You Should Read Glitter Up the Dark

Because there is so much new music to be discovered, and so much old music to look at through a different lens.

Glitter Up the Dark is a history of some of the musicians who have used music to subvert the cultural gender binary. It shouldn't be surprising that music is often a tool of transgression and progression, but we so often don't think deeply about what we enjoy, and it's easy to simply bop along to the pleasant beat of what we like without putting any thought into the cultural work that music is doing. 

I spent a lot of time in grad school studying how various artists and writers in the medieval period, in particular, subverted gender roles in their works, so this subject is always something that I'm interested in reading more about. And I love music, but I'm not terribly thoughtful about it, so it was interesting to see how some of my favorite music is contextualized through the lens of gender.

Starting with... okay, did anyone else read Cry to Heaven during a weirdly impressionable time in their young life? 

This book was SO weird, and blew my little mind at the exact same time and in the exact same way that Flowers in the Attic also blew my little mind.

WHY did we all end up reading Flowers in the Attic by the age of twelve, by the way? Like, I know nobody was supervising me and that's how I read and watched an absolute ton of inappropriate media, but wasn't somebody supervising YOU?!?

Anyway, that's where I first learned what a castrato was (and I learned a LOT more than that, ahem, although that's neither here nor there), that very specific form of non-consensual body modification and genital mutilation that Italy was obsessed with between the mid-16th century and 1900 or so. So for nearly 500 years, Italians surgically created a distinctive third gender expression just so their music would sound pretty.

Or, just let women sing in your church choirs?

Spoiler alert: they didn't even do that. Eventually, Pius X just said that they could start letting boys sing in their church choirs instead. Sister Act would have been so much better!

I was monologuing all this to Will, and showed her the 1902 or 1904 recording of Alessandro Moreschi, to date I think the only castrato whose voice we have:

1902 is VERY old for a recording, so reasonably, Will asked about the first ever voice recording. We both sort of thought that it's Thomas Edison, but it's NOT! It's inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, who in April 1860 tested out his phonoautogram by singing a French nursery rhyme into it. The device wasn't ever even intended to have an audio output, but the recording was re-discovered in 2008 and sent to a lab that was able to construct an audio output for it.

The first recording using one of Edison's devices that still exists wasn't made until 1878!

This hour-long segue seven pages into the book's Introduction is perhaps why it takes me so long to get through non-fiction books...

I mostly picked this book up to read about artists I didn't already know, but I was also really interested to read about artists like Elvis and the Beatles, who many of their contemporary critics saw as effeminate. Contemporary accusations of subversion have long been subsumed by their popularity over time, although I can sort of see it if you focus on the artists as objects of the female gaze; once upon a time, it was only women who were looked at and objectified. Other subversive works are hidden in plain sight, or clumsily redacted--the original lyrics to Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" were "Tutti frutti, good booty."

Speaking of music that was subversive to its cultural contemporaries but is considered canonically classical now, my teenager is currently a few months into a huge David Bowie kick, which has gotten me interested in all things glam rock. I've had Marc Bolan's "Cat Black" on some kind of obsessive repeat--

--after discovering it through this book, even though I've long had several T. Rex songs on my favorites playlist. "Cosmic Dancer," in particular, is on heavy rotation in my favorites, but I always assumed the singer was female. 

But he's not! Check out the outfits in this T. Rex Top of the Pops appearance:

The pants! The vests! The go-go boots! The dancers!

And then just a year later, we've got our own beloved Starman also playing Top of the Pops:

What a time to be alive!

Glitter Up the Dark's author, Sasha Geffen, claims David Bowie developed his overtly androgynous look in consultation with the gay and trans artists in Andy Warhol's circle, especially trans punk musician Jayne County. County also says that Bowie peppered his work with uncredited bits of her original lyrics and music, which. Damnit, Bowie. But Geffen also baldly reminds us that County's work could never have blown up on her own merits: "the industry settled on a man who could do the best impression of a trans person while staying tethered to relative normalcy" (Geffen 33). 

