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October 23, 2020
Steve Haruch's Playlist for His Book "Greetings from New Nashville"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Steve Haruch's anthology Greetings from New Nashville captures Nashville both old and new, for better and worse, in eloquent and fascinating pieces.
Mary Laura Philpott wrote of the book:
"Consider this fascinating encapsulation of time and place a must-read—not only for Nashvillians seeking self-awareness as a community, but for leaders of every growing city in America."
In his words, here is Steve Haruch's Book Notes music playlist for his book Greetings from New Nashville:
Greetings from New Nashville doesn't exactly "chart" the city's dramatic transformation over the past two decades, but it attempts to work through some of the layers — kind of like the way geologists try to determine what was in the atmosphere millions of years ago by looking at what's trapped in the corresponding sediment. It features contributions from Ann Patchett, Margaret Renkl, Tiana Clark, Bobby Allyn and Zach Stafford to name just a few.
In a way, editing an essay collection is like making a playlist writ large. A good essay, like a good song, has a point of view and a beat — with enough twists to be interesting but not so many it loses sight of what it has to say. And in lining essays up, you want them to speak to each other. You want the juxtapositions — that silence between the end of one and the beginning of the next — to vibrate with tension. You want later essays to call back to earlier ones. You want them to riff.
I thought of including a song by every musician named or alluded to, but this being a book about Nashville, that lineup quickly became rather unwieldy. I wanted something that would resonate with the collection but also be listenable by itself. Hopefully I've succeeded.
"Won't Keep Me Up at Night" by Sun Seeker
I would love this song even without it, but the video, in which a bunch of 20somethings throw a rager inside a friend's childhood home just before it's torn down to make way for condos, so perfectly captures the mood of a particular time in Nashville. It felt like everything was being scraped flat — no matter what it was or what it meant to anyone else — just so that rich people could have somewhere to live. It didn't help that the new buildings were nearly all ugly in the same bland, predictable ways.
"Wayside/Back in Time" by Gillian Welch
When I first asked Ann Patchett if I could reprint her essay featuring Welch and a variety of other Americana artists from East Nashville, she was surprised. It was out of date, she reasoned. But that is precisely what's so striking about it now — how much has changed, while that tension between past and present, those cycles of old and new, are still so much part of the rhythm of life here. And as I say in the introduction to the book, the Sun Seeker video feels like a literal visualization of the line from this song, "Drink a round to Nashville, before they tear it down."
"Jolene" by Dolly Parton
Speaking of, the building where Dolly Parton's indelible hit was mixed was in very real danger of biting the dust along with what seemed like half the single-family homes in town. The fate of the fabled RCA Studio A is the subject of Ben Folds' open letter, reprinted in all its name-dropping glory, which entreats the new buyers of the building to consider the incredible history contained within its walls before doing what we all expected developers to do with old buildings they acquired. This story had a happy ending, but just barely.
"Something's Got a Hold on Me" by Etta James
The classic album Etta James Rocks the House was recorded at the New Era Club on Charlotte Avenue over two nights in the fall of 1963. You can feel not only the power of James' voice but also the rollicking energy in the room, which was one of the premiere touring stops of the time. September 1963 was five years after the federal government approved the route plan for Interstate 40 — a route that split a flourishing Black neighborhood in North Nashville in half — and four years before it was revealed to the public. Tiana Clark's poem "Nashville" addresses the "tourniquet of concrete" created by the interstate, which had no exits into the neighborhood and led to the closure of 120 Black businesses.
"Pinata" by Mike Floss
Jefferson Street, which runs through the heart of the neighborhoods choked off by the interstate, was once home to clubs where, among many others, a young Jimi Hendrix plied his craft. That street gets a shout here, in this woozy after-the-afterparty jam by Nashville rapper Mike Floss. So does the city's main tourist strip, which is where this late night is decidedly not headed. As Floos describes himself, he's "way too black for Broadway," a point hammered home in Clark's poem as well.
"Let's Shake Hands" by The White Stripes
In the introduction I make the argument that 1998 marks a kind of new beginning for Nashville — rebuilding from a tornado, the influx of major league sports and so on. That's also the year this single is released by a band living about as north of Music City as you can get without hitting universal health care. It's the beginning of a steep ascent for Jack White, whose subsequent move to Nashville and founding of Third Man Records did plenty to alter perceptions of the city inside and out.
