Tennessee, USA is the heart of where country music really began – Nashville! The Birthplace of Country Music Museum, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, tells the story of the 1927 Bristol Sessions recordings by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Ernest V. Stoneman, and others.
“These recordings in Bristol in 1927 are the single most important event in the history of country music.” -Johnny Cash
Sadly Tennessee is also the state that hates scientific theory and the free press.
Recall July 10–21, 1925, Dayton, Tennessee. That was the dates of the Scopes Trial, also called Scopes Monkey Trial. High-school teacher, John T. Scopes, charged with violating state law by teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. The trial’s proceedings helped to bring the scientific evidence for evolution into the public sphere while also stoking a national debate over the veracity of evolution that continues to the present day.
The two sides brought in the biggest legal names in the nation, William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense. Scopes was convicted and fined $100.
The film Inherit the Wind is a fictionalized account and made religious people look like fools.
Now almost one hundred years later a Tennessee school district bans “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel depicting the horrors of the Holocaust. McMinn County, Tennessee, Board of Education removed “Maus” from the eighth-grade English language arts curriculum, citing “rough, objectionable language” and a drawing of a nude woman.
The Catcher in the Rye
Tennessee is a state of contradictions.
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