Everything but Fried Chicken

Leaving Cincinnati I arrived in Bluegrass Country, which you can recognize because of the beautiful, rolling, tree-covered hills instead of the slightly gritty industrial farm-land of the rust-belt. First stop was Louisville, Kentucky, home of a ridiculous list of awesome things, including Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp, the Lebowski Fest, the Disco Ball, the Slugger baseball bat, the Kentucky derby, Mohammed Ali, Colonel Sanders, Hunter S Thompson, the song “Happy Birthday to You”, and an extremely good record store called Earx-tacy.

I confess, I was expecting old wooden homes with porches adorned with banjo players, mint juleps and race-horse fanatics, so it was both a pleasant surprise and a disappointment to find that Louisville is actually an incredible cool, alternative town with masses of top-notch coffee shops, vintage stores, and a great sense of humour and eccentricities.

I had a fantastic couchsurfing host called Brigid Kaelin – she is a local folk musician who plays accordion and the musical saw and sings brilliantly. Go check her myspace. She had great stories about her touring in the UK and being friends with Elvis Costello. While I was in town Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp did a joint concert, which I was only $100 away from going to.

After Louisville I spent a night in the less cosmopolitan town of “Bowling Green”, where there isn’t any bowling green at all. Although it is in the same state as Louisville, Bowling Green is in a different time zone. Grrr. I had more fantastic hosts there; we cooled off from the ridiculous heat of the day by swimming in a river out in the sublime countryside, and then went back at dusk for a homely bonfire, and to my delight I did sample some mint juleps on a porch with a banjo: for real! I couldn’t actually believe it.

After this glorious Southern interlude, I rolled up in Nashville, Tennessee, like so many aspiring artists before me, lacking only a battered guitar and a demented sense of ambition. They’re not lying when they say there’s an abundance of great country music in Nashville. But no one ever believes me when I explain that we have some decent folk artists in the UK also. I found the romantic Nashville image to have been twisted out of proportion by unchecked tourism and the ever-present pressure of American profiteering. The glitzy honky-tonks were local-less, and were so crammed full of folksiness, tacky celebrity-worship and general cult of the country-singer legend that there wasn’t much room left for much soul.

Still, I had an awesome time in Nashville, not least because of my wonderful hosts Kristina and Chris, who drove me round to places and were just great fun to be around, as well as having a proper Southern twang in their voices. Among many other events (not to mention fine Southern eating), we went to a big-band swing dance in the famous Centennial Park, right next to a massive life-size perfectionised version of the Parthenon, as if it wasn’t surreal enough as it was. Why a Tennessean town happens to have a replica of an emblematic ancient Greek temple, complete with a 14 foot statue of Athena, I have no idea.

Kentucky and Tennessee must be among the coolest states in the union; they’re certainly earned a place up there on my list of where I might live in my middle age. Next, I plunge even deeper into the mid-west, praying that I can find a tornado somewhere, so stay tuned for more graphic Americana in the next update! And if you were wondering, Jack White’s house in Nashville is painted red, white and black after all.