majestic. Keeping with the celestial theme, the program will include a performance of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s Asteroid 4179: Toutatis This short work, composed in 2005 as a companion to The Planets, was named for an asteroid that makes periodic visits to Earth’s neighborhood. A performance of Tchaikovsky’s unapologetically romantic Violin Concerto, featuring violinist Augustin Hadelich, rounds out the program. Sept. 29-Oct. 2 at the Schermerhorn, 1 Symphony Place JOHN PITCHER
Greg Koch plays guitar like a guy who’s done a lot of instructional guitar videos, and I’m not making fun of him — his seehow-I-did-that approach is something like a concept. Koch, who grew up in Wisconsin, has indeed recorded a number of instructional videos, and thus he’s known as a teacher. On his own with his ax, Koch takes solos that can go from Hendrix-style licks to chicken picking, with plenty of deft interpolations from surf music and other rock styles you might recall. These days, Koch tours and records with organist Toby
Lee Marshall and his son Dylan Koch on drums. The well-named Koch Marshall Trio features the light touch of Marshall, who provides bass lines and fat chords — and nifty solos — that support Koch’s playing perfectly. As you often hear in the music of guitar wizards like Koch, the compositions he favors tend to the Hendrix-meets-The Meters-and-Steely Dan variety — they’re mildly funky and often a little tricky. Their 2021 album Up’Nuh documents their sound, and their worldview gets expressed in tunes
like “Soul Stroll” and “Funky Claus.” 8 p.m. at The Blue Room at Third Man Records, 623 Seventh Ave. S. EDD HURT
Music runs deep in Marcus King’s family: Born in Greenville, S.C., he’s a fourth-generation musician and a thirdgeneration electric guitarist. He was still in his teens when he launched his musical career fronting the somewhat jammy, Southern-rock-and-blues-infused Marcus King Band. He met producer and Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach in early 2018; later, King moved to Nashville, and Auerbach produced his debut solo album, 2020’s Grammy-nominated El Dorado. The pair reconvened for King’s follow-up LP Young Blood, released in August. Co-written with acclaimed songwriters like Angelo Petraglia and Desmond Child, the heavy, smoldering rock album reflects on King’s struggles with addiction, recovery and a painful breakup — and his determination to make it through. “On El Dorado, [Dan] had a way of pinpointing the balladeer side of me and focusing on that,” King said in a recent interview with the Scene. “On this record, we focused in on the rock ’n’ roll side. And we don’t stray far from it.” Thursday and Friday, King’s tour makes a stop in his adopted hometown at the Mother Church. Southern rocking singer-songwriter Ashland Craft and Band-schooled songsmith
Neal Francis open both shows, while comedian Dean Delray, known for his podcast Let There Be Talk, serves as master of ceremonies. Sept. 29-30 at the Ryman, 116 Rep. John Lewis Way N. DARYL SANDERS
Kwame Alexander has written a new middle-grade book, The Door of No Return. While the book is aimed toward kids ages 10 to 14, Alexander has written books for kids of all ages as well as adults — don’t be surprised to arrive and find an auditorium full of parents and non-parents alike. He’s a fantastic speaker, and all of his books are written in verse, which makes him popular with poetry lovers. He’s the author of more than 30 New York Times bestselling books, including his Newbery Medal-winning novel The Crossover and The Undefeated, winner of the Caldecott Medal and Newbery Honor. Parnassus Books and the Nashville Public Library Foundation have teamed up to host this event in celebration of Alexander’s new book. Tickets start at $21 and include a copy of The Door of No Return. Find more info and RSVP at parnassusbooks.net. 6:30 p.m. at the Nashville Public Library, 615 Church St KIM BALDWIN
Back in March, post-hardcore heroes
PHOTO: DANNY CLINCHShiner delivered a world-class set of shapeshifting, mega-melodic hard rock to a rapt audience at Drkmttr. This week, the Kansas City foursome led by the outspoken Allen Epley (whose Third Gear Scratch musicianinterview podcast is a must-hear) returns to the East Nashville DIY stronghold to reprise it for those who dropped the ball the first time. The veteran rockers’ towering fifth LP, 2020’s Schadenfreude, was their first in 19 years — and the new crown jewel in a career dating back to the early grunge days. Also on the bill: Atlanta’s Dropsonic, another late-’90s/early-Aughts concern giving it another go, and intrepid Nashville combo Shell of a Shell, whose local appearances have grown increasingly rare since singer-guitarist Chappy Hull took his talents out west to L.A. earlier this year. 8 p.m. at Drkmttr, 1111 Dickerson Pike.
CHARLIE ZAILLIANSince Brett Morgen’s IMAX-ified David Bowie doc Moonage Daydream hit the Belcourt last weekend, the theater is also launching a series of work from the Thin White Duke’s filmography. (Sorry, Goblin King followers — Labyrinth, which the Belcourt played earlier this year, isn’t one of them.) The first three films — Tony Scott’s 1983 vampire orgy The Hunger, Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 sci-fi whatzit The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Nagisa Ôshima’s 1983 WWII drama Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (screening in 35 mm!) — not only have Bowie serving up commanding starring turns, they are also featured quite prominently in Daydream. The series ends with Bowie doing memorable cameos in films from rock-star auteurs Christopher Nolan (The Prestige, also screening in 35 mm!), Martin Scorsese (The Last Temptation of Christ) and David Lynch (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me). Visit belcourt.org/events/bowie for showtimes. Sept. 30-Oct. 5 at the Belcourt, 2102 Belcourt Ave. CRAIG D. LINDSEY
As part of its Hispanic Heritage Month programming, Conexión Américas is bringing back the Latin Party, a street-festival-style celebration at the Nashville Farmers’ Market. Ticket proceeds benefit the nonprofit’s work with immigrant communities across Nashville, and for the price of admission you get to take a salsa class courtesy of the Global Education Center and proceed to dance the night away to music provided by a DJ and a live band. You can also enjoy a menu of Latin American favorites when taking a break from the dance floor. 6 p.m. at the Nashville Farmers’ Market, 900 Rosa L. Parks Blvd.
ALEJANDRO RAMIREZ
endorsed Londoners Wunderhorse open. 8 p.m. at Brooklyn Bowl, 925 Third Ave. N. CHARLIE ZAILLIAN
Although Aida was originally pitched as an animated musical film for Disney (which was at the time still basking in the glow of its wildly successful hit The
Lion King), it seemed Sir Elton John and Sir Tim Rice had different ideas. Their take on Verdi’s classic opera — which follows the tragic love story of enslaved Nubian princess Aida and Radames, captain of the Egyptian army — eventually made its way to Broadway in March 2000, and earned four Tony Awards, including Best Original Score. This weekend, Tennessee Performing Arts Center and Studio Tenn Theatre Company are teaming up to present Aida: In Concert, serving up a slew of talent from Nashville, Broadway and beyond. The production is co-directed by Studio Tenn’s artistic director Patrick Cassidy and Broadway’s Gerry McIntyre (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat; Chicago), who also serves as choreographer. And the cast features Nashville’s own Maya Riley in the title role, along with Jon Robert Hall (television’s Glee; Wicked) as Radames, plus Broadway veterans Jackie Burns (Wicked; If/Then) and Rex Smith (Grease; The Pirates of Penzance). Sept. 30-Oct. 1 at TPAC’s Polk Theater, 505 Deaderick St. AMY STUMPFL
Drop a needle anywhere in Paul Burch’s discography, and you’ll likely not only be thoroughly delighted right then but also hungry to learn more about a thread of influence running through American musical culture. With a revolving cast of expert musicians operating under the name The WPA Ballclub, Burch makes music that draws on old-school country, string-band music, different strains of blues, R&B, early rock ’n’ roll, English and Eastern European folk music, hot jazz and more — sounds that the group always bends to their own purposes. Burch & Co. aren’t ones to use rarified language (and on occasion, they won’t use words at all), but they’ll tell you something profound about living in our world. A few years back, the band played one of the most fascinating shows I’ve seen yet, in which they kept their air of affable composure while rocking with grit and fervor — and it was performed to about a dozen people at a happy hour. These Nashville treasures appear Friday at Third Man’s Blue Room Bar with no cover, so make it a point to get there with plenty of
cash for both the band’s and the bartenders’ tip jars. 7 p.m. at The Blue Room at Third Man Records, 623 Seventh Ave. S. STEPHEN TRAGESER
With three top-tier LPs in just four years, each a distinct stand-alone work, the five fresh-faced Irishmen of Fontaines D.C. (“D.C.,” for inquiring minds, stands for “Dublin City”) have rocketed to the top of their class in the new school of post-punk. Where 2019’s breakneck Dogrel wowed with its brashness, clarity of intent and fierce sense of identity straight out of the gate, the ensemble’s latest, Skinty Fia (rough Irish translation: “for fuck’s sake”), is a moodier, slower-burning affair. On tracks like the standout “Jackie Down the Line,” Skinty emphasizes textures and melodies over raw energy. The alternately wrenching and uplifting A Hero’s Death, meanwhile, came out in July 2020, some of the lowest days of the pandemic — right when we needed it — and will likely make up the emotional core of Fontaines’ long-awaited Nashville live debut. Rough Trade Records-
Contemporary music ensemble Intersection has partnered with the MTSU Center for Chinese Music and Culture to produce shows for a threeday cross-cultural music festival called Convergence. The festival includes a performance at Casa Azafrán with guest zheng performer Haiqiong Deng, who will play two pieces with Intersection. One, called “Dots, Lines and Convergence,” is a zheng concerto written by Chihchun Chi-sun Lee that presents “distinct musical cultures that synthesize and ‘converge’ in the final movement,” according to the artist’s statement. The other is the world premiere of a composition called “Moon Phase” by Sun Yue that was written just for this festival — the composer says in the piece the moon represents “powerful feminine energy, signifying wisdom, intuition, birth, death, reincarnation and a spiritual connection. We long for its guidance, we look to it for peace, we crave its attention, we feel its power when it illuminates the night.” 3 p.m. at Casa Azafrán, 2195 Nolensville Pike AMANDA HAGGARD
