Nashville Musical History Tour

Nashville Musical History Tour Looking for musical knowledge beyond what you can get on the local bus or walking tours? The Nashville Musical History tour has what you want!

Dolly Parton and Andrew Wexler, CEO of Herschend Enterprises, were scouting hotel sites around downtown Nashville one da...
10/07/2026

Dolly Parton and Andrew Wexler, CEO of Herschend Enterprises, were scouting hotel sites around downtown Nashville one day when they pulled up to 211 Commerce St, at the corner of Commerce and Third Avenue North.

"This is the one," Parton said. Just one problem, Wexler told her: The building wasn't for sale.

"Andrew, you'll figure it out," she said.

Wexler told the story at the official opening of Dolly Parton's SongTeller Hotel on Oct. 6.

The tower, developed by The Mathews Company and Ayers Asset Management, opened in May 2000 as Commerce Center. It had originally been slated to carry the name of its intended anchor tenant, Nashville-based MagneTek Inc. The electronics manufacturer backed out before the opening, subleasing its space to law firm Baker Donelson Bearman & Caldwell. Baker Donelson and the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce were there from the opening; in 2009, Baker Donelson expanded and the building became Baker Donelson Center. The Chamber stayed 21 years, moving to Capitol View in spring 2020. Baker Donelson left in 2021 when Dallas-based Velocis bought the building for $50.25 million and painted it white.

In late November 2023, Parton's Dollywood Co. — her joint venture with Herschend Enterprises — bought the building for $75 million through an entity called PNH Properties.

SongTeller opened a few weeks after Parton's death. Dolly's Life of Many Colors Museum, directed by Parton's niece Rebecca Seaver, occupies the hotel's entire third floor — more than 20,000 square feet of fashion pieces, memorabilia and artifacts, including a wedding dress Parton had believed lost.

Herschend Creative Studios led the redesign of what had been a conventional office tower. The team preserved the building's distinctive curved windows. New additions include an intimate songwriter venue called Parton's Live, a listening lobby, a top-floor lounge, and signature rooms with details like wig dryers in place of hair dryers and wall vinyl behind each bed depicting a British fan's collection of Parton concert tickets.

Wexler said Parton had a specific requirement for the site: She wanted her hotel close enough to Broadway to have a direct sightline to it. With 211 Commerce, she got exactly what she wanted.

Jelly Roll and Bunnie XO's house at 4445 Buchanan Lane in Franklin is on the market. Five bedrooms, six-and-a-half baths...
10/04/2026

Jelly Roll and Bunnie XO's house at 4445 Buchanan Lane in Franklin is on the market. Five bedrooms, six-and-a-half baths on almost 10 acres — could be yours for $6.99 million!

My wife and I drove two and a half hours north of Nashville today to have lunch at K.Y. Head Hutners — formerly Dumas Wa...
09/25/2026

My wife and I drove two and a half hours north of Nashville today to have lunch at K.Y. Head Hutners — formerly Dumas Walker, formerly Ennis's, formerly at least a couple of other names. Located on the public square in Greensburg, Kentucky, it's one of the two places, along with Dumas Walker's package store just across the state line in Tennessee, that inspired the Kentucky Headhunters' "Dumas Walker."

This is the place of the legendary "slaw burger, fries and a bottle of Ski."

Unfortunately, when we arrived, we found a note on the door saying that Darlene, the owner, had been hospitalized the night before and that the restaurant was closed until further notice.

We found our slawburger and fries at a nearby diner, but, of course, it wasn't the same. We found our bottles of Ski and returned to the restaurant, where we toasted to Darlene's speedy recovery.

In 2001, Cheetah Chrome — the former Dead Boys guitarist who'd moved to Nashville in 1996 — left a rented house on Haywo...
09/15/2026

In 2001, Cheetah Chrome — the former Dead Boys guitarist who'd moved to Nashville in 1996 — left a rented house on Haywood Lane for a smaller place at 3620 Wilbur Place (the right side of the house pictured here). He soon decided it was time to stop renting and buy a house. He was just starting to look when, one morning, he got to the office and a coworker told him a plane had hit the World Trade Center.

"I'll never forget the feeling of watching my beloved twin towers crash to the ground," he wrote in his 2010 memoir “A Dead Boy's Tale” (Voyageur Press). "It felt like a family member had died." Music felt trivial for a while. He'd been drinking more since a trip to Ireland the year before, and that only increased as the year went on.

