The Jefferson Street Kids
Dave Gore and Robbie Bowden at the Brown County Playhouse in May. photo courtesy of Michele Wedel Photography
~by Jeff Tryon
O
nstage at the Brown County Playhouse, for a recent benefit concert, local music legends Robbie Bowden and Dave Gore shared with the audience that it was not their first time to work in the venerable Nashville performance space. “When we were kids, they used to hire us to come in after the performances and clean up the trash,” said Bowden. Bowden and Gore grew up to share a passion for music and played together in different bands, including a near-miss at fame and fortune with the locally-famous String Bean String Band. It all started on the streets of Nashville, in a simpler time, when
gangs of baby boomer kids stormed around town on their bikes, swam in Salt Creek, and sometimes got into mischief. “The Playhouse at that time was open air, they just had these canvas flaps that they would put down and it had a tin roof,” Bowden recalled. “The alley running down the side there wasn’t paved—it had gravel on it.” Gore remembered, “We would sneak down, especially if there was a play going on that maybe had some suspense to it, was kind of scary. We’d hang out in the alley and we would pick up a handful of that crushed stone and—at the appropriate moment—throw it
38 Our Brown County • July/August 2019
up on the metal roof, which made a horrible racket. “You’d hear women scream—it scared the hell out of them. Then usually a backstage assistant would come running out—‘Get out of here, you crazy kids!’—and chase us uptown,” he said. “But we knew all the good hiding places. We’d run between the buildings, sometimes there were little alleyways and things that you could hide in, so they never did catch us. That was fun.” It wasn’t just the two of them, of course, there was a whole cadre of kids looking for fun in a Nashville of the 1950s that was smaller, slower, and sleepier than today.