Halloween may still be a few weeks off, but Nashville Children’s Theatre is already cooking up a sweet treat with its world premiere of Click, Clack, Boo! Based on the delightful children’s book by Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin (part of the popular series that started out with Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type), this clever adaptation follows Darlene the Duck, Clarissa the Cow and Chick the Chicken. The friends are determined to throw a “spook-tacular” Halloween Hop, despite the concerns of Farmer Brown. This fun new work features book and lyrics by NCT’s executive artistic director Ernie Nolan, with music and lyrics by David Weinstein. Nolan has put together a solid cast, including Dustin Davis, Piper Jones, Eve Petty and Erika Johnson. And it’s sure to be a fun atmosphere for little ones, with
HAIQIONG DENG, PLAYING AT CONVERGENCE
performances held outside at the “Candy Corn Canopy.” Plus, audience members are invited to wear their costumes and enjoy the “Halloween Runway” after each show. Oct. 1-30 at Nashville Children’s Theatre, 25 Middleton St. AMY STUMPFL
The bluegrass world is funny — it exists in its own time-space continuum, but bluegrass musicians like to venture over into the pop-rock dimension to find material. Hailing from Eastern Kentucky, singer Dale Ann Bradley first gained notoriety as a member of bluegrass band New Coon Creek Girls in the early 1990s, and she released her first solo album, East Kentucky Morning, in 1997. Bradley sings a little bit like, say, Dolly Parton, but she sounds a touch more conversational — she has an avid, pop-friendly voice that she controls perfectly. Every Bradley album I’ve heard has shown off a bluegrass-rooted singer who loves to take on somewhat unlikely material. She’s covered Tom Petty and Patty Loveless to good effect, and her 1999 version of Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You” finds her taking a few liberties with phrasing the lyrics while managing to evoke the song’s comic desperation. I also like her 2011 cover of Seals and Crofts’ “Summer Breeze,” which might make you think of summer breezes in Eastern Kentucky or East Tennessee — Bradley makes the song her own. She has a new album, Kentucky for Me, set for release later this year. 9 p.m. at the Station Inn, 402 12th Ave. S. EDD HURT
By the time Elton John concludes his farewell world tour, currently scheduled through mid-2023, he’ll have been at it for almost five years, even including an unavoidable, unfortunate delay due to the pandemic. For some performers that might seem excessive, but we’re not talking about some performers here. To quote my erstwhile colleague J.R. Lind’s review of John’s 2018 Bridgestone Arena show, the first of three Nashville stops on John’s tour: “His songs aren’t a relic of a certain time, they are part of the fabric of every time, weaving in and out of our lives, their titles chapter headings to a collective autobiography.” The massive production comes to Nissan Stadium on Sunday for what will likely be the final time. A quick scan of available tickets suggests they’re not cheap but won’t cost you an old gold Chevy and a place of your own; besides, it’s hard to put a price on a memory, even if you’re in the nosebleeds. 8 p.m. at Nissan Stadium, 1 Titans Way STEPHEN TRAGESER
pounding sound and DIY ethic. Lead singer Donita Sparks also performed one of the baddest rock moves of all time — just Google “L7 tampon” if you don’t already know what I’m talking about. Sparks & Co. are currently on tour for the 30th anniversary reissue of Bricks Are Heavy, a glorious headbanger of an album. Lucky for us, the show will have the group’s original lineup — Sparks and Suzi Gardner on guitar, Jennifer Finch on bass, and Demetra Plakas on drums. Plus, the tour’s kicking off in Nashville, so you can count on them to come busting out of the gate ready to shred. They’re playing with Vera Bloom, who we awarded last year with a Best of Nashville Writer’s Choice for Best Rock Transplant. 8 p.m. at Brooklyn Bowl, 925 Third Ave. N. TOBY LOWENFELS
Love and Compromise is a great title for English neo-soul singer Mahalia’s 2019 album, which is about the obsessive nature of the emotion referenced in the title.
Grunge legends come and go, but L7 sticks around — and we love them for it. The band formed in 1985 — that’s two years before Nirvana — and these gals have a legacy that stems from their ground-
Mahalia keeps the music light throughout Love and Compromise — her vocals are breezy and the keyboard sounds are warm. The album’s “I Wish I Missed My Ex” is both funny and rueful, and Mahalia continues to explore that song’s themes on her new EP Letter to Ur Ex, which lays out Mahalia’s message of self-empowerment. The richest track on Letter is “In the Club,” in which Mahalia sings about how her success has attracted the attention of people who once wouldn’t talk to her on the street.
Because Mahalia’s music is so evenhanded — it’s lush and spare at the same time — her meditations on success, love and identity come across as remarkably free of resentment. She just wants what she believes she’s earned through her hard work, and that’s a theme you can get with. Opening will be R&B singer Ogi Ifediora, who was raised in Wisconsin by Nigerian parents. She released her debut EP, Monologues, this year. 8 p.m. at Exit/In, 2208 Elliston Place EDD HURT
MAHALIA PHOTO: VICKY GROUT
Nashville darling Margo Price has stories on top of stories — and the voice to go with them. In her new memoir, Maybe We’ll Make It, Price shares the anecdotes behind her songs. Arriving in Music City at age 20 with $57 to her
book — though it’s mighty tempting to wait for the audiobook, which is narrated by the singer herself. 5 p.m. at Grimey’s, 1060 E. Trinity Lane TOBY LOWENFELS
The remarkable musical legacy of Earth, Wind & Fire dates back to 1969, when former Chess Records session drummer Maurice White founded a new band from the remnants of a group known as the Sally Peppers. White’s vision was to spearhead a unit that was comfortable playing all the different styles he’d worked in — from R&B and soul to jazz, funk and even rock.
In short, he wanted to create a band that could effectively execute all the elements of Black music. Though White died in 2016, the band still has several core members — dynamic vocalist Phillip Bailey and White’s brother Verdine on bass. Earth, Wind & Fire has not only remained active over all these decades, they’ve continued making new music — fans know they’re always worth seeing and hearing. 7:30 p.m. at FirstBank Amphitheater, 4525 Graystone Quarry Lane, Franklin RON WYNN
name, she powered through addiction and loss to become a Grammy-nominated country musician. A chapter titled “Uppers, Downers and Out-of-Towners” details a night when Price and her husband, fellow musician Jeremy Ivey, hosted 25 musicians for a sleepover: “We were all loser poets struggling to keep our heads above the water and the booze.” Price will be reading more from her book in a discussion with Allison Russell. Wristbands are required to attend and are free with preorders of the
What to eat, drink and do in the Mississippi Delta, from Clarksdale to Oxford
BY ASHLEY BRANTLEY
Beach or mountains? Sand or snow? Weekend getaways often involve picking one vibe simply because changing locations mid-trip wastes time. That’s where Nashville’s location in our region delivers. Since we’re smack in the center of the Southeast, we’re surrounded by dozens of cities and towns that you can mix and match for the perfect town-and-country getaway. Hit Chattanooga and Monteagle, or Knoxville and the Great Smoky Mountains. Or if you’re willing to drive a little further — about four-anda-half hours — eat your way through the Mississippi Delta with a Clarksdale-Oxford combo.
On this trek, you’ll find every conceivable Southern food. You’ll also find that many of the people making that food are first- or second-generation immigrants, or descendants of enslaved African Americans. There’s a reason the Southern Foodways Alliance is headquartered in Oxford, and it’s not just because its director — writer and Southern-culture expert John T. Edge — lives there.
The Delta’s history is rich, complex and contradictory, and you can taste that in its food. No single article can give you all the context you need to appreciate the Delta, so I’d highly recommend you read some SFA oral histories, listen to the Gravy podcast or watch a couple episodes of True South on the SEC Network. Even a little bit of knowledge will enrich your experience. And, while you obviously can’t take in all that the Delta has to offer in one weekend, these places will give you a taste.
Abe’s BAR-B-Q has been a fixture in Clarksdale since 1924. After World War I, Lebanese immigrant Abraham “Abe” Davis moved his operation to its current location: at the Devil’s Crossroads of Highway 61 and Highway 49 — where Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the devil to get his legendary blues prowess. Abe’s son Pat still owns the place, where everyone from Paul Simon to Charlie Pride has eaten. Grab a bottle of Budweiser, order the hot tamales (with chili, always) and the chili-cheese dog, which is brilliantly constructed. The
dogs are sliced lengthwise and laid across a burger bun before being smothered with fixins. Why are we not constructing all hot dog dishes this way?! It’s sturdier and cleaner, and you get two hot dogs! Win-win.
For dinner, I’m told Ramon’s is the place, and based on the drool-inducing photos on their Facebook page, I believe it. The cashonly spot was on summer vacation when we were there, but locals swear by their fried shrimp and their spaghetti (that old classic combo!). We ended up at Hooker Grocer & Eatery, a charming, adorable restaurant that sadly just didn’t deliver on food. Which I hate! As I said, it is cute, and they were blaring Alanis, and several friends of mine swear the food is good. But I have only one meal — which included muddy-tasting fried catfish and rock-hard meatballs — to base a review on, so here we are.
