THE QUEST NASHVILLE

On an early Sunday morning in January, Nashville’s Lower Broadway—“Lower Broad” to locals—looks like the day after a zombie apocalypse. There’s not a soul in sight for two full blocks, save one homeless fellow in an alcove next to an Elvis statue. I pull the last two dollars from my pocket and hand them to him.

I pass the purple-painted Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge. In earlier days this gritty watering hole welcomed Mel Tillis, Waylon Jennings, and Patsy Cline, just a few of the headliners who would slip across the alley from the Ryman Auditorium for a quick drink. On quieter nights a famous face may still drop in to play with the revered house band.

Doors all along the street are now shut beneath unlit neon signs, more than a few in the shape of guitars. Some of the best but lesser known country musicians anywhere played these venues last night in the coveted after-10 p.m. Saturday slot. But, as is increasingly the case, many went unnoticed among the growing number of raucous bachelorette parties and conventiongoers. Nashville is booming; about a hundred people a day are said to move here, and the visitor count is approaching 15 million annually, with record increases year after year.

I try to conjure the riotous scene along this strip just hours earlier: pounding music, neon, visitors spilling out of bars. For many, the now desolate streetscape would mean one sad thing: The show is over. For me, however, and what I’m looking for, I’m right on time.

By noon, I stand on the shop floor of Nashville’s Hatch Show Print, one of the oldest running letterpress shops in North America. Hatch opened its doors the year Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb. While nearby shops printed newspapers and Bibles, Hatch hitched its future to the 20th-century birth and evolution of country music, and eventually every music genre. Hatch presses have pumped out show posters for everyone from Hank Williams, Jr., and Dolly Parton to Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin, and the Beastie Boys—every run using movable-type technology dating back to the era of the Gutenberg Bible. As the owner of several milk crates of vintage vinyl, I revel in this analog mother lode of Nashville lore. Way beyond cowboy boots and honky-tonk, I want to know Music City through the art of Music City.

To my right a 1960s Vandercook press, the size of a sideboard, is covered with celebrity signatures from the likes of ZZ Top and “Weird Al” Yankovic. Across the room, a 60-foot wall of warped and crooked shelves holds almost 14 decades of metal and wooden type blocks alongside carved images of past customers such as Herbert Hoover and Anderson Cooper. Finished works serve as wallpaper.

“We’re a constant here,” says Hatch shop manager Celene Aubry. “We’re telling the story of how the city changes, how the country changes.”

It’s Sunday, so I can only imagine the cacophony of clickety-clacks, thuds, and whirs of full production mode. There are 10 different makes and vintages of presses, including a Sigwalt Platen from 1896. Each poster is unique—the density of ink, how it transfers to the paper. It’s all done by hand, locking in the type blocks, cranking each page through, one sheet at a time, one color at a time. Restrikes of an infamous Elvis poster (once decried by a southern preacher for being too sensual) are made with the exact print blocks of the original run. Even new commissions use vintage type. This attention to detail preserves their seminal American graphic character: bold colors, chunky block letters, no-nonsense. It’s a design style many recognize, even if they don’t know it comes from Hatch.

Growing fascination with letterpress, vinyl, and all things analog is no surprise to Aubry: “When y ou go extreme into the digital world, the natural reaction is to swing back to things that are handmade. We have graphic designers come back to Hatch to reground themselves.”

Behind the shop’s iron gates (marked 1879, the year Hatch opened), it’s easy to forget that this slightly steampunk scene is a functional re-creation. Each historic drawer and inkpot was lovingly packed up from the 316 Lower Broad locale and then reassembled within the grand expansion of the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2013. An 80-foot-tall wall of glass showcases the shop’s inner workings to passersby in the CMHF foyer. It’s striking, but a reminder that Hatch is aworking museum. The bestway to find Hatch’s mark onNashville today, on those who carry forward these printing traditions, is to talk to the locals.

“It’s like hot and cold runningwater. Show posters are just part of our culture here,” says former Hatch trainee BryceMcCloud.McCloud is 43, tall, slender, with a salt-and-pepper beard and smiling eyes.Unlike many former trainees fromaround the globe, McCloud grew up outsideNashville in the same town as Johnny Cash and June Carter. A sculptor and 21st-century letterpress master,McCloud opened his shop, Isle of Printing, in 1997 in an edgy downtown enclave nicknamed Pietown, a slice-shaped neighborhood west of Bridgestone Arena.

Inside McCloud’s strip-mall studio, there’s endless creative clutter: self-portraits made by Nashvillians with small print stamps and a poster he designed for Bob Dylan. Some call McCloud the Willy Wonka of modern letterpress for his whimsy, his intuition, and perhaps most of all, his unusual business plan.

“The reason I created Isle of Printing was that I wanted to change theworld with art,” he says, spreading ink on his Vandercook press. He locks in type blocks and cranks it up. “It’s a bold statement, but you gotta shoot for something.” He pauses, pointing at a smear of magenta pigment across themoving roller. “Hear that? When the ink’s just right, it kinda sounds like sizzling bacon.”

With commercial profits,McCloud commissions himself and a team of other artists to make community art. His project “All Are Welcome” gathered ambassadors from Nashville’s Kurdish, Nepalese, Mexican, Arab, and 15 other ethnic groups, including native Nashvillians.

