We had a bit of a food dilemma today after getting the Opry tickets. I had planned on going to two places that were highly recommended. Hattie B's Hot Chicken for lunch and Peg Leg Porker BBQ for dinner. The Opry tickets meant that dinner was out. What to do? My new plan was Hattie B's for early lunch around 11:30 or so and Peg Leg Porker for late lunch at around 2:30. What else could I do?
Hot Chicken is a Nashville thing where they make fried chicken that has hot sauce in the coating and then you add a cayenne pepper and oil sauce at the end. It can range from mild to volcanic.
This is what Hattie's looked like. The first is Marilyn's southern chicken with no heat. Next comes mine which had quite a bit of heat. You can also see some mac and cheese made with pimento cheese. It's now on the must make at home list. We didn't get major amounts of chicken because we needed to have room for late lunch!
After Hattie's we drove back into downtown Nashville to take a tour of Ryman Auditorium which was the original location of the Grand Ole Opry before it moved to the suburbs. But, when we got there, the auditorium was closed due to some kind of country music award show. This was the set up for the red carpet photos.
We'd already paid for parking so we wandered back to the strip and found a bar with live music and had a beer. It's very easy to just sit and listen to music with a beer. It's amazing how much music there is in this city. As you walk down the street you hear new live music coming from pretty well every bar or restaurant that you pass. And on the streets, there are metal boxes that house radios that play music from a dedicated radio station. Music City indeed!
After our beer, we still had some time left so checked out the public library that was in a beautiful old building. We found ourselves in the Civil Rights section and it was quite a solemn experience. We weren't aware of the segregation issues that had occured in Nashville. In 1957, laws passed to desegregate schools and there was violence and protests. It took four years for the schools to become desegregated. The photos of sit ins and arrests and attacks were shocking. These are reminders of some of the things that were said by people close to the situation at the time.
It turned out that the location of our late lunch was quite close to our hotel in a part of the city called The Gulch. Not overly inviting but I guess it fits with the western theme that we kept seeing. Peg Leg Porker is another restaurant that we saw on BBQ Crawl. The restaurant has won quite a few awards for their dry ribs so we tried those. And Marilyn wanted to try what they called Kansas City Sushi as we had seen it on the tv show. It consisted of smoked sausage, saltine crackers and cheese slices. Probably not something I'll make at home, but it was good.
The dry ribs were quite good and we ended up buying a bottle of the rub to try at home.
Ok, on to the Grand Ole Opry show. As many of you know, I'm not a major or even a minor, country music fan. However, the whole Opry experience was very enjoyable. I'm not just saying that because Marilyn will be reading this either! We saw 8 fifteen minute acts and they were all easy to listen to. A couple of the traditional acts reminded me of music my dad used to play when he wanted to wake me up but it was all good. The new, rocky type of country would be my favourite and there were a couple of those type of acts. When you see country music in that setting, it's easier to see why so many people like it.
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