Nashville
Posted by Donna on September 28, 2009
28 September 2009 – Day 10 of our Adventure
Seems like forever since I wrote an entry. When I look back, I see that it was forever ago that I wrote an entry. How did that happen? Lots to write about to catch you up on Motherdear & Ron’s Amazing Road Trip Adventure!
Let’s start back on Saturday (Day 8 of our Adventure)…
We drove to Hurricane Mills, TN, home of country music legend Loretta Lynn. We went to her ranch and Western Town. We toured a re-creation of her childhood home (in Butcher Holler, KY), a re-creation of the coal mine where her father worked, and the home that she lived in with her husband and children until the late 1980s. At that time she built another home behind the big house and opened the big house to the public.
Remember the Crisco commercials she was in? We saw her actual kitchen where she filmed those commercials. Cool!
Saturday night we went to her concert. It was amazing! Despite her declarations throughout the concert that her voice wasn’t feeling strong, she sounded great. She stood to sing the first few songs then sat in a chair for most of the rest of the concert. She chatted with the audience and her family and bandmembers throughout the concert. It was pretty funny.
At one point she told her son Ernest to “Get back on his X.”
We got to enjoy the music of many members of the Lynn family. Her twin daughters, her granddaughters, her sons. It was cool. Throughout, she sat like a proud matriarch in her chair and enjoyed their performances with the rest of us. It was funny because she picked on one granddaughter for not pinning her hair back off her face.
The concert lasted two hours and finished with Miss Loretta singing her signature hit “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” The two hours went by much too quickly.
We got back to our room at around 10:30 p.m. Read for awhile, then went to sleep.
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Sunday… yesterday… (Day 9)
Our plan was to drive north to the Land Between the Lakes National Park. The goal was to see something in Kentucky! Why Kentucky? Ask my mother. ha ha
On the way to Kentucky, as we drove through the park, we stopped at a living museum called The Home Place. It was an 1850s farm. I pushed Motherdear through the fields and farm in the handy-dandy wheelchair we brought for her. Except for nearly sending her flying a few times, it worked out well. 
Just across the Tennessee/Kentucky border there was an Elk & Bison Prairie that we wanted to see. It is open to the public to drive through. We thought it would be memorable to see buffalo in Kentucky. We got to the prairie park gated community at around 2:30 p.m. We circled the blasted prairie for over two hours and didn’t see any buffalo. We did see an elk though. We also heard elk bellowing.
Finally the needs of my bladder, and the desire to get on the road if we wanted to make it to Nashville that night, required us to give up on the buffalo hunt. With heavy hearts we left the one-way circular loop and returned to the two-way stretch of road that led to the entry/exit gate.
As we pulled up to the gate, we looked to our left… yup… that’s where the herd of buffalo were spending their afternoon. Dang critters! They were pretty far off in the field, but I did snap some pictures of them. Check my Facebook photo album if you want to see them.
Several times on the drive to Nashville I would spontaneously break into giggles. Motherdear would join me. We both thought it hysterical that we’d been driving around for hours and the buffalo were at the front gate. We are pretty sure that they were not there when we drove into the park though. At least that’s what we are telling ourselves.
Made it to Nashville at around 7:30 p.m. Of course the hotel address I plugged in to my GPS was on the EASTERN side of the city when we were coming from the western side of the city. Ugh. But it worked out. We got a good room at the Marriott Residence Inn for $60 a night.
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Monday… today… (Day 10)
This morning I got up early to do some laundry. Fun stuff, huh? These washers were pretty cool though. They were the front loading machines. I don’t think I’ve ever used one before. I realized after I poured the detergent down the spout though that these machines were very tiny. I wasn’t sure if I overdid the bubbles or not. Half figured I’d have a Brady Bunch type soap incident. But all was fine.
After finishing the laundry we plugged the address of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum into my trusty GPS and headed off on our next adventure.
Allow me to digress for a moment or two… last night I logged onto the Internet and learned a bit about the Hall of Fame museum. I read off descriptions of the various admission options. We settled on what we wanted. The no frills, basic admission with the audio tour.
We arrive this morning and this very helpful museum staff member starts telling us about the other option that we’d decided not to do… a tour of the RCA Recording Studio B.
Of course we now opted to do it. And boy are we glad! It was a highlight of the day.
What is the RCA Recording Studio B, you ask? It’s a recording studio here in Nashville. It was one of the best. Elvis Presley recorded 200+ of his songs in this studio. When RCA built a newer “better” studio (Studio A), Elvis and others didn’t like it. They continued to record from Studio B.
On this tour we learned a lot of musical history trivia about some country performers:
Did you know that Roy Orbison wrote his song “Only the Lonely” hoping that Elvis Presley would sing it? When Orbison went to see Presley to talk about it… Elvis was taking a nap. Orbison went back to Studio B and recorded the song himself. It became Orbison’s first hit. Cool, huh?
Did you know that Elvis Presley did most of his recordings late at night? He liked to start at around 10 p.m. on Sunday night and work til the wee hours of the morning. He also liked to be able to change the lighting in the studio to reflect the mood of the song. In the song, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” which he apparently recorded perfectly in one take (but the final word in the song still had to be edited because the back up musicians flubbed it up) it was so dark in the studio that when the song ended you can hear him clunk his head on the microphone.
Did you know that Dolly Parton when arriving at Studio B to make her first recording was so excited she forgot to hit the brake in her car and drove into the studio’s wall? She left her mark on the building and country music! Her hit song “I Will Always Love You” made it to the top of the charts three times. Once when she first released it in 1974. Then she re-recorded it for the soundtrack of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas in 1982. Whitney Houston sang it in the movie The Bodyguard in 1992 and it again climbed the charts. Then recorded it as a duet with Vince Gill in 1995 and it reached #15 on the charts. This song was written to honor Porter Wagoner who had been a business and musical mentor to her for many years.
We learned other stuff too, but those were the highlights that I can remember (and could look up on Wikipedia).
Oh… one more thing… Elvis did not always get what he wanted! The piano in Studio B is the same piano that Elvis played when he was in the studio. He tried to buy it from RCA Records, but they refused.
So… the tour we almost didn’t take was a highlight of the day. Funny how that happens.
Back to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum…
It was great reading about people whose music I listened to as a kid growing up. I’d forgotten many of these people… Charley Pride, Tammy Wynette, Charlie Rich, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, etc.) and may have to revisit my country music heritage.
Really enjoyed the day. Even possibly getting hooked by a con-artist claiming to be a veteran. But how can you say no to someone who may have been one?
Here’s the deal… I was paying for parking at the Hall of Fame. A man pulls up and says, “Ma’am, I hate to bother you. I’m having car problems and I need to go another 30 miles. My hands are blistered from trying to fix this piece of sh*t car. And I’m hoping you would help me out. I’m not a drunk. I’m a veteran. Got the license plates and registration to prove it. I’m hoping you could give me a couple of bucks for a gallon of gas. You can write down my address and send me a bill for it or if you feel comfortable giving me your address I’ll get it in the mail to you.”
He was so nice. Polite. And his vehicle did sound awful. So I gave him a $10 bill. I know I was probably suckered, but I don’t care. He said, “That’s too much ma’am, I don’t need that much.” I almost laughed. Was he for real? Probably not. But I told him to just “Pay it forward.”
His truck sputtered off and I wonder if he managed to get enough from people to fill his tank and buy a weeks worth of groceries. ha ha ha
So those are the highlights of today’s adventure. Now we’re back in our room. Motherdear is reading and I’m uploading pictures and getting caught up in this journal of our adventures.
I hope all is well with you!
Hugs from Nashville, Tennessee!
–Donna
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