They talked about the concept of “welcome” in their cultures and printed T-shirts that said “welcome” in their native languages. “We wanted the gringos, so to speak, to be wandering around in T-shirts that said ‘Welcome!’ in Arabic,” saysMcCloud. Hismany community art ventures share similar motivations.

Art, McCloud thinks, can unite Nashvillians, helping them share and expand their world, without abandoning who they are. “The recent growth in Nashville is breathtaking,” he says, but “losing community is one thing we’re all afraid of. The best thing about Nashville isn’t the buildings; it’s the culture of people.”

More humble evidence of those who’ve shaped Music City is never far away. Long before fine-art portraits and stadium-concert keepsakes, letter press posters were straight-up advertising. On alley walls and barn doors, show posters clearly and engagingly communicated who, where, and when. You’ll still find these artifacts of great music moments all around town, hiding in plain sight.

Amid massive growth and change, locals sometimes pine for the days when you could just show up to venues such as the Bluebird Cafe for a quick beer and a fix of bluesy talent, with no line out front to get in. I discover it’s still possible to catch a bluegrass Grammy winner inside the scruffy Station Inn on a Monday night.Wall-to-wall yellowed show posters surround the half-full room of locals—reminders of 44 years of concerts on this Gulch neighborhood stage. Phones lie facedown and conversations stop, as the music starts.

Nashvillians understand. A live performance is a singular confluence of time, place, musicianship, and audience—never to be repeated. But neither will it be forgotten. Because plastered somewhere, there’s a show poster to remember this night forever.

Hot Art in the Music City 

NOELLE

In Printers Alley, the newly reopened Noelle hotel (circa 1929) show cases letter press portraits and art installations (all created or curated by Bryce McCloud) of lesser known Nashvillians of note: civil rights activists, burlesque dancers, and others who
shaped local history.

PINEWOOD SOCIAL

McCloud’s metal cans with letterpress labels make for a playful art installation in the vintage bowling lanes at Pinewood Social. This industrial-cool gathering spot near the riverfront ofers burgers, craft cocktails, karaoke, dipping pools, and a boccie ball court.

FRIST ART MUSEUM

In Nashville’s 1930s art deco former post office building, the Frist hosts world-class rotating shows. In 2019 look for exhibitions on photographer Dorothea Lange, French Impressionists, and Frida Kahlo.

RYMAN AUDITORIUM GALLERY

Many call the 126-year-old Ryman the mother church of country music. Its gallery of Hatch show posters tells an even bigger story—celebrating acts from Harry Houdini to Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, Louis Armstrong to Smokey Robinson.

CHARLESTON - LOCAL FLAVOR

A savory bowl of shrimp and grits, long a staple of Southern cuisine, is having a moment in South Carolina’s Holy City, where creative cooks are transforming the traditional morning meal of milled ground corn and freshly netted local shrimp. Low Country farmers, fishers, and chefs are stirring it up in new ways inspired by Charleston’s heritage.

For reasons both cultural and culinary, the humble dish is associated with the city’s African-American community. “Grits could feed a lot of people cheaply, and shrimp was a protein that was easily accessible,” says chef Benjamin “BJ” Dennis, a Charleston caterer whose cooking draws from the Gullah Geechee culture and has helped revive heritage grains, such as Carolina Gold rice. “Grits are directly linked with the experience of African Americans in the city and the Low Country,” he says.

“It’s been estimated that 80 percent of African Americans can trace at least one side of their family to an ancestor who was forcibly brought to the New World through the slave port of Charleston,” says chef and instructor Kevin Mitchell of the Culinary Institute of Charleston. “In the 18th and 19th centuries, the great Charleston chefs like Nat Fuller, Tom Tully, and Eliza Seymour Lee were African Americans.”

Today shrimp and grits occupies a central place on restaurant menus from South of Broad to the top of King Street. Frequently made with heirloom corn, grits can come in hues of pink, blue, red, yellow, and white. Each is different. They can taste nutty or sweet, and cook up creamy or al dente. Greg Johnsman of Geechie Boy Mill, a small-batch grain producer that uses antique gristmills, serves Guinea Flint grits with shrimp (plus parmesan cheese, country ham, tomatoes, scallions, and red-eye gravy) at his restaurant MILLERS ALL DAY. A once-lost strain locally, Guinea Flint was rediscovered in Africa and brought back to South Carolina.

“In whatever variety, in whatever else we add, we will always have shrimp and grits,” says chef Forrest Parker of REVIVAL restaurant. “I couldn’t conceive of Charleston without it.

Greatest Grits

SLIGHTLY NORTH OF BROAD

Though locals often refer to it by the acronym SNOB, Charleston’s first farm-totable restaurant is anything but haughty. The convivial Low Country bistro’s seasonal menus include whatever the farmers are bringing to the kitchen.

REVIVAL

Located in the Vendue Hotel in Charleston’s French Quarter, Forrest Parker’s restaurant has earned acclaim for dishes featuring local produce, like Bradford watermelons, and regional specialties, such as Low Country pirlou (a flavorful rice pilaf) made with poached lobster.

MILLERS ALL DAY

True to its name, Millers whips up breakfast (handmilled grits and wa les are on the menu) all day long, as well as other Southern comfort food—biscuits, corn muffins, and fried chicken—in a mid-century modern interior close to King and Broad Streets

Written by Liz Beatty in "National Geographic Traveler", USA, volume 35, number 6, December 2018/January 2019, excerpts pp.46-51. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.