"Hope the High Road" by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
Here's a newspaper caption you don't see every day: "Mayor Megan Barry, left, spins records with the help of DJ Pimpdaddysupreme at Grimey's during Record Store Day." That was the text accompanying a sopecial mayoral playlist published by the Tennessean, which included this Jason Isbell cut. (Her honor also tweeted a different list, dedicated to the late Nashville Scene editor Jim Ridley, who had passed away two weeks previous.) Barry was an unusually hip mayor, but her term ended in disgrace. "I used to think this was my town," Isbell proclaims, "What a stupid thing to think."
"We Live in Two Different Worlds" by Hank Williams
There's no question that Nashville the TV show had an effect on Nashville the city. Karl Dean, who was mayor for much of the show's run, called it an "hourlong commercial for Music City," and meant it as a compliment. Every episode title is also the title of a Hank Williams song (this comes from S1E4) and while neither the show nor the song is about the growing disparity between haves and have-nots in a rapidly transforming metropolis, perhaps a little bit of that vintage sadness carries over. It wouldn't be long before cardboard cutouts of the show's stars stood alongside those of country music icons downtown.
"Only a Clown" by Caitlin Rose
In an Instagram post, singer and songwriter Caitlin Rose mourned yet another teardown. "A bunch of millionaires trading other people’s neighborhoods around until they find the right idiot to build something no one actually wants," the caption begins. That's not where it ends — the caption or the teardowns. Or the mourning, for that matter. Deep pockets have trumped deep roots seemingly every step of the way. But if anything, Rose — with her throwback voice and sly modernity — is living proof that the past can reverberate powerfully inside the present.
"Travelin' Soldier" by The Chicks
Many of the people decrying "cancel culture" these days don't have much to say about what happened to The Chicks (nee Dixie Chicks), who were basically blacklisted from the country world after Natalie Maines dared to criticize George W. Bush's decision to (unilaterally, illegally) invade Iraq. The Chicks' Top of the World Tour was the highest-grossing concert in country history at the time, but that didn't matter to the conservative world of country radio; their fall from grace was fast and seemingly bottomless. To me, this song exemplifies how you make art when you care at least as much about the people who are killed in wars as the ones who authorize them.
"Hurt" by Johnny Cash
I found it so odd to see the video for this song playing on a loop in the Cash museum in downtown Nashville, most especially because it depicts the gutted ruins of a previous Cash museum. And the song itself, well, seems not too enthusiastic about amassing fortunes or accolades. But Cash near the end — both of and apart from the world that made him and broke him and made him again — is utterly captivating. Who wouldn't project him over the entrance to their gift shop if they could? Cash is the kind of icon that looms large and somehow reflects back whatever people want to see in him.
"Greetings From Nashville" by Jason & the Scorchers
The title track, as it were, comes courtesy of this old Scorchers B-side. Arguments about what Nashville should or shouldn't be predate the book by decades, and "Greetings" remains one of my favorite forays into this messy territory. The money's pourin' in, I ain't about to move away. You can just hear the sarcasm dripping from Ringenberg's vocals — that is, I suppose, unless you were hawking those "Nashville: the New L.A." T-shirts in the early 2000s.
"South Gotta Change" by Adia Victoria
Bonus track. The book was already finished when the Nashville Scene published a scathing portrait of gentrification in North Nashville by Adia Victoria, who I knew mostly as a musician. Produced by T Bone Burnett, whose fingerprints are all over this new iteration of the city, "South Gotta Change" is an anthem for the kind of progress that has nothing to do with "elevating" cuisine or high-end bath fixtures. No more running from ghosts.
Steve Haruch is an award-winning journalist, writer and editor. His work has appeared at The New York Times, The Atlantic, Catapult, NPR’s Code Switch, The Guardian and elsewhere. He edited the books Greetings From New Nashville: How a Sleepy Southern Town Became "It" City and People Only Die of Love in Movies: Film Writing by Jim Ridley. The latter earned favorable notices from Vulture, Village Voice, RogerEbert.com, The Oxford American and the LA Times, which called it "impeccably curated." He lives in Nashville.
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