Back in 1999, country music deity George Jones had a huge hit with his song “Choices.” It’s not Jones’ best song, but that’s through no fault of the song’s own. Most songs can’t live up to “He Stopped Loving Her Today” or “Golden Ring.” It’s a good song, though. A deeply good song. It has fiddles, and a sad sack confessing to all the wrongs he’s done, and drinking, and alienated loved ones, and a voice like the squeak of a rural screen door. It sounds like country music. Good country music.
And I think that when people heard it, they thought: “Here is the proof that country music can be innovative and also have room for tradition. Here’s a damn good song by a man who" — at the time — "has been knocking out hits for 40 years and who still sounds current and fresh alongside newer artists.”
It was — to show my hand on the metaphor I’m developing — proof that you could preserve and enjoy the traditional things that are important while also having room for innovation. You could have George Jones and Shania Twain in Nashville.
And then all of Nashville tuned in to the CMA Awards that year. By showtime we knew that George Jones had declined to attend because show-runners wanted him to do a truncated, minute-long version of his song instead of allowing him a whole three-and-a-half minutes to do the whole thing. And there was a feeling that something was terribly wrong in Nashville if George Fucking Jones was being treated with such disrespect. Then Alan Jackson got up to sing his hit, “Pop a Top,” which was a cover of an old Jim Ed Brown song.
So, imagine it: Alan Jackson, one of the neotraditionalists — indeed, we might think of him as one of the Nashville preservationists — gets up to sing a song so good that it was a hit twice, 30 years apart. The very song Jackson is singing proves the value of longstanding Nashville institutions. But Jackson is one of the folks pissed about what happened with George Jones. So, he starts “Pop a Top,” but then he and his band transition into “Choices,” which we all know is in that moment about how the CMA is going to have to live with bad choices they’ve made — like disrespecting George Jones.
Jackson walks off stage. The crowd goes wild.
Woo, there was a problem — someone called it out, straight to the faces of the powers-that-be, and we all cheered in support. Clearly, everything will be fixed now.
Reader, it wasn’t.
The two points I want to make with this story are: 1. A fundamental, basic trait of Nashville is the decades-long discussion of how we’re losing the "real" Nashville and we need to figure out how to save it, and 2. Baked into the narrative of how we’re constantly losing the "real" Nashville is losing.
Preservationists in this city regularly fail.
I want to talk a little about why that is. If you’ve been following the saga of the Exit/In, you know that the owners of the building sold it to some hoteliers, but that the owner of Exit/In (the business) wanted to buy it in order to preserve the venue. The owner is now raising funds to further try to buy the building. The hoteliers said, on Friday evening, they don’t want to tear the building down. They’ve even said they will try to get it on the National Registry of Historic Places.
Here’s a thing I did not know until I started getting more into preservation work: None of these things — having a place registered as a historical landmark, getting a historical marker for it or, hell, even getting it designated as a UNESCO Site of Memory and put on their Slave Route Project (cough, Fort Negley, cough) — actually protects a site from someone rolling heavy machinery over it if they want to.
I had thought — and I’m betting a lot of you did, too — that the whole point of getting these kinds of designations was to make them off limits to development; that we were saying, “This thing, as it is, is important and you cannot mess with it.” But really, all these designations say is, “This thing, as it is, is important to us.” There is no penalty, except for bad feelings, for destroying a historic landmark.
You can imagine the world of heartbreaks this causes.
One of the things that’s interesting to me in the case of the Exit/In is that it really shows how this hurts people on all sides of development. The new owners seem very willing to do what they can to reassure Nashville that they won’t destroy the venue. Like I said, they’re even offering to put the building on the national register. But folks who work in preservation — or who are learning about preservation because of the Exit/In situation — know that such a step, while lovely, doesn’t actually offer any protection.
Nor would it have offered any protection from the site being sold to developers if the designation had been sought earlier.
There’s some consensus that the mechanism protecting historic things that has the most teeth is when the city puts a historic overlay on something. Except that any developer willing to go through the process to get exceptions usually has little problem getting them.
If preserving Nashville’s history is actually important to Nashville, we need some preservation designations with teeth. Something that will actually proactively designate a site as off-limits to developers. We need a way to actually do the thing we think we’re already doing.
I don’t know what that would look like. City leaders and planners and preservationists need to have some hard discussions about how to put together some regulations that genuinely protect these institutions that are important to Nashville, or we will continue to lose them.
Nashville is livin’ and dyin’ with the choices we make.
