Steve Haruch - Greetings From: New Nashville: How a Sleepy Southern Town Became “it” City

Greetings from New Nashville

GREETINGS FROM NEW NASHVILLE

HOW A SLEEPY SOUTHERN TOWN BECAME IT CITY

edited bySTEVE HARUCH

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS

Nashville, Tennessee

2020 by Vanderbilt University Press

Nashville, Tennessee 37235

All rights reserved

First printing 2020

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Haruch, Steve, 1974 editor.

Title: Greetings from new Nashville : how a sleepy southern town became it city / Steve Haruch, editor.

Description: Nashville : Vanderbilt University Press, 2020. | Summary: A collection of journalism and essays that traces the transformation of Nashville over the last two decades through journalistic essays about specific facets of that transformationProvided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020005336 (print) | LCCN 2020005337 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826500274 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826500281 (epub) | ISBN 9780826500298 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Nashville (Tenn.)History. | Cities and townsGrowth. | Nashville (Tenn.)Social life and customs.

Classification: LCC F444.N24 G74 2020 (print) | LCC F444.N24 (ebook) | DDC 976.8/55dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005336

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005337

For J.

CONTENTS

STEVE HARUCH

ANN PATCHETT

J. R. LIND

ZACH STAFFORD

BEN FOLDS

BOBBY ALLYN

BOBBY ALLYN

RON WYNN

STEVE CAVENDISH

TIANA CLARK

STEVEN HALE

ANSLEY T. ERICKSON

ASHLEY SPURGEON

RICHARD LLOYD

CARRIE FERGUSON WEIR

STEVE HARUCH

MERIBAH KNIGHT

MARGARET RENKL

TED ALCORN

STEVE HARUCH

BETSY PHILLIPS

INTRODUCTION

IN 1998, ROUGHLY TWO million visitors came to see what there was to see in Nashville. By 2018, the annual number had ballooned to 15.2 million. On some level, Nashville has always packaged itself for consumption, but suddenly everyone wanted a taste.

In that span of two decades, the physical boundaries of Nashville did not change. (The city and county governments had long ago consolidated.) But something did. Or rather, manysomethings changed, and kept changing, until many who lived here began to feel they no longer recognized their own city. And some began to feel it wasnt their own city at all anymore, as they were pushed to its fringes by rising housing costs.

Between 1998 and 2018, the population of Nashville grew by 150,000. The greater metropolitan statistical area grew by a half-million people, and is expected to cross the two million mark some time in 2020.

But why Nashville? Why now? This book is an attempt to grapple with those questions without offering pat answers. Cities and histories are complex, and there is no single event or factor to credit. What we offer is a series of dispatches aimed at showing the contours, identifying turning points, and more urgently, giving a sense of texture to the life of a place in flux. Roughly half of the chapters are reprints, snapshots of a particular moment in the fast, messy evolution of the city. Others are new essays, written for this book with the benefit of at least some hindsight.

In 2001, the late John Egerton, along with fellow journalist E. Thomas Wood, assembled Nashville: An American Self-Portrait