Zach Richardson also owns a flock of sheep that he deploys all over the city to manage invasive vegetation in a safe, ecologically sensitive and cost-effective way. The Nashville Chew Crew, as he calls his flock, will eat even the most noxious invasive plants: kudzu, mimosa, English ivy, euonymus, Bradford pear, you name it. (more….)
In the far northwest corner of Tennessee, just this side of the Mississippi River, lies a landscape like no other. Reelfoot Lake is less a lake than a system of bayous, creeks and swampland connected by areas of shallow open water. It was created in the winter of 1811-1812 when a series of powerful earthquakes and aftershocks caused 15,000 acres of cypress forest to sink. The waters of the Mississippi River rushed into the depression. (more….)
I am not a musician, or even an aspiring musician, but I moved to Nashville in 1987 because of music. One of my college roommates was in graduate school at Vanderbilt and invited me to visit, and my grad school boyfriend tagged along. Haywood is a picker himself, and he expected to fall in love with Music City; he even packed his résumé. (more….)
Nine songs into his sold-out show at the Ryman Auditorium here on Oct. 5, John Prine stopped singing long enough to give some context for a song he wrote 50 years ago, during the height of the Vietnam War. “I wrote this next one as a protest song,” he said. “It was 1968, and at the time we had a real jerk in the White House.” He paused before voicing what I was already thinking: “What a coincidence.” (more….)
In 1960, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech in this city, which was emerging as a training center for nonviolent protest. “I came to Nashville not to bring inspiration,” he said, “but to gain inspiration from the great movement that has taken place in this community.” (more….)
My husband and I were driving down I-65, still in Tennessee but near the Alabama border, when the statue of a giant chicken caught my eye. It was standing in front of a truck stop near Elkton. I am grateful to be married to a man who will instantly pull off the highway when someone says, “Hey, let’s take a selfie with that chicken!” (more….)
From the middle of its namesake delta, the city of Mobile, Ala., looks like a mythical place: shiny skyscrapers framed by cattails and marsh grass, a city that reaches into a sky so vast it holds all the weather there is — bright sun and cottony clouds and pregnant thunderheads and torrential rain — and all at one time. From the middle of that magnificent delta, Mobile could be Atlantis rising from the sea or the Emerald City of Oz. (more….)
From time to time, a debate resurfaces in Southern literary circles about whether there can still be a recognizable literature of the South in an age of mass media and Walmart. The 21st-century South would be unrecognizable to the Agrarian poets, whose 1930 manifesto, “I’ll Take My Stand,” set out many of the principles that still cling like ticks to the term “Southern writer.” (more….)
I knew I was in trouble as soon as I pulled into the parking lot of the Quality Inn in Americus, Ga., last Saturday night. It was long past dark but I could see well enough to note the out-of-state license plates — New Mexico, Pennsylvania, California, Alaska — places far from this peanut-farming land. (more….)
In 1978, the city of Nashville leased 18 acres of a Civil War monument to a local businessman who wanted to start a new baseball franchise — the Nashville Sounds, then a Double A expansion team for the Southern League — and needed a place for his team to play. It was a ludicrous arrangement from the start: a privately owned ball field built on public land. And not just any public land. Greer Stadium was built at the base of St. Cloud Hill, where the Union Army erected a stronghold after taking control of the city in 1862. (more….)