I do think you can hear the connection, though, between County's mostly underground performances and Bowie's international superstar persona. Here's Jayne County and the Electric Chairs performing in the late 1970s-early 1980s in NYC:

And here's a short bio of Jayne County created by one of my favorite YouTubers:

I'm going to skip past all the punk, goth, synthopop, disco stuff (except to brag to you that I now know the origin of the term "house music"), because I'm too revved up about this chance to once again gush about Kurt Cobain and think about how sad I am that he died. In college, I met someone from Aberdeen, Washington, and was all, "DID YOU KNOW KURT COBAIN?!?" and she was all, "Sigh, everyone I meet asks me that. No."

If I still had all my grunge-look plaid flannel shirts, I could pass them off to Syd now, because apparently they're cool again. Hopefully they've always been cool, ahem, because all I've done over the past thirty years is occasionally upsize my own plaid flannel shirts.

Nirvana's music video for "In Bloom" actually works well in conversation with those glam rock Top of the Pops performances:

Cobain and Courtney Love did a lot of the emotional labor of defying the constraint of the culturally-imposed gender binary, and that had a lot to do with how cool I thought they were, and how much I loved their music, and how I felt at the time about his suicide. I sort of wonder now if the weight of that emotional labor didn't have something to do with his mental health struggles, and if he wouldn't have done better if he could have been plopped here thirty years into the future, where he could just create art and enjoy much of the fruits of that labor.

But then where would we be now if today's 40-somethings hadn't had him and Love as their teenaged role models?

As if that isn't sad enough, the epilogue to Glitter Up the Dark starts with a tribute to SOPHIE, how awesome her recent concert was, and how fucking epic her latest album is. Geffen expresses a desire to share in SOPHIE's "impossible optimism," and the book ends with that hope. 

Damnit, Geffen. I understand that you obviously didn't know that SOPHIE's life would also be tragically short, but still. You made me sad in front of an entire class of bored Health Science students that I was subbing for; one kid literally asked me, "Um, Miss, are you okay?" and when I lied and told her that I was allergic to something in the room, she was all, "Yeah, it smells in here. Can I have a hall pass?"

This is my favorite song and video by SOPHIE:

You're definitely not playing it loud enough to get the correct effect, but that just lets you appreciate the gymnastic choreography. 

Here's a Spotify playlist for Glitter Up the Dark:

It doesn't have all the songs and artists referenced in the book, but it probably has all the ones that are easily findable and on Spotify, so, you know, the musicians can earn themselves a whole penny every time their song gets a million or so plays. I'd definitely support artists better if I knew how (AND if it was as easy as using Spotify and YouTube, which is how I listen to all my music these days. I also use Chrome for browsing, which yesterday literally reduced Will to furious tears, she hates my lack of online best practices so much). 

I Went to See My Favorite Band with 2/3 of My Favorite People

 

I am a pandemic cliche, because March 2020 is when I and all the other depressed teenagers fell in love with Mother Mother, a 15-year-old Canadian alt-rock band.

To be fair, though, I didn't discover them on TikTok the way all the other depressed teenagers did; instead, my own personal resident depressed teenager, with whom I share a Spotify Premium account, started playing them on heavy rotation, and they just sort of absorbed into my subconscious. 

Actually, the first wave of the pandemic was pretty solid as far as discovering great new bands. My teenager also introduced me to Arctic Monkeys sometime in the 2020 months of the pandemic, and I spent many happy hours disassociating from my fear of imminent death AND my constantly-present family by listening to their complete discography on repeat. Our Spotify Wrapped that year was... repetitive. Delightful, but repetitive.

So in this newly post-pandemic world that I'm trying to live hard in, I was ecstatic to pack an overnight bag, shove my husband in the car, grab our kid from her Color Theory class (the other kid stayed home to walk the dog, feed the chickens, and go to her Chemistry class. Also, she's not into music), and drive four hours--

Okay, we stopped for gas, sandwiches, and autumn-themed Little Debbies. If you make an autumn-, Halloween-, or Christmas-themed snack food, I WILL BUY IT.

