Over at The Tennessean, Joey Garrison has a really interesting article about the city’s war with Off the Wagon Tours, which is the party wagon pulled by a John Deere tractor downtown. I have mixed feelings. Basically, I don’t think Off the Wagon Tours should be singled out. I think if your motorized vehicle is not capable of safely going the speed limit, it shouldn’t be on city streets, period. If, for some reason I cannot fathom, we need slow-moving open-air vehicles full of drunks meandering around, we should either close the roads they use downtown to cars — which, yuck, let’s not do that — or give them their own lanes. But just getting rid of Off the Wagon Tours is a drop in the bucket of this stupid problem.
However, I think it’s interesting to see how much this fight picks up issues that Nashville’s been arguing about since the birth of the Grand Ole Opry. Metro Councilman Jeremy Elrod says, “I grew up in Cheatham County, and those kind of things aren't supposed to be operating downtown. They're supposed to be operating on farms or only operating on streets and roads as they travel to farms or to and from the gas station."
Off the Wagon Tours proprietor Curtis Carney says, “Nashville's a country town and we have a tractor.”
As you can read about in Charles Wolfe’s A Good-Natured Riot or Craig Havighurst’s Air Castle of the South, when Country Music U.S.A. was just starting to spring up in the Athens of the South, there was, as you can imagine, a kind of hostility between the cultured city folks and this industry focused on bumpkins. What Wolfe and Havighurst both do a good job of illuminating is the conflict between rural people and the people looking to make money off them.
The rural people who first came to Nashville to play on WSM dressed as they would to come to town and meet important people and go fancy places — in the best outfits they had. Sunday dresses. Suits and ties.
But the selling-point of the Opry was that it brought hick talent to the world. If the hicks didn’t look like hicks, but just like people you went to church with, how would you know that what you were hearing was authentic country music? In other words, the folks on the Opry had to pretend to be the stereotype of what they were so that some of their audience would accept them as authentic.
The other part of their audience was in on the joke, understood the embarrassment of being asked to perform poverty and ruralness, and delighted in seeing (or hearing) these performers then command a stage with their vast talent. Their delight was seeing performers rhetorically position themselves as the worst, corniest version of themselves — and then playing and singing and entertaining better than you expected. A kind of chip on one’s shoulder is built into the genre: You think I’m worthless, but look what I can do, jerk. (And it’s this dynamic of hicks pretending to be hicks so that you’ll accept them as real hicks — and them being kind of annoyed at it but finding a way to make it fun for themselves — that’s at the heart of what makes Hee Haw work and why it’s fun to watch people who write about pop culture struggle to explain why Hee Haw is funny.)
And so here we have a similar thing. Elrod, a country boy, wants people to come to Nashville and see people, not stereotypes. We don’t have to pretend to be country. We are country. And then there’s Carney, saying, “Since we are country, it’s fine for us to pretend to be country, if it gets folks’ wallets open.”
I don’t know if there are any great lessons to be learned from how country music dealt with this tension. Judging by history, all that will happen is that in 50 years, Elrod and Carney’s grandchildren with live in New York or L.A., talking about drinking beer and riding in trucks with pretty girls who don’t know they’re beautiful, and none of them will have ever actually seen a deer or a dirt road except in movies — but everyone around them will accept them as country, because they have a slight drawl.
But I do like that this is something we’ve been struggling with for almost 100 years — from the moment Uncle Jimmy Thompson did his first hour of fiddle music on WSM, and people said, “Whoa, hey, we want more of that!” to now, when tourists see our tractors pulling drunk people and say the same things.
