Nashville Demystified

In which we talk with Mary Mancini about the legacy Lucy’s Record Shop, punk and “alternative” music in the Nashville 90s, and the import of all ages venues. This is such a lovely chat, I am so excited for you to listen!

Lucy’s Record Shop Podcast:

Lucy Barks Documentary:

Nashville Demystified is made possible with support by Knack Factory. It is distributed by We Own This Town.

You can find Nashville Demystified online on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

I talk with artist Kevin Guthrie about his time in Nashville and his development as an artist even though he gets a little weird about accepting the term. His show, A History of Tofu in America, will hang at the Julia Martin Gallery through the end of April 2022.

Within we discuss all sorts of stuff, from his times on the road with Pavement and the Silver Jews to how he became fixated on Tofu. Kevin is an extraordinary dude and this was a super fun chat.

Nashville Demystified is made possible with support by Knack Factory. It is distributed by We Own This Town.

You can find Nashville Demystified online on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

Today I talk with Caitlin Rose, who recently reissued a 10th anniversary edition of her record Own Side Now.

We discuss music making, living with tricky brains, and being weird kids. It’s a fun, sprawling conversation with an extraordinarily gifted songwriter and musician.

Nashville Demystified is made possible with support by Knack Factory. It is distributed by We Own This Town.

You can find Nashville Demystified online on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

Today we’ll talk with Steven Hale, the great and prolific Nashville Scene journalist. Steven tells us about his reporting regarding the proliferation of fentanyl poisoning and its impact on record rates of drug overdoses in the city.

His piece in the Nashville Scene — “The Other Epidemic: Fentanyl Is Killing People in Nashville at a Staggering Rate” — came out on November 4, 2021.

Since it came out, The New York Times has reported on the trend nationally, indicating that a record number of Americans — 100,000 died from April 2020 to April 2021 – and a substantial reason for that has been the proliferation of drugs cut with fentanyl.

Nashville Demystified is made possible with support by Knack Factory. It is distributed by We Own This Town.

You can find Nashville Demystified online on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

Behold! The second installment of our two part series on The Bell Witch.

Today weâ€re going to dive into the actual story—well, the QUOTE actual story—and get into many of the details that tend to be omitted in its retelling. Weâ€ll get to know M.V. Ingram, the author of the first book on The Bell Witch, a bit better, and weâ€ll examine theories on what the haunting may have *actually* been. And! I was contacted by one of the highest authorities on all things Bell Witch in regard to last weekâ€s episode, so Iâ€ll share a bit about that.

We’re joined by our pal Sean Nelson in this episode! Thanks so much for lending us your voice talents, Sean!

We also pull heavily from Betsy Philips’ blog Tiny Cat Pants. Particularly these installments:

You can find Pat Fitzhugh’s Bell Witch website here: http://www.bellwitch.org/

Nashville Demystified is made possible with support by Knack Factory. It is distributed by We Own This Town.

You can find Nashville Demystified online on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

In this episode weâ€re evoking spirits, and weâ€re telling old stories. Youâ€ll hear about the Bell Witch, sure, but this story is not about the Bell Witch. You donâ€t need any more of that—itâ€s been done. Itâ€s a tour, itâ€s a movie, itâ€s another movie, itâ€s a documentary, itâ€s a number of different books, itâ€s a number of different episodes of ghost hunter or spooky histories series. The Bell Witch has been done.

This is a story about stories.

Nashville Demystified is made possible with support by Knack Factory. It is distributed by We Own This Town.

You can find Nashville Demystified online on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

We talk with writer and journalist Craig Havighurst about the history of the Station Inn and its fate after the passing of owner JT Gray. We also discuss what Craig is excited about for the rest of 2021.

In addition to being a writer (he wrote Air Castle of the South: WSM and the making of Music City in 2011), Craig is a staff music producer for WMOT Roots Radio. He is also a regular contributor for WPLN in Nashville and Nashville Public Radio, and he has produced short documentaries for permanent exhibition at the Earl Scruggs center.

Craig has been senior producer, co-host and show journalist for Music City Roots, a weekly Americana radio show for over a decade. Music City Roots is in a production hiatus while the show builds a custom venue in Nashville, which he also talks about in this episode.

Nashville Demystified is made possible with support by Knack Factory. It is distributed by We Own This Town.

You can find Nashville Demystified online on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

In which Nashville Demystified RETURNS and catches up with the splendiferous Maggie Rose. We discuss Maggie’s upcoming album Have a Seat, her podcast Salute the Songbird, and some of the lessons she’s learned after a decade and a half in Nashville.

Nashville Demystified is made possible with support by Knack Factory. It is distributed by We Own This Town.

For more with Maggie, we had a chat about Pretty Woman earlier this week on my other podcast Why Are Dads.

You can find Nashville Demystified online on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

Rebroadcast from September 25th, 2019

Thelma and the Sleaze, for those not in the know, is an all-female queer southern rock band thatâ€s been around for almost a decade. While singer band center of gravity Lauren “LG” Gilbert doesnâ€t live in Nashville—she lives in Alabama as youâ€ll hear here—she long lived in Nashville and the band has deep roots here.

Thelma and the Sleaze has a number of records out, but right now theyâ€re touring around and supporting their album Fuck, Marry, Kill — which I think I refer to in this interview at least once as Fuck, Murder Kill. I accept responsibility for this bad—my bad, Iâ€m sorry, LG—but I to my credit, I donâ€t know if youâ€ve ever been in a room with LG but she is an absolute force and itâ€s hard to not feel / act like an idiot in the presence of this level of stardom. Honest to god, I donâ€t say so facetiously. It was difficult to keep level headed, sheâ€s so fucking cool. But we made it.

More on Thelma and the Sleaze:

Official Site: thelmaandthesleaze.com

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Today we talk with author Steve Haruch. We discuss his wonderful new book—which was published by Vanderbilt Press—called Greetings from New Nashville. Steve edited the Greetings, and two of his essays are featured amount a number of others by some of my very favorite writers in the city. By looking at the time period between 1998 and 2018, it examines how and why the New Nashville we know today—the so-called It City—emerged and it sorts through the impact and implications of that rise. In many ways, it is a question weâ€ve been asking with every episode, and the lens through which weâ€ve been trying to look at Nashville history and so to read the take presented by this collection of essays was both refreshing and satisfying. I had a lot of a-ha moments on my journey through it. The book comes out in October, but you can preorder it now.

Steve, I should tell you, is a writer, editor, and filmmaker based in Nashville. His work has appeared in the Nashville Scene, the New York Times, NPR’s Code Switch, the Guardian, and elsewhere. He is currently producing a documentary film about the history of college radio.

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