--straight to The Pageant in St. Louis, where this marvelous, miraculous, magical event was occurring: 

Here's my best memory of the night: after standing in line for an hour, getting wanded by security (who did not blink when I told him it was my steel-toed boots setting off the metal detector, because, you know, all the other depressed teenagers were wearing them, too!), and getting our hands stamped, we finally entered the venue, where my teenager stopped dead. 

"Are they playing tonight?" she asked, gesturing to the Vundabar backdrop that was already in place.

"Uh, yeah," I said, distracted by looking for the best spot to hold our ground for the next five hours. "Sly Stone had to pull out, so Vundabar's the other opening act."

The teenager, who was already happy about seeing Mother Mother live, proceeded to be very much more happy, because apparently I had not known that Vundabar is one of her favorite bands. It was a piece of lucky concert magic!

Here's my favorite song from the first opening act, Transviolet:

And here's that lucky concert magic in action!

Happy teenager spotted in the wild:

Here's my favorite Vundabar song:

And here's the most exciting moment of my life to date:

They played all of my favorite songs. Like, ALL of my favorite songs. All of them!

I rewrite my list of favorite Mother Mother songs constantly, but here's my current favorite, and part of that is because of how beautiful its live performance was:

I love everything about watching a favorite band perform live, but I love most the experience of the entire venue, cell phone flashlights on, singing along with a beloved song. It's what I remember sitting in a church pew and singing a hymn along with the church choir and the rest of the congregation to be like when I was very small.

I was beside myself with glee, and my teenager was sweet enough to record that glee for posterity:

I didn't mask, and even though I'm double-vaxxed and double boosted, I fully expected to get Covid here. But I did not! Another piece of lucky concert magic!

That teenager behind me HATED me, and kept putting her giant phone right over my head and speaking really loudly during songs. Everybody else in front of me had really giant phones, too, though, and the view through all of their screens was so sharp and saturated that at one point I leaned over and screamed in my teenager's ear, "How come everyone else's cell phone photos look better than ours?"

My teenager screamed back, "They've all got fancy iPhones!" 

We've got the cheapest Samsungs that AT&T will sell us, so that solves that!

However, my teenager took all these photos on my crappy Samsung Galaxy (Girl Scout Ambassador Photographer badge, here she comes!), and I think they are marvelous:

It was the BEST show. I was SO happy:

Hobbling back to the car on sore feet after midnight Central time wasn't quite as fun, and the entire post-midnight staff at the 24-hour McDonald's coincidentally also hated us, but still. It was the best.

The next morning, we had exactly enough time to walk to this creperie, eat a delicious crepe each (is this my first crepe ever? Perhaps!)--

Nutella, strawberries, and bananas!

--and walk back to the hotel before we had to check out and drive the four hours back home to get the teenager to her ballet studio in time for class. 

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

It's Possible to Have an Entire Nutcracker-Themed Homeschool Semester (Ask Me How I Know This...)

Because #nutcrackerlife, amiright?

Seriously, all fall and into the winter, when the kid wasn't doing this--

--she was thinking about it.

How do you get a homeschooling kid to think about something that's not her right-this-minute passion?

Friends, you don't. Instead you just... lean into it. That's the phrase we're using these days for just giving into what you've gotta do instead of griping about it, right?

Fortunately, there are lots of ways to sneakily sneak real-world study skills, handwork, knowledge-building, and practical life activities into a kid's Nutcracker obsession, whether she's a tiny angel bringing light back into the world, a tin soldier hardened from a lifetime of fighting in the mouse wars, a deadly assassin/Baroque-costumed child of the Creature Known Only as Mother Ginger, or a young party guest/spy attending a Christmas party and low-key planning to steal a certain magical nutcracker that turns into a real person and controls an army of ensorceled children and fights giant mice for you.

