Notes from Music City
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Notes from Music City Lesley Gill 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
In February 1960, African-American students from four historic Black colleges sat down at segregated lunch counters in downtown Nashville, proclaiming their right to be served and demanding that the city government open the facilities to them. White mobs attacked the young people whom police did not protect, belying Nashville’s image as the Athens of the South. Yet only 3 months later, White store owners capitulated and opened lunch counters to Black customers. As the students celebrated a major victory, the ramparts of Jim Crow crumbled, and Nashville led the South in desegregating restaurants, stores, and public facilities. Yet 60 years later, the extreme patterns of zoned consumption and racial segregation that have long characterized the city remain on full display. Although Jim Crow is formally dead, downtown is whiter than ever. Steel-and-glass skyscrapers loom over downtown, where they have popped up like mushrooms over the last fifteen years, and construction cranes interrupt the skyline in every direction. Rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods have fueled one of the hottest real estate markets in the country. The retailers targeted by protesters—Woolworths,1 Kress, McClellan, Cain-Strauss and Harvey—are gone, and the country music industry has taken over the city center, ruling Nashville’s economy with a whopping $10 billion annual contribution. Even though the country genre is more complex than many realize, marketing distinctions from the Jim Crow-era still persist in more subtle forms today. For example, in the early twentieth century, folk music played by Whites was labeled as “country music,” whereas current genres, such as blues, gospel and rhythm and blues, performed by African-Americans were labeled as “race music.” Music venues cater to white tourists along Lower Broadway, where the mournful wails of musicians romanticize rural lifestyles and a rustic past. Stores trafficking in rural nostalgia hawk cowboy boots and hats. Fair-skinned bachelorettes on a fast track to the upper middleclass clutch drinks and mug to passersby from atop party busses and pedal taverns that troll the 1 There is a redesigned Woolworths bar/restaurant on the location now, part of a small wave of gentrificationmeets-civil-rights-tourism businesses that highlight part of the city’s racial history in order to capture additional niche markets, disarm criticism, and celebrate certain aspects of racial progress.
* Lesley Gill [email protected]
1
Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University, 1916 Ashwood Ave., Nashville, TN 37212, USA
L. Gill
urban streets. Groups of revelers stagger along the sidewalks under bright neon signs in the afternoons and evenings, as they hop from one crowded scene to another. The Country Music Hall of Fame and the Ryman auditorium—the Mother Church of Country Music—are a couple of blocks from one another. The extreme makeover of downtown has razed evidence of earlier civil rights struggles, and the municipal government h
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