One of the weird and hard things about death is how, even though you eventually get used to the person’s absence, eventually you stop thinking about them every day. Eventually you feel like, “OK, this still sucks and is sad, but it’s settled.” But sometimes you’re still going to see something in the news or hear something on a podcast, and your first thought — or my first thought, anyway — is, “Oh my God, Jim is going to love this.” Like some part of your brain still thinks you can just call him and share a good laugh with him.
The Jim here is Jim Ridley, the Scene's former editor-in-chief, who died a decade ago this week. I think I’ve had just about all the editors the Scene has had, though there may be one or two at the beginning who slipped through without having to deal with me. But Jim still stands out in my mind as being, somehow, quintessentially the Scene’s editor.
Well, shit. It wasn’t my intention to come here and start being a big baby about Jim Ridley. It’s just that, since I can’t tell him about the two things that happened this week that he would have loved, I wanted to laugh about them with you, dear readers.
The first thing is how the renderings for the new TPAC building make it look like a pair of cargo shorts. Now, we can all sit here and convince ourselves that this is unintentional, but Nashville does love putting up buildings with symbolic roof structures. If you look at an aerial view of downtown, you can see the bass clef of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, right next to the guitar on top of the Music City Center. The Batman Building, originally the Bell South building, looks like a 1990s cellphone. I’ve even heard that the Bridgestone Arena is deliberately supposed to resemble a Pringles chip, but I think that’s just an urban legend. My point: It’s not unreasonable to think that, for some reason, the forthcoming TPAC is supposed to look like cargo shorts from the air.
Update to Metro’s downtown code to be sought related to East Bank project
And we have other weird buildings: the Parthenon, the old Sony building on Music Row, the Belmont Mansion with a university grafted onto it, the Fisk library with its retro-futurist Jetsons vibe.
There was — allegedly, meaning I believe I read it — a story in The New York Times before the Music City Center was built about Nashville’s commitment to eclectic buildings, calling Nashville “the home for wayward architecture.” Whew, that was a good line! And Jim and I talked about this article on two different occasions — once when it first came out and we were both so jealous of that phrase and how perfectly it summed up Nashville’s aesthetic, and another time a year or two later when Jim said he’d been trying to find that article because he was curious about who had written it. He hadn’t been able to find it.
So fast-forward to the cargo shorts building, and I’m laughing and wishing I could share it with Jim, seeing as he and I both appreciated a good bit of wayward architecture. And it got me thinking about that phrase again and wondering who came up with it.
I’m willing to accept that maybe Jim and I both misremembered where we read it, but it’s hard for me to think we could both have made up or hallucinated reading a story about Nashville architecture with that phrase in it online.
So I dropped the phrase into Newspapers.com. Nothing. I shortened it to “wayward architecture.” Thirteen mentions, the earliest being in the Illustrated London News on Sept. 20, 1856. I’m going to quote it because it also is a lovely piece of writing, the correspondent having arrived in Moscow for the first time: “Not fifty Isaac Cathedrals could render St. Petersburg comparable for a moment to this strangely-situated forest-encircled city, the marvelous product of seven centuries of wayward architecture and fantastic toil.” The last mention I found is a pretty racist book review from 1942 calling the plantations of Virginia wayward architecture. I won’t quote that one, for obvious reasons.
What the heck? I think Jim would have also been delighted at us both remembering a story that seems not to have actually existed and both our brains coming up with the “home for wayward architecture” line about Nashville.
(Editor's note: This mystery has been stumping Betsy since at least 2009.)
The second thing I wanted to immediately call Jim about this week is the first part in a two-part podcast on dead Nashville racist Jack Kershaw. You may remember him from such accomplishments as sculpting that hideous statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest that used to be out along I-65, briefly being James Earl Ray’s lawyer, and being one of the founders of the League of the South. If you read my book Dynamite Nashville, you know he was Donald Davidson’s flunky.
A widely mocked Nashville statue of the early KKK leader was removed Tuesday morning
Well, over on her podcast Weird Little Guys, journalist Molly Conger is talking about Jack Kershaw and his dreadful statue and what it was made out of and how it came to be made. And she reveals something so shocking and hilarious that I’m jealous I didn’t know it while I was writing Dynamite Nashville — and I’m mad at myself for not discovering it.
While I certainly knew Kershaw was something of a fraud — he claimed to be a member of the Fugitive Poets despite being at Vanderbilt too late to have been, and he also claimed his wife was a first cousin of Fugitive Andrew Lytle though she was not — I believed he was a Southerner and a direct descendant of some Civil War general named Kershaw. Hell, that’s supposedly why there’s a General Kershaw Drive out in Old Hickory, where Jack Kershaw grew up. I mean, he was a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and you have to show that group your pedigree and establish that you are indeed a son (or grandson or great-grandson) of a Confederate soldier. He founded a racist neo-Confederate heritage group, the League of the South. Of course he had Confederate heritage.
Kershaw let the poet Donald Davidson send him on racist errands for much of the 1950s, and Donald Davidson notoriously hated non-Southern racists and thought they were betraying their home soil by not fighting for racism on it. One of the reasons Davidson didn’t work closely with John Kasper on stopping school integration is that John Kasper was from New Jersey and was an acolyte of Ezra Pound, who believed you could go anywhere and be a fascist and that you didn’t need the dirt of your homeland beneath your feet to give you legitimacy. This offended Davidson aesthetically. So surely Davidson would have known if Kershaw was lying about being a Southerner, right? Wouldn’t he have checked at least once to make sure Kershaw was standing on the right ground?
Folks, no! Conger found out that Kershaw was a lying liar who lied about being Southern with a Confederate grandpa. His dad’s family was apparently all from Illinois. No one in his family seemingly fought in the Civil War. I even dug around on Newspapers.com to see if he had anything to do with getting General Kershaw Drive in Old Hickory named that, and first of all, it’s not even in the part of Old Hickory where his family lived when he was growing up. And second, I found no evidence that he had anything to do with a street being named for General Kershaw, who — it turns out — was from South Carolina and had nothing to do with eastern Davidson County.
God, it’s so funny. Jim would have loved it.