First step: read the book:



It's plenty weird, and there's a LOT to talk about. There's a ton of plot that's completely different from any staging of the ballet that you've ever seen, so you can use it as a reference to compare to all of the further picture book and theatrical productions that you feel like watching.

Because you should read and watch as many different versions of the Nutcracker as your kid can stand! Syd has gotten progressively more interested in this as she's gotten older, and this year I swear we watched the first act and at least the overture and Mother Ginger scenes from the second act in every Nutcracker ballet available on YouTube--even the desperately amateur productions, bless their hearts. There are a lot of interesting aspects of how different productions are choreographed and staged, and once you've seen a few so that you've got a baseline of a typical Nutcracker production, the ones that have made atypical choices are really fun to find! Did you know that the Bolshoi Ballet casts an actual kid as the Nutcracker doll? There's also a production somewhere in which the mouse soldiers are small children, and some of them get killed during the battle, fall over dead onto their backs on stage, and are then dragged off stage by their fellow mice! It's BONKERS!!!

There's also a production in which the soldiers, including Fritz, LOSE THE BATTLE and are carted off stage in an actual cage. Later during the second act, when the Arabian dance begins, the dancing couple come on stage dragging Fritz by a chain that's attached to a collar around his neck! Because apparently the child soldiers who were captured were SOLD INTO SLAVERY?!?!?!?!?

See? Fascinating stuff!

I also really like these other retellings of the Nutcracker story or the Nutcracker ballet:



Most of those are picture books with beautiful art, and wonderful inspiration to draw your own  magical Nutcracker scenes--or perhaps create your own picture book/stop-motion film/shoebox diorama/puppet show/live reenactment?

There are also a ton of backstage, behind-the-scenes resources that can fascinate kids. Syd's absolute favorite ballet book is this one--



--about a kid cast as Clara in the NYC production of The Nutcracker. If your kid actually dances ballet, though, you do NOT want to feed her only on books about the kids who are cast as the lead roles, because only a couple of kids a year get those roles and it's already going to suck bad enough when it's not your kid. Therefore, MY favorite backstage Nutcracker book is this one:



It's about a kid who gets the lousiest part in the whole production, feels lousy about it forever, and then doubles-down into it and learns to find its magic. It's a far more realistic version of what it's like to dance in the Nutcracker, with a healthy, wholesome message.

That being said, it is really fun to watch backstage documentaries. Most do follow the kids cast as Clara, but documentaries often give a more well-rounded picture of the production, so they're not as focused on how great it is to get the great roles. Syd and I watch all of the Royal Ballet videos:



Boston has some crazy sets, so this one is fun!



Here's a video all about the Mouse King, who should obviously be everyone's favorite character!



We also liked this series focused on Nutcracker auditions:



It's related to a bunch of other audition and ballet school and rehearsal videos that Syd also likes. There are a lot of interesting Russian ballet behind-the-scenes videos!

So you've got the story to study, you've got the dance to study... and you've got the music! If you think that the Nutcracker is not playing constantly in our house from October through December, then you... well, you are wrong, because it is playing constantly in our house from October through December. Honestly, it's playing for a good portion of August and September, too, if you count audition prep.

Syd sometimes lets me jazz it up by playing Duke Ellington's version, instead:



Kid-friendly composer studies can actually be challenging to find, because most children's studies don't include classical music. Charlotte Mason DOES, fortunately, so there are some resources around. Here's a good template for a composer study, complete with lots of free handouts, that includes Tchaikovsky.

This video is also interesting, because it takes one song and shows you the main instrument playing at each moment:



This CD doesn't tell you a ton ABOUT Tchaikovsky, but it includes a lot of his music and it's really fun!



So now your kid has studied the story, the dance, the music... but what's the weirdest part of the Nutcracker?

The NUTCRACKER!!!

Seriously, it's a ballet about a NUTCRACKER. My kid doesn't even like nuts, and yet she owns something like sixteen nutcrackers by now.

