Vamos! Country music in Nashville

In which Sid and Doris do the Grand Ole Thing and offer you a chance to see it too.

Last night we had fled from the DOOMPA DOOMPA DOOMPA of downtown Nashville into a music-free farm-to-fork restaurant.  This will not do, we decided, we need to find the Real Country Music Scene.

Well I am not sure if it really is the scene, or whether it is a pastiche, or a home for past memories, but we got tickets for the Grand Ole Opry.  Like the Prairie Home Companion this is a long-running multi-artist show originally broadcast on radio but now available streamed on the internet.  After many years in venues of increasing sizes they built a purpose designed auditorium in a place which could loosely be called Nashville.  In much the same way that Gatwick airport is in London.

Booking at the last minute we seem to have benefitted from someone else’s cancellation, because in a nearly-full house we have seats at the centre of the balcony, with a nice large shelf for Mifter Bat to sit on.  (Mifter Bat, for readers new to our story, is the unofficial mascot of London City Singers, Doris’s barbershop chorus.  He has a keen ear for tuning and overtones, and was of course thrilled to be ON AIR.)

The show was, well I guess it was what it always is, which is a mixture of shall we say experienced artists and newer ones.  One group looked like a set of elderly uncles wearing Sunday best suits, and one of the later acts had a suit that he said he’d commissioned especially for the show and we were unsurprised. Oh, and one looked spookily like Sid’s brother – he won Sid and Doris’s Song Of The Night award with an excellent duet with a fiddle player.

There was also an unexplained eight-person dance group who appeared only briefly at the beginning and a comedy routine of awkward lameness (but everyone laughed dutifully), and after the usual two hours the show was extended for a pre-recording of a song to be used in a forthcoming 9/11 tribute.

As the singer encouraged 4,300 unmasked people in a state with a vaccination rate of under 40% to sing along loudly while waving their phone torch lights, Sid and Doris remembered from their position wedged firmly in the middle of a long aisle-free front row that their travel insurance specifically excludes any Covid-related illness.  The next few days will be an interesting test of the efficacy of the Astra-Zeneca vaccine.

Pushing those thoughts firmly aside your duo made their way out into the massive and gloriously breezy purpose-built car park and had only a short time to admire how very, very efficient good car park design can be while around 2,000 cars including the JGG were emptied almost without queuing onto the adjacent interstate highway.

Would we go again?  No.  Are we glad we went?  Yes, but we still haven’t found our own ideal sort of country music here.

PS Here is the live-streamed show if you’d like to listen to it yourself.  We saw a two-hour show but only the second hour was streamed so regrettably you will miss both the unexplained dance group and the lame comedy routine.  However it does include the fiddle duet at around 55 minutes and That Suit at around 1:05.