NASHVILLE LETTER
It’s party time in Nashville. On this long weekend in January, when we celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday, groups of already drunk friends, cowboy hats and cowboy boots, bury young girls’ lives and tour concerts , pulled by a tractor in a cart. Without the slightest precaution against Covid-19: the only requirement at the entrance to bars is not to present your vaccination card but to lay down your arms. In the huge Music City Center, there are dozens of them, made up and dressed in lights, to take part in a cheerleading contest under the watchful eye of their parents.
As for tourists, after admiring Elvis Presley’s Cadillac with gold handles in the Country Music Museum, they will visit the famous RCA studio, a tiny building a few minutes from downtown, where Elvis recorded his first 45 rpm, Heartbreak Hotel, in 1956. The capital of Tennessee has, for several years, been nicknamed Nash-Vegas, a party town at the gates of the southern United States, west of the Appalachians, where people come to slum like in Las Vegas, in the Nevada desert.
If we have fun on weekends, staying at a reduced price in the rooms of gigantic hotels, during the week, we work on it – including in music. The city (715,000 inhabitants and 2 million for the agglomeration) has become one of the poles of attraction of the United States, one of those cities in the center of the country which are flourishing, like Austin in Texas, Charlotte in Carolina North, Denver, Colorado because life on the Pacific coast and in the northeast has become horribly expensive and too democratic for some people’s tastes.
Land of automobile implantation
First there was industry, as evidenced by the huge stadium financed by Nissan, which set up a factory in 1983. Then, more recently, services, starting with AllianceBernstein, a Wall Street investment firm whose the tower now dominates the city and who decided to leave New York in 2017. Then came Amazon, who installed a mini-headquarters there, and tomorrow, it will be Oracle’s turn to land; the computer group has decided to leave its headquarters in southern San Francisco (California) to settle in Austin and Nashville, on the other side of the Cumberland River: 50 hectares, 1.2 billion dollars (1 billion euros) of investments and 8,500 jobs in 2031.
Nissan is the story of the Japanese car manufacturers forced to set up in the United States in the Reagan years and who then chose the non-unionized South. As Jérémie Papin, head of Nissan in North America, recalls, the Tennessee authorities donated the land, built the necessary infrastructure and provided cheap electricity, thanks to the Tennessee Valley Authority – it was created by the President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 as part of the New Deal to exploit the region’s hydroelectric potential.
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