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

Sightseeing in Nashville: Science, History, and Doughnuts!

Nashville is such a kid-friendly city that when I could eventually be dragged away from the country music, we found plenty of other fun things to do there. We revisited the Nashville Parthenon, this time in the daylight:

We wanted to go inside and see the recreated statue of Athena, but alas, the price stymied us--twenty bucks seemed a little spendy just for statue spying, so we stayed outside:

We've been to Greece since the last time we saw this Parthenon, and both kids commented that from that perspective, the Nashville Parthenon actually doesn't look all that much like its Athens counterpart. The structure is the same, of course, and the metopes are evident, and it's not, you know, under construction, but most importantly to the children--it's the wrong color!

I guess brick, plaster, and wood can't compete with Pentelic marble.

Of course, after turning up our collective noses at spending twenty bucks on art and history, we spent just about twenty bucks on four doughnuts at Five Daughters Bakery!

The kids noted that this is possibly THE most hipster establishment that we have ever frequented, and we have a hipster bakery in our own hometown!

BUT the doughnuts were delicious, as you can see:

And there was a hipster playground for the kids to run off their sugar in:

We are constantly losing Syd on vacations!

Our hometown hands-on science museum is a member of the ASTC Passport Program, and I like to make a point to stop into whatever other member museums that we can whenever we travel--since visits to member museums are free, it's a terrific and free way to kill some time with the kids. Even though we went to the Adventure Science Center during our trip through Nashville last year, when we went back there were several new things to do, and it turns out that the things that the kids had done last year were still fun, too:

Last year, the Adventure Science Center had a traveling exhibit on poisons that we all loooooooved, but I might have loved these two traveling exhibits on math in motion and math-inspired art even more!

Ugh, I was obsessed with this over-engineered, large-format spirograph:

And of course the kids found the toddler toys. These toy fruits were actually super cool, because they were also fraction manipulatives--you could have one-half of an apple, then attach another one-third apple to it, and see how much of an apple you have! I was wishing I'd had a set when the kiddos were wee--maybe it would have made equivalent fractions more transparent to them when they were introduced in their math curriculum...

Here you can graph your movement up and down a column of colors:



Here you can play with your shadow:

Here you can play with light:

Here you can play with perimeters:



And here you can just play!

We once again stayed until we closed the place down, and then we headed downtown for food, Broadway, and The Grand Ole Opry.

You Can Pet Kangaroos at the Nashville Zoo

Both kids love animals, so zoos and aquariums are sites that we always try to visit when we travel. Other than the hotel, indoor pool, and local pizza restaurant, then, the Nashville Zoo was the first place that we visited in Nashville.

Bonus (kinda): it was so freaking cold on this day that the ticket office gave us half-off our admission!

And because of the cold, some of the animals weren't out (the African plains, in particular, were deserted), but there were still plenty of beautiful critters to spy:



Especially in the nice and warm herpetology building!

This was pretty cool. The zoo was preparing to open a new exhibit the next day, and they were removing some of the rays from this exhibit to transfer to the new one:

Turns out that goats don't mind being cold, and there's nothing that my kids love better than a petting zoo!

These goats could even do some tricks!

The younger kid's favorite animal was the cloud leopard. She sat for ages and just watched these particular kitties chilling in a patch of sunlight:

The best place, though, was the kangaroo habitat. You could just walk through it freely--and so could the kangaroos!

Of course you, unlike they, have to stay on the path:

But, if you can reach them, you're allowed to pet them. Unfortunately, most of the kangaroos spent most of their time napping just out of reach of people's arms--I mean, of course:

But occasionally one would get so dozy that it would roll over near enough:

Found a punctuation error:

The zoo used to be someone's farm, and they still have the original house and the kitchen garden on display. You know how much I love a historic garden!

They also have one of the best playgrounds that I've ever seen. Matt and I were kind of tapped out at this point, so I don't have many photos, but trust me--it was massive and really cool:

One annoyance throughout the day had been some pestering flocks of wild geese that seem to have made their home at the zoo. They were pretty aggressive, not being fussed at all by the presence of people but instead quite interested in the contents of their bags and pockets and hands, and I kept seeing people encouraging them, feeding them junk and convincing their children to get close to them for photos, and it was pissing me off. It doesn't do any favors to a kid, to teach it to approach a wild animal and treat it like a photo prop, and it doesn't do any favors to the geese, feeding them crap and teaching them to behave aggressively around humans.

There were some geese piled around a primate exhibit, being encouraged by a dad with a camera who was trying to film his toddler interacting with them, and some dudes on a bench feeding them popcorn. I was soooooo ready to go, but the primates had just come outside, the kids were dying to see them, and this dad and the geese were completely blocking the path. I ignored the whole lot of them and walked straight down the path, through the middle of the geese. One goose started hissing at me--because geese are aggressive--and I ignored it while the dudes on the bench heckled me, and it tried to bite me, but I didn't care because I was wearing jeans, so I didn't even look at it, just kind of kicked it away from me as I kept walking. I heard the dudes screaming, but I figured they were just shocked that the goose actually attacked me, so I just kept walking and ignored them. When the rest of the family finally caught up with me, however, the kids were in hysterics with laughter. They'd wisely been more reluctant to walk straight through a flock of geese, so they had the perfect vantage point to see that when I'd kicked at the goose that was biting me, I'd actually unintentionally kicked it (the kids say kick, but I swear it was more of a very firm nudge) straight at the dudes who were heckling me. All the dudes (except for one dude--good job, Calm Dude!) immediately started shrieking, and both kids insisted that they had literally jumped behind the bench they'd been sitting on, fleeing from the goose.

That will teach THEM to encourage the wildlife!

And now whenever I am angry at someone, the children like to ask if I'm going to kick a goose at them.

Curious about the other zoos and aquariums we've visited? Here they are, and I promise that I have not kicked any of the animals at any of them:

• Cincinnati Zoo
• Georgia Aquarium
• Indianapolis Zoo
• Louisville Zoo
• Monterey Bay Aquarium
• New England Aquarium
• Newport Aquarium
• St. Louis Zoo
• San Francisco Zoo
• Shedd Aquarium
• Smithsonian National Zoo