A great option is Chamoun’s Rest Haven The Southern-Lebanese-Italian restaurant is owned by Paula Chamoun Jackson, daughter of Chafik and Louise, who came to Mississippi in 1954. Chafik sold nylon stockings door to door before opening the grocery store that would become Rest Haven. Their name says it all: Everyone is welcome, and it’s been that way since the beginning. In fact, Rest Haven and Abe’s were the only two restaurants in Clarksdale that didn’t refuse service to a group of Black kids in 1965, a year after racial discrimination in restaurants was upheld as illegal. When it comes to food, you can’t go wrong with the $18 Taste of Lebanon, which includes fried kibbeh balls, raw kibbeh, cabbage rolls, grape leaves, hummus, tabouli, Syrian bread and pita. Everything
is fragrant, highly seasoned and delicious, but the fried kibbeh and cabbage rolls were pure knockouts.
For late-night (aka 9 p.m.) eats, we hit Ground Zero Blues Club. Named because Clarksdale is “Ground Zero” for the blues, the joint is best known for being co-owned by Morgan Freeman, so I had celeb-level hopes for its authenticity. I was delightfully surprised. While it’s clearly the biggest, “most commercial” juke joint in town, it is still a joint. They get a steady rotation of blues legends and international travelers, and they use the honor system to take up the $12 cover. Perhaps most surprising, the tamales were the best we had in the Delta — moist cornmeal, well-seasoned meat, supremely satisfying.
To stay, you’ve got two decidedly different options: Travelers Hotel and The Shack Up Inn. Travelers Hotel is a hip in-town option in a building that railroad workers used for overnight stops in the 1920s. If you’ve ever been to a boutique hotel, you get the gist. If, on the other hand, you want something a little more country, there’s The Shack Up Inn a few miles from town. The plantation-turned-B&B (“bed and beer”) is made up of 50-plus restored shotgun shacks, grain bins and other old buildings that you can stay in overnight. When I got there, I heard one man named Bubba smack-talking another man named Bubba, and I knew I was in the right place.
Shack Up doesn’t allow kids, which makes sense — the place is packed with funky, breakable sculptures and stray metal, so it’s a tetanus shot waiting to happen. It is also one of the most unique places I’ve ever been. You could stay for a month and not explore every nook, cranny, sign or piece
of art. Hit the on-site Gin Joint for a beer and just wander. If you think you’ll love this place, you will. If not, take the advice they give on their website: “If you think you might not like [our shacks] then do yourself, and us, a favor and don’t book one. They are for people who appreciate history, the way it was. … The Ritz we ain’t.”
Almost to Oxford you’ll find Taylor Grocery Originally a dry-goods store built in 1889, it has character everywhere, from the vintage high school class composites to the newspaper vending machine that reads “Control your pets & kids.” (The Hewlett family seems too kind to rip off influencers, but they could make a mint renting this place out for photo shoots.) If you don’t want to queue up behind locals, get there right at opening (5 p.m.), BYOB and order the fried catfish and red beans and rice. And don’t leave without a shaker of their house seasoning — think Cavender’s meets Tony Chachere’s — and some swag, because how could you not when their slogan is “Eat or we both starve”?
Next, make an appointment to stop by Wonderbird Spirits, North Mississippi’s first distillery — it launched just in time to bottle hand sanitizer for half of 2020. Wonderbird’s gin gets stellar press for good reason: It’s fantastic — crisp, bright and botanical. It should be with the care they take, infusing each of 10 botanicals separately so you can pick out the red clover, which grows in front of their picture-perfect distillery, or the pine, which grows behind. They make the base spirit by fermenting Delta rice as
The Mississippi Delta is 7,000 square miles of alluvial floodplain, which has a whole scientific explanation that boils down to “the soil is fertile.” According to David L. Cohn, a Polish, Jewish author who im migrated to Greenville in the 1880s, “The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg.” I felt like a bad Memphian for not knowing this quote — until I did some Googling and learned that Catfish Row does not exist! It’s a prime example of how, like so many things in the South, the particulars about the Delta are debatable. Huzzah for old South ern men in diners everywhere!
Compared to the Latin variety, Delta tamales are simmered rather than steamed, have a grittier texture (they use cornmeal instead of corn flour/masa), and are often served with a sauce made from the cooking liquid. They’re also more likely to be made spicy, which is why you’ll see many listed as “hot tamales.”
The shotgun house is another Southern situation where history, fact and folklore mix. Some say these long, narrow houses where folks like Elvis and the Neville Brothers grew up got their name because, if all the doors are open, you could fire a shotgun from the front door out the back without hitting anything. Another theory suggests the name came from an Afro-Haitian term “to-gun,” which means a “place of assembly.” Whatever the origin, the superstition is sure: Spirits are attracted to shotgun houses because they can pass straight through them, which is why some — including many at the Shack Up — are built with intentionally misaligned doors.
WONDERBIRD SPIRITS GROUND ZERO BLUES CLUB RAMON’Syou would to make sake, which gives them a remarkably clean foundation (and an awesome reason to name their hypnotizing distillery cat Kōji).
OXFORD
Eating in Oxford revolves around chef John Currence, Oxford’s favorite son. By all accounts, he’s a cool, competent dude, winning a James Beard Award in 2009 and going toe to toe with the governor over a homophobic bill in 2014. (If he said even half of what’s been reported while telling off the governor’s team, I’d like to be his next wife.) Nashvillians will know him for Big Bad Breakfast, his gut-busting joint that has an outpost with a perpetual line outside of it on Charlotte Avenue. All of his restaurants are gorgeous, inviting, and make a mean cocktail. But I wonder how much oversight the food gets day to day while Currence is out opening and maintaining 15 (!) locations of BBB across the South.
and a cool backstory as an old drug store. For dinner, we hit Snackbar, now helmed by chef Vishwesh Bhatt, who brought home his own Beard Award in 2019. You can see Bhatt’s Indian influence all over the menu — collard-green-peanut slaw, trout with tahini sauce — but I wish you could taste it more. The food was good! Don’t get me wrong. But when you read about the connections Bhatt sees in the foods of the South and Gujarat, India (where he grew up) and you tack on a Beard Award, you expect to be blown away. We weren’t.
If we had it to do over, we’d eat dinner at Saint Leo. The concept is simple: woodfired Italian food, executed flawlessly, in a bustling modern space. Chef Emily Blount’s ethos reminds me of Nicky’s Coal Fired, or Andrew Ticer and Michael Hudman’s spots in Memphis: inventive, unfussy, and above all, delicious. Blount’s breakfast pizza has it all: leeks, scallion, pork jowl and potato, on top of melty mozzarella and Green Hill cheese from Georgia, drizzled with béchamel, and topped with pecorino and egg. It’s the kind of hangover cure that can easily lead you down the primrose path to Sunday Funday, especially when paired with the Capri C’est Fini cocktail. Made with Parmesan-washed vodka, melon-andbasil syrup, egg white and lime, it was one of the two most interesting drinks of my summer — savory, zingy and complex. (The other was Husk’s Tomato Tomahto — tequila, green tomato, lemon, Cynar — which is still on their menu if you want to snag it.)
The tamales we had at City Grocery were the weakest we had on our Delta trip — too crumbly, muted in flavor — and the patrons sitting beside us at the tiny back bar warned us off even attempting the escargot toast. That said, the upstairs bar is easily the most convivial spot in town for a drink, filling up with friends as soon as the doors open. Bouré is basic but tasty, with a solid cup of gumbo
To stay, you’ve got two on-the-Square options. The Graduate is fun and has a lively rooftop bar, as well as a less migraineinducing aesthetic than Nashville’s granny-chic version. The Chancellor’s House is more stately if a bit staid, though they’re actively working to bring its older elements up to date. We stayed there and loved it — it was comfortable, spacious, dog-friendly and expertly staffed, and you don’t have to pay to park! As we Nashvillians know, it’s the small things like free parking and less-than-$16 cocktails that thrill you. Bonus: It’s right across the street from the Chevron, which means you can grab the obligatory (and still delicious!) chickenon-a-stick anytime.
contemporary art in 17 states for 35 years, and their Art of the South benefit exhibition organizes annual displays of the best work being made across Number’s very broad “South.”
The exhibition has been off the calendar since 2019 due to the pandemic, but it makes a triumphant return at Zeitgeist this Saturday. Art of the South used to mean a yearly pilgrimage to Bluff City — twist my arm and force me to eat barbecue and buy another Graceland shot glass, or watch Mystery Train for the 86th time. Number recently relocated to The Packing Plant in Nashville under the care of interim editor Jon Sewell. And this first Art of the South in Music City is juried by Frist Art Museum senior curator Katie Delmez, who blind-selected 86 works for this sprawling regional survey. The show’s Middle Tennessee-based artists include Cesar Pita, Dooby Tompkins, Omari Booker, Amelia Briggs, Sai Clayton, Paul Collins, Lindsy Davis, Elise Drake, DaShawn Lewis — and yours truly. Zeitgeist celebrates with an opening reception from noon until 6 p.m. this Saturday.
of life over the past few years as we each move out from under the worst of the pandemic at our own pace, slowly reclaiming our freedom of movement and reconnecting with friends and family after having our lives shrunk so suddenly and severely. Beall’s show is actually a lot more universal, timeless and generally human than that, exploring the expanding nature of our lives as we grow and experience and hopefully gain a little bit of wisdom between the cradle and the grave.
