A recent post by Facebook group Lawrence County News has put a roughly 30-year-old tourism ad back in the spotlight. It's a commercial (watch it via the Vimeo embed above) produced by the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development that features some legend-status Music City institutions, not to mention a cheery little jingle sung by none other than Nashville singer-songwriter Kathy Mattea.
Hey, look! It's Conway Twitty onstage at the Grand Ole Opry! There's Barbara Mandrell with a saxophone! There's a looping Wabash Cannonball at Opryland! And the flashing lights of Printers Alley! Between shots of the General Jackson,* Opryland Hotel and fireworks awkwardly superimposed over a significantly sparser-than-now Nashville skyline, you might notice a remarkable lack of midday traffic on the interstate. And before you go roasting the creators of the commercial for featuring a shot of an airplane ("Ohh wow, a real-live flyin' machine!" I can hear you smarming in your best Cletus voice), Nashville used to be an American Airlines hub, and that was a somewhat big deal.
About that skyline, so many things are missing: the Batman building (AT&T), the R2D2 building (One Nashville Place), the Renaissance hotel (attached to the currently-being-demolished old convention center) and more. In fact, the ad is almost as notable for the buildings you can see — like the Sheraton, with its formerly rotating Polaris restaurant — as for the ones that weren't yet built.
The ad is viewable via both the Lawrence County News FB page and the Dalton Hudson Vimeo page. (I recommend clicking around in that Vimeo library — it contains some other Old Nashville gems, including the legendary "Tennessee Trash" anti-littering commercial.) Scene editor Steve Cavendish and I — both of us Nashville-area natives — vaguely recall the ad running in the late '80s (I was a toddler, he was ... older than that), but we can't pin down precisely when it was made. Some moderate Googling and archive-combing have led us to believe it was filmed in 1985 or later. Any readers have a better idea?
*A commenter was kind enough to point out that the riverboat featured in the ad is not the General Jackson. It may indeed be the Captain Ann.
