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Archives
April 2004
Nashville, Tennessee
[04.28.04] Riverstages,
the three-day music festival held on the banks of the Cumberland
River in downtown Nashvill, begins Friday, April 30 with performances
by Geronimo, Fuel, Foo Fighters, Drive-By Truckers, Wyclef Jean,
Jonny Lang, & more. Runs through Sunday, May 2.
[04.19.04] The Great Smoky Mountains National Park 54th
Annual Wildflower Pilgrimage begins today and continues through
Sat., April 24. Hikes and a range of events and classes, including
a day in the life of the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI)
fill the week with botanical wonders hard to match anywhere else
in the world. Closer to home, Nashville's own Radnor
Lake serves up a lavish display of native plants in bloom.
[04.17.04] Honor your homeland: it's Earth
Day and Nashville is celebrating with a splendiferous festival
in Centennial Park, noon to 7 p.m. There'll be free
live music (including Randall Bramblett and Nanci Griffith),
hands-on
activities for children (including japanese fish printing and
African bead work), and food provided by local vendors. This year's
festival is dedicated to raising environmental awareness about the
Cumberland River.
[04.13.04] Gibson &
NCO Nashville Guitar Festival kicks off this week with performances
by some of the world's best acoustic players, including Lawrence
Juber & Phil Keaggy on April 15, and Muriel Anderson (the first
woman to win the National Fingerpicking Championship) & Matt
Flinner on April 16. At the Belcourt Theatre.
[04.11.04] Cemeteries aren't simply graveyards for the dead. They
can have a life of their own in preserving the history of a people
and a place. Nashville's City Cemetery,
the oldest in Davidson County, is replete with literal touchstones
to our past.
[04.05] April Bounty
Tennessee's botanical richness overflows: so many wildflower
hikes occur in the month of April that our list of guide-conducted
hikes, extensive as it is, can claim only partial coverage. Indeed,
there is such a floral feast this month in Nashville and the surrounding
area that you may be forced to choose among multiple hikes offered
on the same day. Two of the country's great wildflower pilgrimages
(Great Smoky Mts. National Park's
54th Annual & the Cedars
of Lebanon State Park's 27th Annual) unfortunately overlap this
year. Delicious dilemma that it is, I hope next year the festival
planners won't make us choose.
Special note should be taken that Nashville's own Radnor
Lake, in addition to their regular hikes, is offering wildflower
hikes geared particularly for the hearing impaired. What a considerate
and wonderful extension of their already splendid program roster.
[04.02] A history timeline for events occuring in Nashville from
its founding in 1779 through the occupation of the city during the
Civil War is outlined on BlueShoe's new About
Nashville page. U.S. Census figures from 2000 on Nashville's
population are included along with a brief compilation of geographical
facts and an economic tally of Nashville's largest
employers.
[04.01] Look, Ma! Photo of Nashville taken in
a Thailand rice paddy:
"We move the world," international shipping concern
DHL boasts in its ad depicting Nashville as a backwater province.
Turns out DHL moves the world with fiction. The ad depicts a four-wheel
drive navigating a flooded mid-Tennessee road and the caption: “For
35 years, we’ve delivered despite language barriers, unpaved
roads and lack of street addresses. Try us to Nashville.” While
occasionally there are flooded roads in Tennessee and while some
of us do speak with a southern accent and permit our paint-peeling
street addresses to fall off our ramshackle mail boxes, in this
particular case, the picture was not of a Nashville scene, or even
of a Tennessee locale. The photo was taken in a rice paddy in Thailand.
Way to move us, DHL! Nashvillians love to travel and like it even
better when such a beautiful part of the world comes to us.
Job hunting? Google's upcoming new Copernicus
Center offers out-of-this-world employment opportunities for
those not minding relocation.
It's the first of April which means you should look over the 100
Top April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time.
 Featured
photo: The Bellsouth "Batman Building,"
one of the landmarks in downtown Nashville, overlooks the old brick
storefronts of Lower Broad--a row of cowboy apparel stores and honky-tonks
such as Tootsie's Orchid Lounge.
We've just added a page dedicated to Nashville's
local live theatre productions, including those by Darkhorse
Theatre and the TN Repertory.
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