Mel Beall’s Life in Widening Circles opens at The Browsing Room in the Downtown Presbyterian Church this Saturday night. Beall’s title immediately puts me in mind
Beall’s work combines her training as a textile artist with the meditation sigils she’s been drawing in her practice as one of the Downtown Presbyterian Church’s artists-in-residence. Sigil drawing usually starts with a written prayer, intention or request. The individual letters are broken down into basic lines and shapes, which are recombined into a symbolic design as the original phrase disappears and is dissolved into the depths of the artist’s subconscious mind, resulting in text paintings you can’t read. Life in Widening Circles’ vitality and mortality themes are a great match for the lead-up to All Hallows’ Eve, and you can commune with these spirits at a reception at the Browsing Room from 6 until 8 p.m. on Saturday night.
EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM BY JOE NOLAN WEDGEWOOD-HOUSTONLydia Moyer and Sam Lavigne’s Electioneering exhibition opens at Unrequited Leisure on Saturday night, and runs through Nov. 9, the day after Election Day. The show’s title — and its timing on the fall art calendar — are no accident. Electioneering aims to highlight, interrogate and ultimately satirize the aesthetics of contemporary American political advertising. It’s a diabolical art form unto itself that developed alongside midcentury television technology and into the endless loop of the 24-hour cable news cycle before oozing onto the doomscroll of the social apps on our mobile devices. Moyer’s work generally focuses on an individual response to contemporary social, political and environmental crises, and Lavigne’s art is preoccupied with data, surveillance and policing.
Each artist contributes here, but Electioneering is ultimately a group show with more artists added to the video loop on display at the gallery’s Packing Plant space each week. By election night, the various contributions to the collaborative video will constitute a frenzied dance of partisan pixels to match the mediated madness that stands in for functioning democracy in America. Here’s hoping this exhibition puts a gleeful stake through the heart of the political establishment’s duopoly puppet show, and that it’s not just another forgettable contribution to the ignorant scrap heap of artist-made political propaganda that’s proliferated over the past half decade.
Nashville-based artist Delia Seigenthaler is bringing paper, magazines, old photographs, a stack of her mother’s mailorder art school books, mass-produced
art, thrift store finds, antique children’s books, doll catalogs and wallpaper flowers to her show at Julia Martin Gallery, Trials and Dispositions. The exhibition of multimedia works is predictably fashioned from lots of colorful cutouts and castoffs, but it avoids the kitschy clichés that make a lot of collage art read like clever and forgettable novelty displays. This work is actually weird and admirably mysterious. Seigenthaler’s puppet-like sculptures are truly creepy — perfect for this shadowy season of cackling jack-o’-lanterns, pagan holy days and masked-maniac movies.
The artist’s 2-D work presents various characters pieced together from mismatched elements, just like Mary Shelley’s monster — the first exquisite corpse. These works — like most figurative art — evoke narratives. But where a lesser artist would give us visual puns or Hallmark-style messaging, Seigenthaler delivers new fables, forgotten mythologies and neo-alchemical compositions alluding to some hidden knowledge buried between their layers. If you love collage and assemblage done right, and you’ve already got your Halloween costume planned, you’ll want to make like a vampire and hang at the opening reception — from 6 to 9 p.m. this Saturday night.
Number art journal was founded in Memphis in 1987. It’s one of the oldest publications of its kind in the South, and for Number, the South is a very big place. I wrote more about the history of the journal in the Scene’s recent Fall Guide, and one of Number’s most admirable and ambitious principles is that the region known as the South includes everything from Arkansas to Florida, and from Maryland to Texas. The journal’s documented the best
ABeat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson is the latest book from the award-winning poet who currently holds the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. Edited by Amor Kohli, a professor of African and Black diaspora studies at DePaul University, A Beat Beyond contains a wealth of notes, essays, reviews, and talks written by Jackson from 1993 to 2020.
for a personal benediction. Jackson writes, “I wish to make a sound that echoes in the end that says Major Jackson. No more. No less.” A pilgrimage to one’s own center of language is the ultimate high lyric.
Jackson lists more practical advice in “Poetry and Influence of the Nonliterary Variety.” In helping young poets create a fertile space wherein their poetry can come forth, he asserts that they should: “Read other authors’ work with a pencil and notebook nearby”; “Free associate (or doodle) a memory”; or even “Call one of your parents and attempt to engage them in an argument.” Revealing the heart of a professor, he encourages aspiring poets and writers to open themselves to as much of the world as they can take in.
work, including “flash reviews” and liner
placement. For example, we enter what reads like Jackson’s most intimate thoughts concerning poetry in “Convergences and Confluences”: “Seems like poetry was always with me, how difficult it is to pinpoint exactly what convergences and confluences have shaped me into becoming a poet; more a series of vague memories that intensify to one reality.” This short, stream-of-consciousness piece is immediately followed by a longer academic essay, “The Necessity of Language as Freedom,” which features several close readings and literary analyses, though it is anything but dry. Its direct style is a blinking beacon in the suffocating murk that academic writing can sometimes be.
These two essays are included in the first of the collection’s three sections, “On Poetry: My Lyrical Self.” The section takes its title from “My Lyrical Self,” originally delivered as a lecture, which retraces Jackson’s becoming through a sort of literary ontology. Here, the young writer who cannot write will find that page becomes mirror and poetry becomes testimony. Jackson considers his poem “On Disappearing,” where he speaks to, perhaps, the young writer whose words have evaporated: “I have not disappeared. / The boulevard is full of my steps. The sky is / full of my thinking.” The page might be empty, the speaker seems to argue, but the streets bear the imprint of my walking, and I have written my thoughts on the tablet of the sky. In “Convergences and Confluences” the young writer is offered a model, possibly
In the collection’s closing essay “Black Poetry: A Beat Beyond,” originally published in the hip-hop magazine The Source, Jackson chronicles the poetry battles, pitting poet against poet like the rap battles of the 1980s, that are happening in places like New York City, Boston, D.C., Philadelphia, Camden and St. Louis. Although written in 1993, Jackson’s engagement with the dissenting voices is still relevant. Academic poets have long criticized performance poets because the latter do not seem to revere the traditional elements of the written art — meter, form and the like. However, performance poets believe that they are part of an oral tradition, which is especially relevant in an increasingly audiovisual society. Today’s lyrical controversy sets academic poets against those who choose Instagram as their poetic medium. The latter, academic poets argue, have not been trained to “hear,” taking T.S. Eliot, Gwendolyn Brooks or Countee Cullen as their models. The Instagram poets retort that the academy is elitist and inaccessible. Both in 1993 and in the present, Jackson’s unifying resolve holds: “Whether read in the classroom, performed on a stage, or improvised in the streets, poetry conveys the richness of living in the music of ourselves.”
A Beat Beyond is a collection for the weary writer, for poets who feel themselves becoming invisible, and for any person who desires a liberation of language and lyric. With prose that transcends the bounds of mere musicality, Major Jackson invites us to investigate just how poetry “puts in an appearance.” From the academy to conversations in the grocery store, from churches to hip-hop music, poetry is a sound guide that can lead us to the center of language.
For more local book coverage, please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.
EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
It’s hard not to be in awe of Lil Nas X. With a repurposed Nine Inch Nails loop and a sense of classic storytelling in his song “Old Town Road,” he rewrote the rules out from under a heap of calcified gate keepers, making a whole lot of people be honest with themselves about their definitions of and relationships with country music. While doing so, he graciously stomped chart records once held by Olivia Newton-John, Boyz II Men and Mariah Carey, and then came out of the closet. This kind of urgency makes X very much the pop star for the epoch. Who knows how long, as a culture, we’ve got left, so why not make each step up the ladder of success into a culture-shaking moment that requires an inordinate amount of thinkpieces? This is the same artist who, while promoting his single “That’s What I Want” in November, made an entire collaborative video with Maury Povich as a supplement to the single’s music video, getting profoundly House of Leaves with the promotional process.
Even amid that upward trajectory, Lil Nas X remains fun, glam and as sharp as he ever was. One of the truest axioms of the past few years remains “Don’t come for a Barb on social media” — Nicki Minaj fans don’t play around. That includes X, as he makes apparent whenever anybody tries to start some shit online. You would
Ilast caught up with Kurt Wagner on the Scene’s behalf in 2019, getting the lowdown on Lambchop’s then-new album This (is what I wanted to tell you). Quarantine did nothing to dull the iconoclastic Nashville singer, songwriter and bandleader’s edge. The Bible, out Friday via the band’s longtime home Merge Records, is Lambchop’s third release since then, following a 2020 covers collection called Trip and last year’s piano-via-guitar-driven Showtunes.
To make The Bible, Wagner’s creative compass guided him to a disused paint factory in Minneapolis’ North Side. There, he and producers Andrew Broder and Ryan Olson wrote, arranged and recorded the 10-song collection during the summer of 2021, with that city still simmering one year on from the protests over the murder of George Floyd and subsequent nationwide calls for social justice.
This complex, powerful environment instills in The Bible a deep heaviness but also a sense of renewal.
think by this point that mainstream talk ing heads would understand that as a gay Black zoomer who locked wills with the country music establishment out the gate, Lil Nas X is not going to wilt in the face of focused heteronormativity or white-people foolishness. If anything, he has found some sort of alchemical approach to taking the gumption of his haters and turning it into sparkly, fantastic innovation.
