Nashville Demystified

In 1982, the Nashville Flame volunteered to have himself lowered into a dangerous, long-decommissioned mine to recover the bodies of two murder victims.

Eight years earlier, he experienced something even stranger than a couple of frozen corpses at the bottom of a 250 foot deep hole in the ground.

Also, we take you down a fever dreamy rabbit hole of 1980s Nashville.

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Today weâ€ll talk with Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza. Robyn lives here in Nashville and is a queer, non-binary, Latinx poet and holds a PhD in theology. Robyn is also author of the book Activist Theology, which is a collection of stories about how they found their way as an activist, a theologian and a person living in this weird and unstable time. I canâ€t say enough good things about Robyn and this conversation outside of the fact that I am stoked to be sharing it with you. It will change your perspective for the better and if your perspective is already changed in that way, it will just make you stoked to be a living, thinking person.

I also talk with Tristan Scroggins – a mandolinist and all around bluegrass wizard. He is also a columnist for No Depression, where he writes about—among other things—how strange it is to live life on the road as a traveling musician.

More Robyn Henderson-Espinoza

More Tristan Scroggins

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Today I talk about–and I hate how timely this conversation is–Nashvilleâ€s history of white supremacist violence with author and historian Betsy Phillips. Specifically we talk about bombings that took place over a half century ago, but as this week reminds, the mass violence of white supremacists is something that is not part of our history–it is part of our ongoing reality. One quick point of interest–Betsy reminds that bombings used to be the preferred method of violence in these types of strikes, largely because dynamite was so easy to come by. You could just go to a store and, very affordably, buy dynamite! And then when dynamite became more difficult to come by, the rate of bombings went down. Imagine that.

Betsyâ€s forthcoming book is Dynamite Nashville: The KKK, The FBI, and the Bombers Beyond Their Control coming out from Third Man Books in late 2020/early 2021. In it, she is attempting to solve Nashville’s three unsolved integration-era bombings or at least explain why they haven’t been solved. What I found is that our bombings were part of a vast network of bombings throughout the South, the precursors to some of the more famous violence of the 1960s. Meaning, in short, if our bombings had been solved and that network disrupted, many of the tragedies of the 1960s could have been avoided.

The three bombings are Hattie Cotton Elementary School on September 10, 1957 (it was the culmination of the first day of integrated first grade in Nashville–which was September 9–but the bomb didn’t go off until after midnight); the Jewish Community Center on March 16, 1958 (the Confederate Underground took credit for that bombing); and Councilman Z. Alexander Looby’s home on April 19, 1960. Thankfully no one died in the explosions. Looby, aside from being a city councilperson, was also the preeminent civil rights attorney in the state. He was the lawyer for the plaintiffs that forced Nashville’s schools to desegregate and he was one of the lawyers for the sit-in protesters.

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Image from The Tennessean

Today we talk with:

Eleanor Buckland [Lula Wiles]

Eleanor discusses why professional musicians†concepts of “home” can be especially unique.

Evan and James, both professional musicians themselves, talk about how and why Bluegrass Wednesdays (at the American Legion Post 82) came to be.

Related topics:

Nashville Demystified is brought to you by Knack Factory – a commercial video and content production company with offices here in the city and We Own This Town. Knack Factory is a commercial video and content production firm in Nashville. We Own This Town is a collective of podcasters based in Nashville.

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