Mind you, none of them are functional, but there you go.

We like this How It's Made video about the traditional nutcracker form:



And this is an interesting video on the history of the nutcracker and how it all got wrapped up in Christmas, anyway:



And, of course, you know that this would not be a kid-friendly unit in MY homeschool if it did not include a very impractical video of something over-the-top. We are NOT going to be building this giant nutcracker that can crack coconuts for us:



Instead, here are some nutcracker crafts that you CAN build while watching ballet videos or listening to Tchaikovsky!

• stenciled banner. I like the idea of a nutcracker banner as holiday decor, and I'm thinking that felt (which I have a ton of) would be just as nice of a penant material as the burlap that the tutorial calls for. You can find lots of nutcracker-related stencils online (I think one that featured a timeline of Syd's participation would be really cute!), but a good art project would be teaching the kids how to make stencils and then getting them to freehand some for this banner.
• real nutcracker. We do not have the equipment for this, but if I can ever access it, this is going to be one of the first projects that the kids and I make together!
• popsicle stick nutcracker. If you don't have the miniature popsicle sticks that this project calls for, you can cut the larger ones to size. 
• nutcracker cube critter. These little dudes remind me of the LEGO brickheads, but you cut and assemble them from cardstock. 
• clay nutcracker and angel. This is a very accessible tutorial, but if you're an able crafter and want to use polymer clay, you can search for some very intricate and elaborate tutorials on YouTube. Or just wing it!
• clothespin soldiers. You can reenact the entire battle scene!
• guided drawing with nutcrackers. I love this art activity! You can make it as simple or as in-depth as suits you.

If you're attending the ballet, I like a lot of the activities from this educator's guide to the Nutcracker. This one, though, has activities that you can print-out--maybe you can use it to keep a kid entertained before the show starts?

It's strange to think of what a small part of Syd's entire life these childhood Nutcracker seasons will be, considering what a large part of her life they take up right now. Ballet isn't really one of my own big interests, but I never regret the time that it takes, or how deeply I have to dive, myself, to help a kid dive deeper into her passions.

Anyway, now that Nutcracker is over for a few months, it's time for Syd to immerse herself into her designs for our town's big Trashion/Refashion Show. No regrets on this project, either, but just between us, I like Nutcracker more than I like fashion design!

P.S. If you like study resources and weird videos of people making giant nutcrackers and cracking coconuts with them, you'd like my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Girl Scout Make Your Own Badge: Keyboarding

I have been telling you guys for six years now that Girl Scout badges are AMAZING for getting kids to try new things and stretch themselves in new directions. One of my kids built a genuine dog house for a badge. The other kid wrote an honest-to-god screenplay. I don't know, I could probably sit here for an hour and name off the cool things both kids have accomplished solely for the lure of that prestigious badge on their vests, but I'm actually only sitting here because Will is sitting next to me memorizing the Document-Based Question rubric for the AP European History exam and then we're going to go over her DBQ draft and outline it using the rubric as our spine and then she's going to write another draft of it, so, you know, my brain is already busy.

Instead, here's the latest thing that one of my kids has done for a Girl Scout badge: Syd, who doesn't take piano lessons, learned to play a song on our keyboard.

There's another entire history there, how I super wanted both kids to learn an instrument when they were littler, and managed to get one kid into guitar lessons and it went pretty well for a while before it crashed and burned, and managed to get them both to sort of unenthusiastically study keyboard and/or recorder at home off and on for a couple of years before they both finally wore out my patience and I let them drop it.

Enter the Make Your Own badge. This is a retired Girl Scout badge program that lets kids create a badge topic, come up with their own five steps to earn that badge, and then complete those steps and actually design the actual badge that the kid can proudly wear. Back when the MYO badge program was active, the Girl Scouts had a site where kids could use clip art to make these badges, and since its retirement, some groups and companies have started making small runs of embroidered badges for kids who are all interested in the same thing.