For the Long Live Montero Tour — his first, which stops at Municipal Auditorium on Saturday — X has crafted a three-act, high-tech, semi-autobiographical extrava ganza that eschews rawk show traditions for Broadway imagination, making a prom ise to the audience in a playbill to not be a “regular-ass show.” And given the inordi nate number of shitty things going on in the world in 2022, there is a certain degree of strength to be drawn from having dinosaurold Dad Rock tour clichés blown the fuck up by the imagination and drive of queer people looking to reclaim, to reinvent, to redefine. (See also: Ben Platt’s show at Bridgestone on Sept. 18, which got raucous ovations for musical theater, gay love and Sara Bareilles.)
You only have to look to “Industry Baby,” his collaboration with Louisville’s Jack Harlow, to feel 100 percent of the vibe X is putting out right now. Built around triumphant, Basil Poledouris-style brass, it’s a song that leaves the listener feeling pumped. Then you add in the video, which exploits prison nudity while also raising awareness about the American carceral system as well as raising funds to benefit The Bail Project, a nonprofit devoted to eliminating the weaponization of cash bail. The track has also become a go-to jam in countless movie trailers of all sorts, finding through omnipresence something that ap proaches the level of the mass culture that critics and theorists tend to speak of with equal parts nostalgia and late-blooming re
alization. Which is kind of a major achieve ment considering the furor that erupted when he dropped the video for “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” in which he gives the treatment for FKA twigs’ “Cello phane” a Miltonian makeover.
Given the nearly limitless canvas that modern effects technologies have given us, there’s a satisfaction in what X and his troupe of eight dancers (no band, thank you very much) craft and execute with their
bodies. Choreography remains an art form that can’t be replicated by algorithms or pixels. It can be taught, and grown, and styled accordingly in software — or cut and pasted to bolster primary dancers in movies or on TV. But live, onstage, there’s nothing else quite like it. There’s no one in contemporary pop music with instincts that compare to X’s at this point, with ambition and imagination in perfect balance.
EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COMWho exactly are Ryan Olson and Andrew Broder? Ryan’s a producer who does all sorts of wild things — everything from Swamp Dogg to Third Eye Blind. Ever heard of Marijuana Deathsquads? [Laughs] Andrew had a band called Fog, and recently produced this record, Niineta, by Native singer-songwriter Joe Rainey. It’s amazing. Revolutionary. Creates a whole new genre, honestly. Describe the atmosphere in Minneapolis during recording. There was a wildness in the air, and we tried to bring that into the music. I wrote the songs with Ryan and Andrew, and let them produce. That’s significant. Most Lambchop records are not collaborative like that. Actually, they never are. It’s as much creative control as I’ve ever surrendered. And they knocked it out of the park. [Certain] ideas took a while to convince me — [on] “Gimme Your Love,” namely — but I came around. It was important for me to see what can happen when I hang back.
In the liner notes, you mentioned writing “A Major Minor Drag” the day Gift of Gab from Blackalicious passed away. Loved that group. A hip-hop gateway, for sure. Absolutely — they were great. He died the day I was writing lyrics for that song.
It always surprises me where you draw from. I try to incorporate the here-and-now into the lyrics, whether it makes sense now, or later — or
Its emotive piano swells, heart-catching strings and Wagner’s quivering vocals carry the weight of a fraught several years. The Lambchop main man, who turns 63 this year, recently took a break from readying an epic release event at Minneapolis’ Walker Arts Center — replete with a 19-piece ensemble of Twin Cities players — to reconnect via phone. PLAYINGnever. You’re reading a book, pause, look up and leaves are falling, wind is blowing, something in the natural world is happening. Then you look back down. You’ve been to live outdoor shows. The birds are chirping. An incidental sound is ringing in key with the music. It’s magic. Whatever that feeling is, I try to satisfy it.
The closing song’s title “That’s Music” — that’s a reference to Ira Kaplan from Yo La Tengo? Yeah, it’s something he once said on his WFMU show. Kind of self-explanatory. [Laughs]
The story behind calling this thing The Bible, please. Well, it’s catchy. It grabs your attention. Somehow, no one had claimed it, which shocked me. Kendrick Lamar could put out The Bible and everyone would be like, “That’s fucking amazing!” [Laughs] I do believe this record is special, though. It needed a memorable title.
Are you friends with Low? I know Alan [Sparhawk]. They’ve always been artists, always moved forward. That’s come through since day one, and they don’t stumble much. Love their recent work especially, with B.J. Burton — Double Negative, and [Hey What]. B.J.’s one of the great producers. Him and Ryan, they’re very competitive. They’re also good buddies: tight, friendly, the nicest fuckers you ever met. They draw from each other’s wells. That’s the scene here. It’s beautiful. It’s not Nashville. [Laughs] The way Nashville felt in the ’90s, though — in my little world, at least — that’s how it is here, now.
Have you talked anybody from Minneapolis into moving to Nashville? No — why would they do that? [Laughs] I love Nashville. It’s my home. I grew up there, and will probably die there. But the cost of living is lower up here. The horrors of gentrification exist in pockets, but its soul’s intact. There’s neighborhoods that are predominantly Native. The history of activism runs so deep — so many avenues to go down. It’s inspiring to be around.
Damn. Are you thinking of getting a place there? [Laughs.] I lived in Bozeman, Mont., for three winters when I was in grad school for sculpture and fine arts in the early ’80s, so I know what that’s like. I’m not ruling Minneapolis out, though. Summers are nice, and right now it’s perfect.
What’s ahead for Lambchop? Well, we’re doing these big productions at the Walker, to represent The Bible. If those go well, maybe we’ll take the show to L.A., or Berlin. Post-COVID, it’s delicate, and difficult. We need to be more careful, or else we’ll lose our asses. But looking backward, doing full-album shows has never interested me. I’ve warmed up to reissues, but live, I just want to do something other than “Up With People,” the oldies.
What does the future of live music look like, to you? I’m really curious, myself. In my mind … it’s a traffic jam, a stampede. Things are going to have to recalibrate.
When we spoke in 2019, you recommended a group called Standing on the Corner that I checked out and loved. What’s a young band you’ve been super into lately? Soul Glo, from Philly. So inventive, so fucking good. Nothing weak there.
The Scene ’s music writers recommend recent releases from Virghost, Lou Turner, Peachy and more
BY EDD HURT, DARYL SANDERS, STEPHEN TRAGESER, RON WYNN AND CHARLIE ZAILLIANAs the harvest season unfolds, there’s still a ton of live shows to enjoy. But musicians across the city continue offering up excellent records. The Scene’s music writers have eight new recommenda tions for you — add ’em to your streaming queue
or pick them up from your favorite local re cord store. Or put them on your wish list for Bandcamp Friday, the promotion in which the platform waives its cut of sales for a 24hour period. Bandcamp Friday returns on Oct. 7, and many of our picks are available to buy directly from the artists there, too.
VIRGHOST AND KINGPIN DA’ COMPOSER, SUMMER IN SEPTEMBER IV (CAPITOL MINDS)
In the nine years since the debut of their Summer in Septem ber series, top-notch rapper Virghost and outstanding producer KingPin Da’ Composer have refined their ap proaches and sharpened their skills aplenty. In the newest installment, Virghost brings nimble bars that, among other things, touch on staying above the fray of online beef, while KingPin draws from a vibrant pal ette of sounds with touches of neo soul and old-school boom-bap. It’s an enticing listen throughout, but the back half of the release — “Fake Proud,” “1995,” “Abstract Colors” and “New Day” — is a cavalcade of bangers. With assists from Neauxlah Goddess and BeHoward on the off-kilter groove of “1995” and Simone Curry and the F.O.C. Choir on the gospel-tinged “New Day,” it’s some of the duo’s most sonically diverse work, too.
STEPHEN TRAGESER
Left-of-center Nash ville songwriting jug gernaut Styrofoam Winos strikes again with the latest from the core trio’s Lou Turner. The Texas-born tune smith and wordsmith follows up her acclaimed 2020 solo outing Songs for John Venn with a set that, true to its title, is a more celestial affair as it investigates the little things that make up a life. A blanket-warm collection of dreamy, ’70s-time-capsule-style psych-folk numbers, Microcosmos is easy to get lost in. That said, Turner reserves the right to sneak up on the listener unexpectedly — with the lyrics to “Dancing to Hold Music,” for example,
which painstakingly take inventory of the ups and downs of a dissolved relationship, and the standout “What Might We Find There,” a deft and devastating look into con necting with others. CHARLIE ZAILLIAN
The pop music you hear on Andrew Combs’ Sundays is derived from the mild rock that singer-songwriters have favored since the 1970s. Combs has evolved his style con siderably since 2015’s All These Dreams, which found the Texas native emulating Mickey Newbury and Guy Clark, but with somewhat more elaborate — and indie-rocktinged — production. Combs questions the idea of evil in “Mark of the Man” and looks back at his younger self on “Adeline.” Re corded in mono, Sundays sounds a little muf fled, but Combs’ musical ideas combine Guy Clark and John Lennon — you get the idea that Combs could go fully pop but isn’t going to leave his influences behind. EDD HURT
COLLIN FELTER, PHASES (SELF-RELEASED) Jazz’s compositional side sometimes gets overlooked or under rated in importance, with so much emphasis placed on individual virtuosity and en semble interaction. But it’s the overall quality of the pieces and how they connect to tell a story that are the most important things about multi-instrumen talist and composer Collin Felter’s second LP Phases. The 10 original compositions combine to provide a musical portrait of Felter, revealing his ability to craft both engaging short pieces and more ambitious longer ones like the finale “New World,” the set’s longest piece at more than six minutes. Other works reflect an energetic, fun side (“Hot Chicken,” “Post-Dinner”) as well as a more somber, thoughtful approach (“Limitations,” “Rising Action”). The set’s focus is much more on cohesive presenta tion, with Felter also contributing his own standout moments on trombone and guitar. This is jazz for fans who enjoy imaginative sequencing and a solid blend of expressively melodic yet also rhythmically challenging numbers. RON WYNN
This is a hot record. It’s also a very cool one — and on it, vocalisttrumpeter Jennifer Hartswick moves be tween the two extremes with ease. Produced by guitarist Nicholas Cas sarino, who co-wrote six of the nine songs with Hartswick and lyricist Erin Boyd, Something in the Water is a nearly perfect blend of contemporary jazz and ’70s horndriven pop R&B. Best known for her work as a member of the Trey Anastasio Band, Hartswick shows here she is a formidable marquee artist. A dynamic, soulful vocalist with a wide range, she is also a top-notch
trumpet player, as her scorching solos on the record demonstrate. Hartswick is not plowing any new ground here, but that doesn’t matter because she does it so well.
