Time travel in Nashville: radio triggers imagination

Here's a snapshot of Weirdland, Music City Section:

Driving on a cool grey Sunday afternoon through tree-lined Richland, an old planned residential district on Nashville's southwest side near Elmington Park & West End Middle School, I was lucky enough to have my VW's radio tuned in to WRVU (91.1 FM), Vanderbilt University's fine community radio station. My soundtrack for that short excursion (from the carwash on Charlotte along undulating Bowling Avenue onto upscale Woodmont Boulevard unto mall-choked Hillsboro Pike) was provided by WRVU's "Spoonful of Bluegrass." The DJ was playing scratchy old recordings circa 1930 by Fiddlin' John Carson, the Skillet Lickers & other so-called hillbilly acts from a time before country music had acquired any respectability -- despite its widespread popularity.

I tried to imagine what that old weird America (that inspired Dylan & the Band's "Basement Tapes" in 1967-68) looked like, smelled like & sounded like. How did a winter Sabbath afternoon in Nashville go down in the Depression era? Back then, the woman who became my Grandma Crawford had to leave the farm in Arcadia, Wisconsin & go to work as a maid for a rich family in Whitefish Bay; Grandpa Crawford was glad to be employed at a CCC camp & therefore able to send money home to his widower Pa; Grandpa Mrazek fished for food & rode the rails. I cast my mind back to those hard, intense times before television kept people indoors getting fatter & lazier. Before most people had cars that isolate them from one another & inflate their egos to a dangerous size. I longed for a taste of life free of the techno-media-cocoon that threatens to smother us all. My imagination did not let me down.

I envisioned streetcars clanging along rutted roads bustling with pedestrians: embittered men whose heads were covered with felt fedoras & tweed caps, anxious woman in ankle-length skirts concealing petticoats & other elaborate underthings, hungry kids in woolen knickers & gingham pinafores. I smelled coal-burning furnaces blackening the skies, piles of horse manure in the gutters, cold rivers ready to receive the baptized come spring. I heard pianos playing in parlors, tobacco-stained saliva hitting brass spittoons in taverns, preachers summoning sinners to salvation on downtown streetcorners, gospel choirs harmonizing in vaulted redbrick tabernacles, a gunshot.

And then I returned to the present, a rush of traffic & crammed consumer aisles at the Harris Teeter grocery store. At least my radio & my imagination still work.