My kids are always interested in weird things, though (Syd's last MYO badge was Doughnut Designer), so I simply bought a few blank badges that we can draw and paint on, and asked them what they were most wanting to learn how to do these days.

Syd's answer?

Well, she wanted to learn how to play one of her favorite songs on the keyboard. Specifically, she wanted to learn how to play Shawn Mendes' "In My Blood."

And, just in case you think that I would finally be delighted about one of my kids FINALLY showing interest in a musical instrument, no, she didn't want anyone to teach her this song. No lessons. No instructors. No YouTube tutorials. No mentoring allowed AT ALL by ANYONE.

You're less delighted for me now, aren't you? You're even thinking that it simply can't be done. I mean, this isn't "Twinkle, Twinkle" or "Mary Had a Little Lamb." So, whatever. I told Syd I thought it was a terrific idea and I internally gave up on it. She'd work on it for a while, get frustrated, discover it was impossible, drop it, forget all about it, and I'd have her pick something else later.

But what actually happened is that my kid, through the most obtuse channels, did actually learn how to play a passable version of this song! And the way that she did it is absolutely bonkers.

1. She browsed through free piano game apps for her cheapo, four-year-old Kindle Fire that's the only tablet that she owns, the poor little lamb. Her mother is so mean! Eventually, she settled on this one, which has the primary characteristics of having the song that she wanted AND having a virtual piano keyboard that she can look at. Mind you, it doesn't have the notes on the keyboard, but that's cool because she can't read music.

2. She played the game, one of those "touch the screen at the right spot at the right time" rhythm games, a billion times to earn enough points to unlock the Shawn Mendes song that she wanted.

3. The song's game drops the melody notes onto a piano keyboard; touching the notes at the right time causes the full score to play and earns you points, etc. Syd played this game hundreds of times, first matching the game's keyboard to our keyboard by ear, then transcribing the game's musical notes. She tried several methods for this, too, including numbering our keyboard keys with a dry-erase marker, creating her own musical code and writing the notes down that way, and drawing her own keyboard and trying to tag the notes that way. It was painstaking to watch, made up mostly of trial and error, and took absolutely forever because you can't rewind the song on the game. To transcribe the notes in the middle of the song you have to play to the middle of the song on the game, over and over and over.

4. Syd learned the melody piece by piece, using trial and error not just for the actual notes, but also for the rhythm. When she forgot a note she'd have to play through the song on the game several times to figure out what she was doing wrong, then transcribe it to the keyboard all over again.

5. Finally, Syd got to the point where she felt like she had the melody memorized, and she had much more fun making it sound the way she wanted it to.

It's not perfect. I mean, obviously--you read how she learned the whole thing off a Kind app!--but it's sure as hell impressive for a kid who can't already play the keyboard, or read music, or play any other instrument whatsoever. I'd say it's worth a Girl Scout badge for sure! And you guys: this is the kid who has sneaked or weaseled out of 80% of her assigned schoolwork since the day she turned 12. She's the kid who, when I asked her what she wanted to do with her life, told me with a straight face that she wanted to sit on my couch, play Minecraft, and make art forever. Part of me is breathless with relief that she DOES have grit and determination, and part of me is gnashing my teeth as I wonder why she can't apply even an ounce of that grit and determination to her math curriculum. Grr.

This will be the cover photo for her upcoming CD, I think:

So the moral of the story, the best I can figure, is this: who cares what the "right" way to do something is? If you want to learn to play "In My Blood" on the keyboard, and you don't want to take lessons, then you go ahead and teach yourself. So what if you don't have proper fingering? The insistence on and privileging of "being taught" something as opposed to teaching yourself is kinda elitist, if you really think about it. Not only are there loads of people who don't have access to piano teachers and properly weighted keyboard keys who would love to play themselves some Shawn Mendes tunes, but there's also plenty of room in the world for people who simply don't feel like taking lessons and would rather drag that Shawn Mendes tune out of a digital toy by the scruff of its neck and muscle it onto a keyboard all by their dang selves.