TOTAL WIFE, A BLIP (WAREHAUS)
Pay no mind to its title: A Blip is no brief, modest interruption. Roughly 51 percent melody and 49 percent noise, the newest full-length from Nashville’s Total Wife is an explosive, cacophonous statement of intent. The latest Boston expats to grace the local underground in recent years (see also: Twen and Sad Bax ter), the group draws on Duster, Stereolab, Swirlies and other ’90s cult acts — and over the course of 10 tracks in 46 minutes, Total Wife refashions these influences into a dis orienting yet engrossing sonic tapestry that demands repeated listens and stokes enthusi asm for what’s next.
CHARLIE ZAILLIANPEACHY, EVERYTHING IS FINE (SELF-RELEASED)
Formed by longtime local-scene stalwarts, Peachy came roaring out of the gate in 2018 with Squirt, a punk rager of an EP. The trio has expanded its sound as singers and song writers Leah Miller (who also plays bass) and Rachel Warrick (on guitar) have grown increasingly confident in their individual songwriting voices. Along with drummer Benji Coale, they’ve figured out how to let their influences shine within the context of the band — hear some Siouxsie and the Banshees and other post-punks in the DNA of tunes on which Miller takes the lead, like “Rosy Tinted,” while the songs Warrick sings, like “Happy for Once,” take more cues from ’90s indie rockers like Superchunk and The Breeders. The true delight is that it all sounds like the irrepressible and kinetic Peachy, a group that’s not here to take shit from anyone.
STEPHEN TRAGESER
Jimmy Hall sings, “I been wound up tight, and I wanna cut loose.”
And he wasn’t kidding.
Ready Now is the Wet Willie vocalist’s first al bum in more than a decade, and it’s a monster. This is the kind of sophisticated rock record you get when world-class musicians work together. Southern rock royalty, Hall has long been one of rock’s most soulful vocalists and harmonica players, and here, he reminds us he still is. He’s backed on the LP by a formi dable group of musicians led by producer-gui tarist Joe Bonamassa and including guitarists Josh Smith and Warren Haynes, keyboardist Reese Wynans, bassist Michael Rhodes and drummer Greg Morrow. An inspired and moving collection of mostly original material co-written by Hall, this is an album that de mands repeated listening. DARYL SANDERS
EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COMFIND LINKS TO STREAM AND BUY THESE RECORDS AT NASHVILLESCENE.COM/MUSIC
As the hottest part of the day hit Franklin’s Park at Harlinsdale Farm on Saturday, Celisse and her crew of two cranked up the heat. Kicking off their set on the Midnight Sun stage with an original bluesy rock tune called “Get There,” they absolutely melted the crowd on the first day of Pilgrimage for 2022. A couple songs in, as amps emblazoned with “Celisse Loves You” roared behind her, the singer-songwriter-guitarist scanned the crowd for children, asking if this was the kind of festival where you could cuss. After some encouragement from the crowd, she said: “This song is about being with somebody who is bullshit.” As the power trio laid into “Mistreated Me,” it was hard not to feel like you loved Celisse, too.
Up next, Pilgrimage semiregulars Dawes brought seemingly every wide-brimmed hat on the grounds to one spot for an hour of jammy love tunes and talk of chasing tequila with Champagne. Over on the Gold Record Road stage during the same time slot, Better Than Ezra — the New Orleansbred rock band whose singer Kevin Griffin co-founded the festival — pulled off a fun mix of old favorites like “Misunderstood” and “Good.” They also included a little medley in tribute to Rush, one new song, and most importantly, a crowd sing-along of Oasis’ “Wonderwall.” Right around the same time, producer, songwriter and rocker Butch Walker drew a huge crowd to the small Americana Music Triangle tent, with the overflow making it look like a packed-out revival.
As the sun set over the walking-horsefarm-turned-public-park, folks got settled in at Midnight Sun for headliner Brandi Carlile, who just played a phenomenal two-night run at Ascend Amphitheater in July. Similar to those shows, this one led off with a short, rollicking guitar medley from Carlile’s longtime co-conspirators, twin brothers Phil and Tim Hanseroth. Thus introduced, Carlile took the stage in a bright-yellow suit — just a little bit David Byrne and a lot Marlene Dietrich — and dove into “Broken Horses,” the perfect song for the venue.
After ripping through four of her more rocking tunes, Carlile asked if it might be OK if she did a little something that wasn’t popular back home in Seattle, but that we see a lot of in Nashville: a three-part harmony. We do see a lot of those around here, but we’d argue that “The Eye” isn’t just any three-part harmony tune. It kicked off what we’d like to refer to as the “I’M NOT CRYING YOU’RE CRYING” portion of the show, which ended with two songs about parenting that are enough to make anyone tear up: “The Mother” and “Mama Werewolf.”
Carlile recalled playing “The Mother” for the late John Prine. She said she’d felt emboldened to play it for him when they were both performing on a cruise ship.
Right before she headed down for the gig, her baby rolled off the bed and busted her lip. Carlile spilled to Prine about feeling guilty; she told the audience that he looked right at her and deadpanned: “It won’t be the last time.”
It was the perfect bit of levity for what felt like a crowd with lots of parents, some
of whom had tots in tow — and some who did not, and may have been feeling a little guilty for being out. Near the end of Carlile’s set, her face brightened and the crowd emanated a collective “aww” as her kids came onstage to sing “Hold Out Your Hand” with her backup singers. Then, Carlile let the band take a rest and tucked the crowd in
for the night by saying that in a hard world, she had a wish for them. She sang “Stay Gentle,” segueing neatly into “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
The heat was back on Sunday afternoon, when country phenom Brittney Spencer dazzled at Gold Record Road with her breakout single “Sober & Skinny” and a
BRANDI CARLILE
CELISSE
BETTER THAN EZRA
BUTCH WALKER
heartfelt rendition of The Chicks’ ’90s classic “Cowboy Take Me Away.” Spencer’s command of her voice and her versatility stayed at center stage to the end of her set, which wrapped with a blazing take on Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Were Made for Walkin’.”
A little later, guitar virtuoso Yasmin Williams gave a captivating performance at the festival’s Shady Grove. The D.C.-raised solo guitar wizard drew in passersby with her experimental blend of finger-tapping, slide work and kalimba riffs. Even as the sound from the fest’s two more prominent stages threatened to drown out her intimate performance at times, Williams took it all in stride, chatting directly with the crowd and thanking them for being a part of her pleasant afternoon hang.
Across the grounds, influential guitarist, singer-songwriter and storyteller Rosie Flores
brought her trademark Tex-Mex sound to the packed pews inside the Americana Music Triangle tent — her second set of the day. The supremely charismatic selfdescribed “Rockabilly Filly” brought a collection of stories and songs deeply rooted in the soil of her home state of Texas and cultivated during her time in Los Angeles.
Back at Midnight Sun, Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives donned their finest rhinestoned Western suits and rocked and rolled their way through some of the country stalwart’s trademark hits and deep cuts. During the hourlong performance, the Country Music Hall of Famer reflected on his career and the changes he’s witnessed — both in the genre and across Nashville itself — while serving up gems like “Tempted” and a cover of Marty Robbins’ “El Paso.”
Meanwhile, a sea of jam-mericana fans descended on Gold Record Road for indiefolk outfit Trampled by Turtles. They offered up a fierce preview of their forthcoming 10th LP, the Jeff Tweedy-produced Alpenglow. New tunes like “Burlesque Desert Window” nicely complemented old faves like “The Middle” and allowed plenty of moments for the Minnesota group to stretch out into jam territory.
Five years from their last appearance at Pilgrimage, The Avett Brothers brought joyful, boundless energy that permeated their entire set. At the top of the set was 2009 fan favorite “Laundry Room,” followed by “Ain’t No Man,” “Live and Die” and the steamy “I Wish I Was.” Among other highlights was a cover of “The Race Is On,” a George Jones classic that the Avetts were first introduced to via the Grateful Dead.
Several years of hard work led to what felt like near-overnight stardom for Chris Stapleton about seven years ago. He’s no longer a rising star, though he is still working with folks who are: See “Sweet Symphony,” his new collaboration with Joy Oladokun released Friday. Using that copious experience, he closed out the weekend with a nearly two-hour-long performance, which served as a master class on how to headline a music festival.
