A view of downtown’s row of famous honky-tonks and saloons. The 188m-high AT&T skyscraper, built in 1994, is nicknamed the Batman building It was an elegant evening. In a large, columned house on Nashville’s Belle Meade Boulevard last November, the big green lawn outside darkening in an unseasonably warm Tennessee dusk, patrons of the city’s vibrant public library sipped drinks and politely jockeyed for a moment with the guest of honour. They clasped his hand again and again, often reaching out to touch his shoulder; more than a few hesitantly asked for a picture, their faces lighting up when John Lewis said yes, of course. So it went for a long cocktail hour: the elite of a once-segregated city paying unabashed tribute to perhaps the greatest living civil-rights champion, a man who had learnt the craft and the power of nonviolence in the city’s American Baptist Theological Seminary more than a half century before. Here was where he learnt the patience to endure unimaginable hate – psychological and physical – for a larger cause. It was his bravery – in Montgomery, in Selma, in his words as the youngest speaker at the March on Washington – that helped lead to the end of Jim Crow. “Because of you, John,” Barack Obama wrote on a commemorative photograph to Lewis on the occasion of his inauguration as the nation’s first African- American president. Lewis’s first sit-in arrest was part of an effort to desegregate the downtown Woolworth’s lunch counter here. “Nashville is where it all started,” Lewis remarked quietly that evening at the library party. “The city has changed so much – so much. It’s hard to believe sometimes.” Lewis, now a veteran Atlanta congressman, was right: Nashville’s current moment is hard to believe. In 2016 Nashville moved ahead of Dallas and Austin on Forbes’s “Best Big Cities for Jobs” list, holding the number 4 slot nationally, trailing only San Francisco; San Jose, California; and Orlando. Only a few cities, like Denver and Austin, are expected to grow faster in population over the next decade. Roughly put, an average of 72 people have been moving to the Nashville region every day. The school system is home to more than 120 different languages. Long the capital of country music – a red-state mecca before we called them red states – Nashville has realised the vision of its 19th-century fathers and become the Athens of the New South. The economy is booming; Vanderbilt University is nearly impossible to get into; Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman live here. The prosperity grows out of a live-and-let-live spirit, sometimes called the Nashville code, in which celebrities stand in line unaccosted at Starbucks in Green Hills and hipsters pour into formerly marginal neighbourhoods, creating little Brooklyns with a drawl. At once cosmopolitan and comfortable, Nashville can, depending on what you’re looking for, be slick or sleepy, invigorating or calming. The food scene is James Beard on a bender: it’s difficult to track the number of 70 DEPARTURES-INTERNATIONAL.COM
excellent new restaurants that seem to open with unnerving frequency, each a little cooler than the last. With its eateries and boutiques, the newly redeveloped 12South corridor feels a little like a Southern SoHo, especially if you’re taking a stroll. Hotels range from a glorious downtown Omni to the charming quarters at Mark Banks’s 404, which helps anchor the city’s thriving Gulch neighbourhood that divides the honky-tonks of lower Broadway from the collegiate West End. As you would expect, music can be found nearly everywhere. There is the historic Ryman Auditorium, the Mother Church of Country Music and, for those willing to brave the long lines, the fabled Bluebird Cafe. My wife and I, both Southerners by birth and inclination, moved our family to Nashville from New York five years ago. We loved Manhattan, where we had lived for 15 years and where our three children were born, but as the kids grew toward their teenage years we began to get restless in the North. We had kept a house in Sewanee, Tennessee, the tiny Episcopal college town where I went to school, and every summer it grew progressively more difficult to pack up for the remigration to New York. On something of a lark, then, we made an appointment to look at houses in Nashville. It was not totally foreign territory. I had grown up in Chattanooga, my wife in Mississippi, and I had spent many pleasurable hours here while working on a biography of Andrew Jackson, so we thought it worth the exploratory trip. We fell in love with the first house we saw – an old neo-Georgian with lots of space – and, through friends, intuited what we now know to be true: the city provides the best of familiar Southern life, with more engaging cultural offerings than any one person can truly experience. We even have a cool mayor, our first female one: Megan Barry, a former Metro Council member. Greater Nashville is a blue dot in a sea of red, one of only three counties in the state (out of 95) that did not join the Trump tide in 2016. Socially progressive but sensitive to fiscal and business concerns, Barry is that rarest of creatures in the American South of the post- Reagan era: a Democrat with a sky-high approval rating. “Nashville is a city on the move,” she says, “with a vibrant, diverse culture and enormous growth built on an ever-present historical base of music, which fosters an environment of creativity that permeates our food and maker scene and makes Nashville a great place to live, work and play.” An afternoon country session at Robert’s Western World, on Broadway Art – visual, sung, written – is the city’s soul. In the early 20th century, Nashville was home to the Fugitive poets, a band of writers that included Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. The Frist Center for the Visual Arts sits in the middle of town, hosting first-class exhibitions such as “Secrets of Buddhist Art: Tibet, Japan and Korea”. In music, this is still a place where talented dreamers arrive unknown with hopes of immortality. Tim McGraw showed up one day in 1989, on a Greyhound bus. He’d sold practically everything he had back home in Louisiana and arrived in town with his guitar and a suitcase. It’s a » DEPARTURES-INTERNATIONAL.COM 71
