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!
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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.

In September 1989, Margaret Becker bought this house at 525 Saddle Drive in Bellevue’s Walnut Hill Manor subdivision.She...
09/04/2026

In September 1989, Margaret Becker bought this house at 525 Saddle Drive in Bellevue’s Walnut Hill Manor subdivision.

She was 30, and her career in contemporary Christian music had started to take off. She had been nominated for the GMA Dove Award for New Artist of the Year in 1988, and “Immigrant’s Daughter,” her third album, had come out just weeks before.

The best account of Becker’s life around the time she bought the house comes from a 1992 Los Angeles Times profile.

In 1988, while working on songs for her second album, “The Reckoning,” Becker had decided that the stuff around her was getting in the way of her creativity. "Every time I sat down to write," she told the Times, "I'd get distracted by the radio or television, or what was on my walls. I needed a change of environment, but I was penniless at the time and couldn't afford to go to Aruba." So she put her television, radio, and most of her household furnishings on the sidewalk in front of her apartment and let the neighborhood haul them off.

"Creatively speaking, it opened up a whole new window for me,” she said. “When I eliminated all the nuisances, it was a great time of growth."

Eventually she acquired a house “on a hillside, with a real inspirational view,” as she told the Times. She began furnishing the house, replacing what she had given away.

That house was 525 Saddle Drive.

Becker released “Simple House,” her fourth album, in 1991, writing in its liner notes that giving up most of her possessions showed that "I could live a very full life with just a few basics." “Simple House” won the 1992 Dove Award for Rock Album of the Year, while its title song won Rock Recorded Song of the Year.

Becker would live on Saddle Drive for nearly 16 years, through much of the most active period of her recording career. She released “Soul,” “Fiel a Ti” (a Spanish-language album), “Grace,” “Falling Forward” and “What Kind of Love,” took a three-year break from recording and expanded into writing and other creative work.

She sold the house in June 2005.

A few days ago, I posted a reel of the house Hayden Panettiere owned when she lived in Nashville and was shooting the sh...
08/19/2026

A few days ago, I posted a reel of the house Hayden Panettiere owned when she lived in Nashville and was shooting the show of the same name. Your response to it sent me to Panettiere’s memoir, “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” to find out what she had to say about the house.

She and Wladimir Klitschko, a heavyweight boxing champion, purchased what she said was a five-bedroom, four-bathroom in the Green Hills area in 2013. “It wasn’t much bigger than the house I’d grown up in, but we’d retrofitted it with security features that made the White House seem slack in comparison,” Panettiere wrote. “All the rooms upstairs were separated by thick, wooden doors with interior iron plates that locked into the walls and floor when we closed them. When all those doors were sealed up tight, the only way to open them was if Wlad or I scanned our palms on a panel next to our bedroom. If we chose to, we could also lock down both the master and [their daughter] Kaya’s bedroom windows with metal grates, and if we didn’t, no worries. Our black ops security guard had installed bulletproof film on all the other windows in the house, and he planned to live in the apartment above our garage.”

Both Panettiere and Klitschko were public figures, and his brother Vitali had become mayor of Kyiv. “I was also vulnerable to obsessive fans — something I’d experience ten years later, when I had a stalker who the FBI investigated and ultimately sent to prison,” Panettiere wrote. “Finally, we lived in a state where pretty much anyone and everyone could own a gun—and much of the population did. I loved that house, but it was a fortress.”

The couple also installed three saltwater fish tanks, stocking them with “gobies, sea anemones, tropical fish, and a stowaway mantis shrimp I named Sebastian,” she wrote.

Within a few months, Panettiere became pregnant, and her daughter, Kaya, was born almost exactly a year after Panettiere and Klitschko bought the house. Klitschko spent much of his time in Germany or Ukraine. Panettiere and Kaya joined him when possible, but Nashville was her base. Increasingly, she managed the house alone.

“Nashville” shot the last episode of its sixth and final season on April 5, 2018. Panettiere put the house on the market shortly afterwards. “For the first time in my life, that house got more press than I did, as if the fact that it was trading hands signaled my world was in the middle of a crisis,” she wrote. “I give the press a lot of s**t sometimes, but they were right on this one. Honestly, I was glad my house was the one getting the attention and not me.”

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