Fresh off a Saturday appearance at Farm Aid and joined by his band, wife Morgane Stapleton and frequent special guest harmonica player Mickey Raphael, Stapleton leaned into his 2015 breakthrough Traveller for a substantial chunk of the set. After kicking off the show with “Nobody to Blame” and “Parachute,” the country giant made sure to voice his appreciation to the massive crowd of fans in front of him. Along with popular singles like “Joy of My Life” — plus a medley of the Skynyrd classic “Free Bird” and his own “Devil Named Music” — Stapleton revisited his first radio flop, the impeccably written “What Are You Listening To?”
Despite ups and downs, including getting rained out in 2018, Pilgrimage has become a staple of the festival season in Middle Tennessee. While it’s not an event where you’re likely to see the absolute cutting edge of innovation, Pilgrimage’s programmers are consistent in bringing a rainbow array of superb performances to a beautiful park — and you can still get to bed in time to be at work on Monday.
EMAIL THESPIN@NASHVILLESCENE.COM ROSIE FLORES BRITTNEY SPENCER THE AVETT BROTHERS YASMIN WILLIAMS
the winners of The Nashville Scene’s annual Best of Nashville Readers’ Poll and Writer’s Picks at the free to attend community festival with vendors, food trucks, games, giveaways, live music, shopping and more.
Who’s going to be there? We can’t tell you just yet…it’s a secret!
Here’s what we CAN tell you - it’ll feature the winners of our Best of Nashville Readers’ Poll and Writer’s Choice Awards including Best CBD Company, Best Performing Arts Group, Best Women’s Clothing, Best Mexican Food and SO much more!
Flight
delivers a kind of dark comedy about the misadventures of a buffoonish city slicker in the wild. This isn’t a movie about a man finding a deeper understanding of his character. It’s a movie about a man who never had any, and its over-the-top title is actually the punch line of this absurdist deer hunt. JOE NOLAN
would be a better surname for Tom), but the drab look, confinement of most action to one set and complete lack of chemistry between the actors unfortunately relegate this one to the VOD sludge pile. STEVE ERICKSON
1:30 p.m. Oct. 1 at the Virgin Hotel’s Maybelle Room
Established as the Sinking Creek Film Celebration in 1969, what is now known as the Nashville Film Festival will celebrate its 53rd installment at a handful of venues throughout Nashville. More than 150 films will screen as part of this year’s festival, among them 38 feature-length offerings.
details on panels and more — is available at nashvillefilmfestival.org. D. PATRICK RODGERS
THE RETURN OF TANYA TUCKER: FEATURING BRANDI CARLILE
6:30 p.m. Sept. 29 at the Belcourt
SEPT.
The fest’s long-held tradition of presenting music-related films continues this year with a number of music-centric features and documentaries. Those include opening-night presentation at the Belcourt, The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile, in which director Kathlyn Horan focuses on the titular country music icon’s collaboration with acclaimed producer and songwriter Carlile — with the fest’s openingnight party to follow at nearby venue ReTrace. Closing out the fest will be Sacha Jenkins’ anticipated Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues, also showing at the Belcourt.
In addition to the Belcourt, screenings will also take place at TPAC’s Andrew Johnson Theater, The Franklin Theatre, the Virgin Hotel’s Maybelle Room and Soho House. (While folks can buy individual tickets for many NaFF screenings, Soho House events are reserved for badgeholders only.) The festival will also feature virtual events and its annual Creators Conference programming, where attendees can check out industry panels like Music Sync for Film (3 p.m. Sept. 29 at the National Museum of African American Music), Create in Tennessee (10:30 a.m. at the Maybelle Room), From Script to Screen (livestreaming 4 p.m. Oct. 2) and many others.
Below, find our thoughts on 17 flicks showing as part of this year’s festivities. This is just a drop in the bucket. The full list of films — along with passes for in-person screenings and virtual screenings, as well as
Tanya Tucker has proven to be one of the most prolific country stars of her era, and now she’s the latest musician to get the documentary treatment. The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile has earned praise from critics, with Collider’s Ross Bonaime saying the documentary “makes for an extremely charming and uplifting documentary about new chances, new possibilities in life, the power of music and the joy of giving your all for the things that you love.” It should be the perfect way to kick off this year’s festival, and a must for anyone who grew up loving Tucker’s music.
CORY WOODROOF1 p.m. Sept. 30 at TPAC’s Johnson Theater
“Big Old Goofy World” is executiveproduced by John Prine’s pioneering independent record label Oh Boy Records. It’s one part music documentary, one part home movie and one part promotional video, introducing new acts and defining the latest era of Oh Boy following Prine’s passing in April 2020. The movie features lots of candid footage of Prine, but it’s the handful of folks who helped the singer-songwriter grow the label over the years who tell the tale here. It’s a brisk feature at just under an hour in runtime, but it’s a don’t-miss for Prine fans, and the story of the singersongwriter’s DIY trailblazing is as inspired and askew as his best songs. JOE NOLAN
2 p.m. Sept. 30 at The Franklin Theatre
I expected The Integrity of Joseph Chambers to be a rich study of traditional masculinity given its ponderous title. Instead, writer-director Robert Machoian
3:30 p.m. Sept. 30 at TPAC’s Johnson Theater
Colin Barnicle’s Carol & Johnny is a documentary about Carol and Johnny Williams, a couple who robbed 56 banks across the American West in the late 1980s and early 1990s. After serving decadeslong jail sentences for their crimes, Johnny and Carol can finally get back together again — but will they? The pace sometimes creeps here, but Carol & Johnny gives viewers a unique window into ordinary lives blown apart by extraordinarily tragic choices. JOE NOLAN
BUTTERFLY IN THE SKY
6:30 p.m. Sept. 30 at TPAC’s Johnson Theater
After 2020’s Jasper Mall, documentarians Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb have proven themselves adept at studying how the past remains a pillar for the present. With startling behind-the-scenes footage and a healthy dose of empathy, Thomason and Whitcomb’s Butterfly in the Sky delivers a wonderful eulogy for the beloved PBS show Reading Rainbow, and details the adventurous spirit that drove the lead creatives on the series. LeVar Burton should be granted sainthood, and Butterfly in the Sky is a must for anyone who grew up reading with him.
CORY WOODROOFFOLLOW HER 8 p.m. Sept. 30 at The Franklin Theatre
Follow Her can’t decide whether it’s a throwback erotic thriller, a #MeToo-inspired tale of misogyny in the film industry or a dark, twisty vision of influencers’ manipulations being cast back at them. Unfortunately, it doesn’t succeed as any of them. Jess Peters (screenwriter Dani Barker) can’t make ends meet through her livestreams of kinky men being secretly filmed, so she takes the train out of New York to meet Tom Brady (Luke Cook), a screenwriter looking for a female collaborator on his Hitchcockian thriller. Things are not what they seem (“Redflag”
Meet Me in the Bathroom is full of home videos and early live clips of the 2000s New York rock scene, which can be exciting, but it falls short of being the definitive film about this time. Adapting a 600-page book into a film running less than two hours means condensing and simplifying things — Meet Me in the Bathroom never gets a handle on why a band like The Strokes seemed so exciting for that moment, or why that time vanished almost immediately. Its view of a scene vanishing under the pressures of hard drugs and the disenchantments and pressures of fame could apply to most music subcultures. The most distinctive thing about this one is that it took place in New York, but the film’s references to the impact of 9/11 and gentrification never dig below the most obvious level.
STEVE ERICKSON
SHOW BUSINESS IS MY LIFE (BUT I CAN’T PROVE IT)
2 p.m. Oct. 1 at TPAC’s Johnson Theater
Comedian Gary Mule Deer has been making people laugh for 60 years — armed with a guitar, a rubber chicken and an arsenal of zingers. With Show Business Is My Life (But I Can’t Prove It), audiences get the full Mule Deer experience in a documentary that spans the comic’s entire career thus far. Comedians from Steve Martin to David Letterman pop up to pay tribute to Mule Deer’s genius, reinforcing the impact of his time in the industry. While Mule Deer has had his troubles, the documentary shows how he’s always been able to bounce back, usually with a great story to tell. CORY WOODROOF
5 p.m. Oct. 1 at TPAC’s Johnson Theater
Thomas Haden Church has long been one of the most reliable character actors in Hollywood, having appeared in everything from Sideways to George of the Jungle, Spider-Man 3 to We Bought a Zoo. In Acidman — a father-daughter drama that delves into estranged relationships, mental
‘BIG OLD GOOFY WORLD — THE STORY OF OH BOY RECORDS’
THE INTEGRITY OF JOSEPH CHAMBERS
SHOW BUSINESS IS MY LIFE (BUT I CAN’T PROVE IT)
health and UFOs — he gets top billing alongside Glee star Dianna Agron. The film has garnered solid notices for Church and comes from rising writer-director Alex Lehmann, whose delicate, sorrowful character studies Paddleton and Blue Jay (both on Netflix) are proof enough that Acidman may require a few Kleenexes for its screening. CORY WOODROOF
9:30 p.m. Oct. 1 at the Virgin Hotel’s Maybelle Room
The Spanish-language Piggy is destined to take its place alongside other classics of complicated fat cinema like Breillat’s Fat Girl, Daniels’ Precious and Millard’s Criminally Insane. Sara (Laura Galán, adept at piercing sadness and handy with a shotgun) is bullied, undervalued and functionally invisible except as a target. But when her small Spanish town is targeted by a serial killer, she becomes the only means of saving the mean girls who’ve dehumanized her for years. Not content to play things safe by established revenge fantasy tropes, writer-director Carlota Pereda has made a vicious and resonant drive-in/exploitation epic that fits right in here in a world where the worst people can’t even be shamed into enough decency to save their own lives. Cathartic and in no way soothing. JASON SHAWHAN
6 p.m. Oct. 2 at The Franklin Theatre
At times hamstrung by its need to be a lot of things to a lot of people, Camille Hardman and Gary Lane’s doc works best as an appreciation of 1980’s stone classic 9 to 5, a cursory look at the process of developing a film and a chance to look at what has changed in the American workplace and political climate since 1980 — as well as what has sadly remained the same or gotten worse. Still Working 9 to 5 is a crowd-pleaser of the highest order, though, bringing an assortment of people together to demonstrate that there’s no separating out one aspect of the struggle for sexual equality because it’s all connected. I learned some interesting things about the making of the film, I learned a lot about the organization of women workers, and I exult in Lily Tomlin explaining the semiotics of fetching coffee, teaching a grad school seminar in eight seconds. JASON SHAWHAN
3 p.m. Oct. 4 at the Belcourt Producer, director and screenwriter Marcus Pontello’s Friday I’m in Love could easily prove to be a crowd favorite given the NaFF audience’s penchant for music films. This documentary excavates the evolution of the Numbers Nightclub in Houston, which started its life as a Vegas-style dinner club in the 1970s before morphing into a gay disco, a New Wave nightclub, and ultimately a legendary alternative music venue. Pontello’s personal story of growing up as a gay kid in Houston distracts a bit here, but his narration and his archive editing with co-editor Mary DeChambres are great. Pontello weaves his interviews into a story that’s smart enough to be funny, entertaining and inspiring. The writerdirector makes you want to know more about these people and this place before he delivers deep history, unique personalities and a nonstop soundtrack. JOE NOLAN
3:30 p.m. Oct. 4 at Soho House
Brazilian writer-director Gabriel Martins’ Mars One is his solo feature debut, and it’s a good one. The film follows the day-to-day lives of the Martins — a lower-middleclass Black family living in Brazil in the days following the election of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro in October 2018.