In November, he took a couple of shows anyway — one in Chicago, one in Cleveland. At the Cleveland show, he got a call from David Thomas, the Pere Ubu frontman he'd started out with in Rocket From the Tombs back in Cleveland in the '70s. They hadn't spoken in about 20 years. Thomas came to the show with another old friend and joined Chrome onstage for "Final Solution" and "30 Seconds Over Tokyo."

Thomas had tracked down the band's original 1975 loft tapes, long since bootlegged into oblivion, and planned to put them out properly. Chrome agreed it was a good idea. Neither said anything about reforming the band. As they said goodbye, Chrome told him, "Let's not rule out doing something together again."

The tapes came out in 2002 as “The Day the Earth Met the Rocket from the Tombs.” Rocket from the Tombs played again in 2003. By then, Chrome had bought his house and moved on from Wilbur Place.

Apple Music unveiled a two-panel "This Is Country Music" mural this week on the outside walls of the old United Record P...
09/14/2026

Apple Music unveiled a two-panel "This Is Country Music" mural this week on the outside walls of the old United Record Pressing at 453 Chestnut Street, painted by Nashville artist Christian Green (who works as C3). Side A depicts Linda Martell and Charley Pride, rendered mid-performance, mics in hand. Side B shows a wall of vinyl — more than two dozen records, each labeled with the name of a Black country artist, past or present. A few are left blank on purpose, standing in for whoever comes next.

United Record Pressing began operating out of that Chestnut Street building in 1962. Inside, it had the "Motown Suite," a second-floor apartment where Black artists and executives could stay when Nashville hotels wouldn't have them. Berry Gordy used it. So, reportedly, did the Supremes and Smokey Robinson. Apple says 100% of ad revenue generated from the mural will go toward preserving that suite.

Pride appeared on Billboard's country charts for the first time in 1966 with "Just Between You and Me." Martell came on the scene a little while later, becoming the first Black woman to play the Opry in 1969, the same year her single "Color Him Father" reached No. 22 on Billboard's country chart.

"It honors country music trailblazers Charley Pride and Linda Martell — two Black pioneers who opened doors for so many country artists of color to follow," Green said in a statement announcing the mural. "My approach has been to capture not just their likeness, but their spirit — the joy, the power, and the grit."

The second panel reads like a syllabus: DeFord Bailey and Ray Charles next to Mickey Guyton and Rhiannon Giddens, next to Shaboozey and Willie Jones. Beyoncé's on there too.

Cheetah Chrome, the lead guitarist for the Dead Boys who died Sept. 13 at age 71, lived in Nashville for several years.H...
09/14/2026

Cheetah Chrome, the lead guitarist for the Dead Boys who died Sept. 13 at age 71, lived in Nashville for several years.

He'd come in 1996 at the suggestion of Joe McGrath, who'd played with him in a post-Dead Boys band called the Broken Angels. “I knew next to nothing about the place," Chrome wrote later in his 2010 memoir “A Dead Boy's Tale” (Voyageur Press), "other than we'd driven through on the way to somewhere else years before and it didn't look like much." He'd planned to stay two weeks to record demos.

He ended up staying.

Around the same time, Nashville's own Tommy Womack wrote a song called "Whatever Happened to Cheetah Chrome?" — a song about the Dead Boys that ended up on Womack's 1998 solo debut “Positively Na Na.” After learning that Chrome was in town, Womack got to play the song for him at a soundcheck.

By late 1997, Chrome had moved into a rented house at 228 Haywood Lane in southeast Nashville. Among other things he'd been dealing with: a lawsuit settlement against the Limelight in New York. By the time he paid his lawyer and repaid the City of New York for his hospitalization and surgery after being assaulted by one of the club’s bouncers, he had just enough left to get dental implants.

In early 1999, a Detroit promoter called and asked what it would take to get Chrome to do a show at a club called Lili's in Hamtramck. Chrome named what he described as "ridiculous figures and demands." The promoter said yes. They recorded the May 15, 1999, show for a possible live record, but a mic on Chrome's guitar amp got knocked over mid-set, forcing him to fly back to Detroit and overdub his guitar parts. To preserve the feel, he got drunk and played straight through the bass, drum, and rhythm guitar tracks, leaving in the mistakes. "Even I didn't know which parts were recorded live or overdubbed," he wrote. “Alive in Detroit” came out on DUI Records in 2000 — his first full-length solo release.

