NASHVILLE

We're back to this great city of music.  A two-hour drive from Mammoth Caves brought us to our campground just north of Nashville.  This looks to be a nice place to call home for a while.  Having a pull-through site meant it was a snap to get set up and by early afternoon we were all settled.  We are excited to be here and look forward to going back to all our favorite music venues:  the Bluebird Cafe (where all the local songwriters come to perform the songs recorded by the big country stars), the Station Inn (the spiritual home for all bluegrass music fans, the many honky tonks of lower Broadway (where at least a dozen clubs have live music 14 hours a day with no cover charge, the Ryman Auditorium (original home of the Grand Ole Opry), the Exit/In (grungy club where all the artists who have played there sign a big black wall, hoping to get a picture of that) and hopefully more new ones we don't know about yet.

This blog will likely have a lot of micro-blogging for the next several weeks where I post pictures and a short message right from whatever venue we happen to be at.  Stay tuned for some great musical stories!

Our first musical event was that very first night--we bought tickets last spring to see Bonnie Raitt at the Ryman.  Bonnie is a legend who has been playing since the sixties when she started playing blues alongside Howlin Wolf and Mississippi Fred MacDowell.   If you're interested, her bio is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnie_Raitt.  Rolling Stone magazine has her number 50 on their list of 100 greatest singers and number 89 on the 100 greatest guitar players list.  She was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000.  We loved her show at the Ryman--the acoustics were magnificent, her playing and singing was stellar, her band was killer.  It was touching because she kept giving recognition to the songwriters of many of the songs she played who were in the audience.   One of the great things about Nashville are the fabulous songwriters in this town, more on that in later posts, I'm sure.  This was the last city on Bonnie's 89 city tour and it was a show to remember for sure!