And then they get to put a badge on their vest to show that they can do hard things just for the fun of it.

Nashville is Country Music

In between the science and history--and the doughnuts!--we did the sightseeing in Nashville that *I* really wanted to do:

The country music!

The Country Music Hall of Fame is thorough enough that you can go without having any real prior knowledge of country music and come away with a good understanding of its history and its momentous people, places, and things, but it's a real treat to go when you DO know country music, because you get to see stuff from all of your favorite musicians!

Two of Loretta Lynn's Grammies

Loretta Lynn actually made this dress herself when she was a kid. Sissy Spacek wore it in Coal Miner's Daughter.

I called the kids over to read this blurb from the museum's excellent History of Country Music display. "Barbara Allen" is the first song we learned for our Folk Music study!

I love Minnie Pearl so much that I can't even stand it. Even as a kid, I always thought that she was the funniest person, and as a kid who was baffled by fashion and the way that all the other girls managed to look cute in their clothes, I remember noting that Minnie Pearl did not dress cute, and it was awesome.

Here is one view of one of Elvis' cars. It had a TV in the back!

I entered a state of fangirl bliss when I saw this, the cornfield from the Hee-Haw set, with the costumes of some of the characters!

handwritten rough draft, with edits, of "American Pie"

one of Johnny Cash's guitars! He has his own museum in Nashville, so there weren't many of his artifacts here at the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Here is Minnie Pearl's plaque in the Hall of Fame.

To keep the kids entertained, there was a scavenger hunt that they could complete to earn a small prize from the museum, and I had them work on earning the Country Music Hall of Fame's fun patch for Girl Scouts. They had to pick and research a musician, then find their plaque. Here is Syd with her pick, Emmylou Harris.

We didn't go to the newer Grand Ole Opry location in Opry Mills (although we DID go to Opry Mills Mall to buy Syd some Crocs and visit the Bass Pro Shop), but instead to the Ryman Auditorium.

I also love Roy Acuff.

The Ryman Auditorium has a fascinating history, and it's interesting to tour.

Part of what makes it special is the fact that after serving as an iconic venue for decades, it was abandoned for further decades, and almost demolished before people came together to save and restore it. Here's part of the balcony that informed the restoration--can you see the hand-stenciled embellishments under the top layers of paint?

They made sure to include it in the restoration:

Here's the stage, so important that when the Grande Ole Opry later moved to their new location, they cut out a piece of it and put it front and center on their new stage so that musicians could still perform on it.

I'm not going to lie--I was VERY offended that you could only take a photo of yourself in front of the stage by paying extra. Seems a bit grabby-fisted to me, as you've already paid admission to get in, AND they don't advertise beforehand that they're going to grabby-fist you, but ah, well. This free photo, not nearly as nice, will have to do.

 But of course you haven't really done the Ryman if you haven't been to a concert there. And what better concert to go to than the Grand Ole Opry itself?

I was worried that the kids would be bored, but they seemed to have a fine time. And the Gatlin Brothers were there, with Larry Gatlin emceeing the show. The Gatlin Brothers only really had one big country music hit, but we must have had some eight-tracks of their gospel music or something, because somehow I'm very familiar with them. 

We didn't do everything that I wanted to do in Nashville--the kids took one look at the tourist crowds on Broadway and made sure that I understood that we would NOT being going into any of these honky-tonks, my desire to listen to live music be damned, and somehow we managed to not eat any hot chicken, either--but we managed to fill three days with activities that kids and adults enjoyed.

As part of our folk music study this year, here are some resources on The Grande Old Opry, Nashville, and the history of country music that we've enjoyed:

Scenes from the Grand Ole Opry Through the Decades (Use the Grand Ole Opry's YouTube page to find current videos)

Other Resources

• American Roots Music
• Coal Miner's Daughter
• Walk the Line
• Hee-Haw
• Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison
• Oxford American Southern Music CD: Music of Tennessee
• Tenney