This is a story about kids growing up and challenging traditions with the extremes of the Bolsonaro regime providing an unnerving backdrop. The ensemble acting is a highlight here, and the writing choices defied my expectations in the best way. Kudos to Martins for giving us a plot about people instead of a polemic about politics. Mars One has been chosen by the Brazilian Academy of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts to represent Brazil in the Best International Feature Film category at the Oscars in 2023.
JOE NOLAN
NANNY
8:30 p.m. Oct. 4 at the Belcourt
You know something is up the first time Aisha (Mame-Anna Diop) steps into the sprawling apartment of the family she’s going to be nannying for. It’s not the absence of the vibrant color with which cinematographer Rina Yang lights the world around the young Senegalese mother so much as how the home itself can’t detail her skin, giving her to the shadows long before weird things start happening and terror and trauma start converging. Classy, visually sumptuous and with a superb score, Nikyatu Jusu’s film is an exquisite slow burn that constructs itself at the point where the present participles of adulthood have to reconcile the many stories we’re raised with. Also, Leslie Uggams! JASON SHAWHAN
11 a.m. Oct. 5 at Soho House
Writer-director Natalia López’s Robe of Gems, a movie about traditional families falling apart and new ones beginning, is screening in the fest’s New Director Features category. López has primarily worked as an editor, and it’s not surprising that Robe is visually stylized and focused on mood over story. But this tale about two women forming a bond over a missing child demonstrates that López may be a director of unique vision in search of a screenplay to match it. JOE NOLAN
AFTERSUN
4 p.m. Oct. 5 at The Belcourt
Told through precious memories and mysterious recordings, the spectacular Aftersun dives into the way we look back at our past and dwells on the ones who shape it. A young girl and her father take a vacation in Turkey in the late ’90s, moving at a relaxed yet fragmented pace. We begin to see, the further we go, that the daughter is trying to better understand her father, both in the moment and in the rearview.
Anchored by stellar performances from Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio, filmmaker Charlotte Wells’ debut is empathetic and strikingly realized. It’s also got a late-film needle-drop for the ages. This one could very well be the best of the fest. CORY WOODROOF
LOUIS ARMSTRONG’S BLACK AND BLUES
6 p.m. Oct. 5 at the Belcourt
NaFF’s closing film Louis Armstrong’s Black and Blues chronicles the life and career of the legendary jazz musician. Early reviews suggest that, rather than just playing it straight, the documentary looks at Armstrong’s complicated place in history. The Apple+ doc will see a wider release later in October, but festival attendees can close out this year’s run with a film that “asks us to think a little harder about what Armstrong meant in the context of both music and U.S. history,” according to The Hollywood Reporter’s John DeFore. CORY WOODROOF
EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM ROBE OF GEMS
cation 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 7, 2022.
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 7, 2022
Matt Maniatis Attorney for Plaintiff NSC 9/15, 9/22, 9/29, 10/06/22
Non-Resident Notice Third Circuit Docket No. 21D1243
QUAMESIA J. HARVEY vs. ROMAINE DONVON GARDNER
In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a nonresident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon ROMAINE DONVON GARDNER. It is ordered that said De fendant enter HIS appearance herein with thirty (30) days after OCTOBER 6, same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court lo cated at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on NOVEMBER 7, 2022.
TRINA
vs. DAVID JAMES WATSON
In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a nonresident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon DAVID JAMES WATSON. It is ordered that said Defendant en ter HIS appearance herein with thirty (30) days after OCTOBER 6, same be ing the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Met ropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on NOVEMBER 7, 2022.
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 L. Chappell, Deputy Clerk Date: September 2, 2022
weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.
Richard R. Rooker, Clerk L. Chappell, Deputy Clerk Date: September 8, 2022
Shardea Hamblin Attorney for Plaintiff NSC 9/15, 9/22, 9/29, 10/06/22
Non-Resident Notice
Third Circuit Docket No. 22A60
DONALD RICHARD DOWDELL, et al. vs. SARA RAE QUEEN DOWDELL
process of law cannot be served upon CELFA ROSAS CAZAREZ. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HER appearance herein with thirty (30) days after OCTOBER 13, same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Met ropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on NOVEMBER 14, 2022.
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.
NSC 9/22, 9/29, 10/06, 10/13/22
Sr. Research Scientist. Initiate, lead, conduct and support animal genetics product development based on biology, bio tech, physiology, microbiology, agriculture, food, and genomic research.
Joseph P. Day, Clerk L Chappell, Deputy Clerk Date: September 16, 2022
Matt Maniatis Attorney for Plaintiff NSC 9/22, 9/29, 10/06, 10/13/22
Non-Resident Notice Third Circuit Docket No. 22D971
ADOLFO LEON ISAZA
Robyn L. Ryan Attorney for Plaintiff NSC 9/15, 9/22, 9/29, 10/06/22
In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the de fendant is a nonresident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon SARA RAE QUEEN DOWDELL. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HER appearance herein with thirty (30) days after OCTOBER 13, same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Met ropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on NOVEMBER 14, 2022.
Employer: PIC USA, Inc. Job location: Hendersonville, TN, with 10% travel required. Mail CV to Karla Herring, PIC USA, Inc., 100 Bluegrass Commons Blvd., Ste. 2200, Hendersonville, TN 37075.
Amazon.com Services LLC seeks candidates for the following (multiple positions available) in Nashville, TN. Apply at: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/ , referencing job ID: 2243504
Industrial Engineer V Continuous Improvement (Multiple Positions, GEODIS Logistics, LLC, Brentwood, TN): Reqs Bach(US/frgn equiv) in IE or rel & 5 yrs exp in IE CI, inc facilities support or ops. Alt will accept Master’s (US/frgn equiv) in IE or rel & 3 yrs exp in IE CI, inc facilities support or ops. Also reqs 3 yrs distribution center exp; exp w/AutoCAD; PC proficiency w/MS Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel & Access. Domestic travel up to 30%. Qualified applicants mail resume: Sharon Barrow, 7101 Executive Center Drive, Suite 333, Brentwood, TN 37027, Ref# INDUS027673
EARN YOUR HS DIPLOMA TODAY
Non-Resident Notice Third Circuit Docket No. 18D391
SHARDEA ANGELIC HAMBLIN vs. RUSSELL LENOX HAMBLIN
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 L. Chappell, Deputy Clerk
Date: September 2, 2022
Richard Hedgepath Attorney for Plaintiff NSC 9/15, 9/22, 9/29, 10/06/22
Non-Resident Notice Third Circuit
In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the de fendant is a nonresident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon RUSSELL LENOX HAMBLIN. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HIS appearance herein with thirty (30) days after OCTOBER 6, same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Met ropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on NOVEMBER 7, 2022.
It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4)
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.
Joseph P. Day, Clerk M. De Jesus, Deputy Clerk Date: September 16, 2022
Laura Tek Attorney for Plaintiff NSC 9/22, 9/29, 10/06, 10/13/22
Third Circuit Docket No. 22D653
JOSUE JOEL CASTANEDA CUYUCH vs. CELFA ROSAS CAZAREZ
In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the de fendant is a nonresident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary
In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a nonresident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon MARINA LINDA ISAZA. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HER appearance herein with thirty (30) days after OCTOBER 13, same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Met ropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on NOVEMBER 14, 2022.
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.
Joseph P. Day, Clerk
L Chappell, Deputy Clerk Date: September 16, 2022
Nathaniel Colburn Attorney for Plaintiff
Business Analyst II (Job ID: 2243504). Design and implement reporting solutions enabling stakeholders to manage the business and make effective decisions.
For more info call 1.800.470.4723 Or visit our website: www.diplomaathome.com Docket No. date of the last publi
