More Nashville Nostalgia

This is E. D. Thompson's second collection of facts and memories about the Nashville that we remember. If you read Nashville Nostalgia, then you know that you are about to add to the knowledge and happiness that you derived from that book. If this volume is your first look back at the Nashville of your childhood and your parents' childhood, then you are about to embark on a journey through the history of a city like no other. More Nashville Nostalgia will remind you why Nashville is called the Athens of the South and Music City USA, where your favorite department stores and movie theatres were located, when Hillsboro High School burned down, what big bands played in Nashville, and who Alfred Leland Crabb, Louis Nicholas, Jere Baxter, Ken Bramming, and Bettie Page were. On every page is a name, a food, a street, or a pastime which will spark a happy memory-and for the parts which are new to you, this book will make you wish you had known them! My father's love for the past is infectious, and you will find yourself sharing his wistful reverence for those sights and sounds which will never come again but which will never leave our memories and our hearts. The only treasure more valuable than Nashville nostalgia is more Nashville nostalgia!

E.D. Thompson chronicles the many changes that Nashville has gone through during the past 50 years. He writes a weekly column on Nashville Nostalgia and also does a weekly radio broadcast.

E.D. Thompson's first two Nashville Nostalgia books offered wonderful reminiscences of (mostly) twentieth-century Nashville. However, his latest book, The Nashville Nostalgia Years is a colossal indexing of Nashville history spanning more than 260 years. This catalogue of time will transport the reader back to the Nashville of the nineteenth and even eighteenth centuries, as well as to the Nashville which exists in the memories of readers, their parents, and their children. The Nashville Nostalgia Years journeys, year by year, through the remarkable history of this beloved city. Along the way, sixty-six nostalgic essays elaborate on memorable people, places, and events.

Before there were guidebooks, there were just guides—people in the community you could count on to show you around. I'll Take You There is written by and with the people who most intimately know Nashville, foregrounding the struggles and achievements of people's movements toward social justice. The colloquial use of "I'll take you there" has long been a response to the call of a stranger: for recommendations of safe passage through unfamiliar territory, a decent meal and place to lay one's head, or perhaps a watering hole or juke joint. In this book, more than one hundred Nashvillians "take us there," guiding us to places we might not otherwise encounter. Their collective entries bear witness to the ways that power has been used by social, political, and economic elites to tell or omit certain stories, while celebrating the power of counternarratives as a tool to resist injustice. Indeed, each entry is simultaneously a story about place, power, and the historic and ongoing struggle toward a more just city for all. The result is akin to the experience of asking for directions in an unfamiliar place and receiving a warm offer from a local to lead you on, accompanied by a tale or two.

Nashville is chock-full of music landmarks, but there are quite a few historic structures that have been lost to time. The elegant Maxwell House Hotel served a breakfast blend that grew into the nationally known coffee brand. Public transportation first arrived in Nashville by way of horse-pulled streetcars in the 1860s. Fort Negley was the largest stone fort built during the Civil War. The Nashville Female Academy once served as the largest school for young ladies in the United States during the nineteenth century. Author Elizabeth Goetsch digs into the archives for some of the Music City's lost structures.

At the turn of the twentieth century, few white, southern leaders would speak out in favor of racial equality for fear of being dismissed as too progressive. Willis Duke Weatherford (1875--1970), however, defied convention as one of the first prominent white southern liberals to dedicate his life to reforming the South's social system, eliminating violence and injustice through education, and opening a dialogue among the affected groups. His energetic efforts led to a rise in progressive action in the region, though at times his own beliefs prevented him from advocating for absolute racial equality. As a result, historians debate Weatherford's legacy: Was he a forward-thinking supporter of human rights or merely a moderate paternalist? In this comprehensive biography, Andrew McNeill Canady offers a reassessment of the influential educator's life and work. Canady surveys Weatherford's work with institutions such as the YMCA, Berea College, and Fisk University and illuminates his many efforts to foster dialogue among southerners of all races about religion, race relations, and Appalachia. He also examines Weatherford's reluctance to challenge Jim Crow laws and the capitalist economy that contributed to the poverty of African Americans and the people of Appalachia, revealing the limitations that southern reformers faced and the often-difficult compromises they were forced to make. During a career that spanned from the Progressive Era to the civil rights movement, Weatherford was involved in virtually every significant southern liberal effort of his time. Past research has focused primarily on Weatherford's early work, but Canady's study is the first to investigate the full trajectory of his life and career. This overdue biography makes a significant contribution to literature on the long civil rights movement and the development of southern liberalism.

New Critical Nostalgia weighs the future of literary study by reassessing its past. It tracks today's impassioned debates about method back to the discipline’s early professional era, when an unprecedented makeover of American higher education with far-reaching social consequences resulted in what we might call our first crisis of academic life. Rovee probes literary study’s nostalgic attachments to this past, by recasting an essential episode in the historiography of English—the vigorous rejection of romanticism by American New Critics—in the new light of the American university’s tectonic growth. In the process, he demonstrates literary study’s profound investment in romanticism and reveals the romantic lyric’s special affect, nostalgia, as having been part of English’s professional identity all along. New Critical Nostalgia meticulously shows what is lost in reducing mid-century American criticism and the intense, quirky, and unpredictable writings of central figures, such as Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and W. K. Wimsatt, to a glib monolith of New Critical anti-romanticism. In Rovee’s historically rich account, grounded in analysis of critical texts and enlivened by archival study, readers discover John Crowe Ransom’s and William Wordsworth’s shared existential nostalgia, witness the demolition of the “immature” Percy Shelley in the revolutionary textbook Understanding Poetry, explore the classroom give-and-take prompted by the close reading of John Keats, consider the strange ambivalence toward Lord Byron on the part of formalist critics and romantic scholars alike, and encounter the strikingly contemporary quantitative studies by one of the mid-century’s preeminent poetry scholars, Josephine Miles. These complex and enthralling engagements with the romantic lyric introduce the reader to a dynamic intellectual milieu, in which professionals with varying methodological commitments (from New Critics to computationalists), working in radically different academic locales (from Nashville and New Haven to Baton Rouge and Berkeley), wrangled over what it means to read, with nothing less than the future of the discipline at stake.

In The Gaithers and Southern Gospel, Ryan P. Harper examines songwriters Bill and Gloria Gaither's Homecoming video and concert series--a gospel music franchise that, since its beginning in 1991, has outperformed all Christian and much secular popular music on the American music market. The Homecomings represent "southern gospel." Typically that means a musical style popular among white evangelical Christians in the American South and Midwest, and it sometimes overlaps in style, theme, and audience with country music. The Homecomings" nostalgic orientation--their celebration of "traditional" kinds of American Christian life--harmonize well with southern gospel music, past and present. But amidst the backward gazes, the Homecomings also portend and manifest change. The Gaithers" deliberate racial integration of their stages, their careful articulation of a relatively inclusive evangelical theology, and their experiments with an array of musical forms demonstrate that the Homecoming is neither simplistically nostalgic, nor solely "southern." Harper reveals how the Gaithers negotiate a tension between traditional and changing community norms as they seek simultaneously to maintain and expand their audience as well as to initiate and respond to shifts within their fan base. Pulling from his field work at Homecoming concerts, behind the scenes with the Gaithers, and with numerous Homecoming fans, Harper reveals the Homecoming world to be a dynamic, complicated constellation in the formation of American religious identity.