Timejumpers at 3rd and Lindsley

3rd and Lindsley is a great music venue several blocks south of the Lower Broadway honky tonk strip.   They being in alternative rock, singer-songwriters, country and on Monday nights, a Western Swing band called the Timejumpers.  This is a band made up of some of the best studio musicians in Nashville (and that's saying something!).  These guys are tight and hot and we were lucky that tonight they were joined by Vince Gill, long time country legend, 30+ Grammy winner and all around nice guy.  We saw Vince in Boston last year and loved him and we have tickets to see him again in Florida in January.  He is a hot guitar player, great singer and has written some of the sweetest country songs of all time like this one:




Anyway, the Timejumpers were great and we had another fun night on the town in Music City!

The world famous Station Inn with face-melting guitar update!

Three times the size of your living room, full of mismatched tables and chairs, painted black from floor to ceiling and wallls covered with bluegrass festival posters from 50 years. Every bluegrass great from Bill Monroe on down has played here...dozens of times.
Tonight it's 18 South, a local band that defies categorization. Jazz, bluegrass, blues, even a version of Woodstock, all make up their repertoire. Outstanding musicianship, virtuoso actually, with two bluesy singers, electric guitar, electric piano, string bass, acoustic guitar and drums. Not the usual Station Inn lineup, but outstanding...and a packed house. These guys obviously.have a rep in Nashville.







Here is a quick video I took of their HOT guitar player:

UPDATE

After the show I did a little research on 18 South and was impressed with what I found.  They really are a local hot ticket.  Check out this YouTube video of them on Bluegrass Underground on PBS.  Their guitar player, Guthrie Trapp is a legend here and you can see why starting at 3:00 on the video:

We're going to see Guthrie Trapp at least two more times before we leave.

Larry's Grand Ole Garage and Bluegrass

It started out as a garage and grew to become a Nashvillle official historic site. Sitting on pews, listening to old time bluegrass and eating home-made pumpkin pie. Priceless...and free.

Levi Lowrey at 12 th & Porter

Levi Lowrey is a singer/songwriter who was the first artist signed by Zac Brown's record label. He co-wrote one of Zac's singles and had Zac's drummer playing in his band. He writes awesome songs very much in the Zac Brown style.  We also found out that Lee Dewyze, winner of American Idol's tenth season, is going to be playing at 12th and Porter next week, so we might come out to see him.

Mama's Blue Dress at 12th & Porter

Four hot singers/pickers in a wonderful small venue. Opening for Levi Lowrey. We are sitting literally with our feet propped up on the stage.

The Loveless Cafe and Music City Roots

Well, we had been in Nashville a whole three days, we'd only seen one concert (but a great one!) and I'd spent all my time working (I still do work, and pretty hard) or trying to fix our trailer's toilet (now that's a story you don't want the details on!).  So on Wednesday of our first week we decided to check out Music City Roots, a refurbushed barn out in West Nashville where they have live music every Wednesday.  I thought we would see bluegrass or folk music, but really had no idea what we were in for. 

We first ate at the Loveless Cafe out front, which was for me the best Southern cooking I've had yet.  Grilled catfish, turnip greens with pot liquor (don't ask), homemade melt-in-your-mouth biscuits with butter and berry jam.  Hmm, Hmm.  And the friendliest people, which is pretty much the norm in the South.  The music show was a kick in the pants.  It was being broadcast live on radio, so between bands they had live commercials (Mrs. White's biscuits, just like home made!) and interviews with the musicians.   We saw five bands ranging from Mississippi grunge blues to vaudeville bluegrass to alternative rock.  The twenty minutes per band was just about enough (none of them were really our style, which is bluegrass and straight country) but we had a great time and had found a neat new music venue to try again.

NASHVILLE

We're back to this great city of music.  A two-hour drive from Mammoth Caves brought us to our campground just north of Nashville.  This looks to be a nice place to call home for a while.  Having a pull-through site meant it was a snap to get set up and by early afternoon we were all settled.  We are excited to be here and look forward to going back to all our favorite music venues:  the Bluebird Cafe (where all the local songwriters come to perform the songs recorded by the big country stars), the Station Inn (the spiritual home for all bluegrass music fans, the many honky tonks of lower Broadway (where at least a dozen clubs have live music 14 hours a day with no cover charge, the Ryman Auditorium (original home of the Grand Ole Opry), the Exit/In (grungy club where all the artists who have played there sign a big black wall, hoping to get a picture of that) and hopefully more new ones we don't know about yet.

This blog will likely have a lot of micro-blogging for the next several weeks where I post pictures and a short message right from whatever venue we happen to be at.  Stay tuned for some great musical stories!

Our first musical event was that very first night--we bought tickets last spring to see Bonnie Raitt at the Ryman.  Bonnie is a legend who has been playing since the sixties when she started playing blues alongside Howlin Wolf and Mississippi Fred MacDowell.   If you're interested, her bio is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnie_Raitt.  Rolling Stone magazine has her number 50 on their list of 100 greatest singers and number 89 on the 100 greatest guitar players list.  She was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000.  We loved her show at the Ryman--the acoustics were magnificent, her playing and singing was stellar, her band was killer.  It was touching because she kept giving recognition to the songwriters of many of the songs she played who were in the audience.   One of the great things about Nashville are the fabulous songwriters in this town, more on that in later posts, I'm sure.  This was the last city on Bonnie's 89 city tour and it was a show to remember for sure!