The gigs kept coming, but not well. A trip to Atlanta late in the summer of 2000, Chrome wrote, was bad enough that "the only good thing about it was that nobody was killed or injured." Then his drummer and guitarist left — pregnant wives, responsibilities. Chrome compared rock and roll to "hitting yourself in the head with a hammer — it feels good when you stop." Though he still played some, he took a full-time job at a tile company. He lived at the house on Haywood Lane until 2001.

I always have a moment of mild panic whenever I post.No matter how thoroughly I’ve researched, there’s always a nagging ...
09/05/2026

I always have a moment of mild panic whenever I post.

No matter how thoroughly I’ve researched, there’s always a nagging fear that I’ve gotten something wrong. It may be as simple as confusing bungalow and ranch styles (which is bad enough) or claiming that a house sits in Belle Meade when it's actually in Belle Meade Links. Maybe I’ve mistaken a property somebody simply owned for a place where they actually lived.

The possibility that really bothers me is getting the place wrong.

I’ve made some 600 posts on this page and misidentified a location a handful of times. Once, it was because the paper ran the wrong address of a neighborhood venue for a full year (locals let me know about that one real fast). But it’s usually my fault.

This post is about one of those places I thought I had right. And the really aggravating part is that it provided the material for one of my best stories for years.

One of the reasons I started the Nashville Musical History Tour is because a friend asked me, “Where was ‘the Wishy Washy on Wedgewood’ where Dolly Parton met Carl Dean?” In theory, finding that place should be simple. We know when Dolly came to Nashville — May 31, 1964, the day after she graduated high school. We know where she was living — 1710 Allison Place, in an upstairs apartment with her Uncle Bill and his wife. She always said she met Carl her first day in town at “the Wishy Washy on Wedgewood.”

Theoretically, finding that location should be as simple as going to a city directory for 1964, going to the street-directory section, finding Wedgewood and running your finger down the page until you spot the Wishy Washy.

Turned out there was just a small problem: There was no Wishy Washy on Wedgewood in 1964.

If you grew up in Tennessee in the 1960s, there’s a good chance you called laundromats Wishy Washys, the same way you called any cola a Coke. When I realized Wedgewood didn’t have a Wishy Washy, I assumed Dolly wasn’t being literal about the name of the laundromat, so I looked for the closest Wedgewood laundromat to where Dolly was living. That, I figured, had to be the place she was talking about.

Now it looks like she wasn’t being literal about the “on Wedgewood” part.

The day after Dolly died, the Metro Nashville Archives posted a picture of a Wishy Washy at 2106 8th Avenue South, a few blocks off Wedgewood. “One part of Dolly’s story we especially cherish is her love story with Carl Dean,” they wrote. “While we don’t have their marriage license, we do have a photo of where it all began—the Wishy Washy Laundromat on 8th Avenue South. The sign may be out of view, but this is where a chance meeting sparked a love story that lasted a lifetime.” The photo, they told me, came from the late 1960s.

I knew about a Wishy Washy in Tullahoma. I knew about a Wishy Washy in Old Hickory. I knew about Wishy Washys that were car washes. Somehow, though, I had overlooked the Wishy Washy that was just two blocks off Wedgewood, a 20-minute walk from the house on Allison Place.

This week, I went to the library and pulled the city directories for the mid-1960s. Sure enough, there it was in the 1964 directory — and still there in 1966, though it appears to have gone out of business sometime that year. I'd looked for it in the street directory, and I'd looked for it in newspaper archives. Apparently, I'd never bothered to look at the listings, because I would have recognized the 2106 8th Avenue South address.

The site of the Wishy Washy is still there (the laundromat I had identified — Doc's Launderette, which later became Wedgewood Laundry — was demolished shortly after Dolly came to town to make way for Interstate 65). And the wild part is that it has made plenty of music history since then. Now known as The Eighth Room, it was the site of the Douglas Corner Café from 1987-2020. It’s the place where Alan Jackson and Trisha Yearwood played the showcases that led to their first record deals. It's also the place where Keith Whitley shot the music video for “I’m No Stranger to the Rain.”

The crazy thing is, strong cases can be made for both Doc's and the Wishy Washy being Dolly's "Wishy Washy on Wedgewood" — Doc's because it was actually on Wedgewood and was the closest laundromat to the house, the Wishy Washy because it was, you know, actually a Wishy Washy, even if it was a couple of blocks off Wedgewood.

I'd always thought I'd get the chance to ask Dolly one more question.

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