Where the South Still Sings

There is a restless music inside the human heart. It’s what pushes us out towards the boundary, to discover a world of mystery and melody. To make our own way through purple mountains and across fruited plains. Like a pulse that runs through every wanderer, this music has been playing a long time in the American South. In 1780, when Tennessee was the edge of the western frontier, Kasper Mansker set out into the territory and established a small, stout fort in the heart of the Cumberland River Basin. His home offered safe lodging for hunters and settlers cut from the same cloth. Hospitality at Mansker’s Station meant that frontier families could find provision and fellowship in the dense forest around the growing town that would become the city of Nashville.

Today, folks may marvel how much has changed. But campers—be they full-timers, snowbirds, or newbies— know better: There are places where you can still hear the music. From the cockpits of their rigs, they play the highway like a fiddle in search of the perfect tune. And, twelve miles north of Nashville, there is a campground for them where the music still plays every night less than a hundred yards from the shallow, sonorous waters of Mansker Creek.

A Taste of Southern Hospitality

The Grand Ole RV Resort is easy to find. Pull off I-65 at exit 97 in Tennessee, alongUS Route 41, and the campground will stand prominent: a large, brick-red building trimmed with white pillars that prop up a wraparound porch full of rockers. Tommy Cunningham, a retired custom home builder, bought an old campground in 2012, reestablished it, and built the resort himself—with, he declares, the help of his guardian angel. Tommy figured if the economy was good, people would be travelling; and if the economy took a turn for the worse, people might trade homes for RVs. Either way, they’d need a place to stay—an observation worthy of Kasper Mansker.

The campground is a family business. His daughter Tammy and son Tommy manage the outside; his daughter Sue Richardson manages the office and takes care of the customers. Just inside the doors, she works behind a small register with the kitchen behind her. In the morning, folks walk up the porch and step into the diner to get breakfast. Then they’ll stock up on supplies from the general store, check out, or just make conversation. The Grand Ole RV Resort’s sign says that visitors “Arrive as Guests, Leave as Family.” And a quick talk with Sue, whether she’s getting you settled on the campground or just stopping by to check on your breakfast, gives guests the hospitality you’d expect from Nashville.

Sue swings by a customer’s table, where two mouth-watering plates stacked with omelets, hash browns, and fresh tomatoes are caught in the middleof a vanishing act. Sue comments, “The breakfast is awesome isn’t it?!” It is indeed, nod the guests. In fact, it’s so good that it worries the chef, who has come out of the kitchen to chat. With a dash of mischief in his eye, he tells Sue that he doesn’t want word to get out about how good the food is because he doesn’t want more customers. “Well, I do!” shouts Sue, jumping in with alaugh. The chef then acknowledges with a soft but sincere pride that their breakfast is the best thing you canfind outside a Nashville home (and maybe within one). Even as he speaks, the bright, nodding smiles of the customers—still eating—offer a testimony of their own.

The front door kicks open. A tall, relaxed camper walks in, swivels into a backwards-facing chair, and looks directly at Sue.

“I hear if I come sweet talk ya that I might get things,” he says with a wry smile.

“Oh, no! Who told that lie?!” Sue fires back, happy to mix a little humor with business, before asking, “How can I help you?” She walks him to the register so he can check out and get his family back on the road by lunch. After he cashes out, he walks out with the ease he came in with, as Sue calls over his shoulder, “Take your time.”

The guest half turns back, laughs, and winks to the chef before hitting the door, “You’re right! She is nice,” giving every indication this was not his first time talking with the chef. It is dialogue characteristic of family, where each exchange is just a continuation. There’s a word for that: relationship.

Live Music at Sunset

It’s the old, true, genuine things about Nashville that make it feel like home. Things like being able to walk into a diner after a long, eventful night and chat with the cook over breakfast. There is a virtue in making music, finding rest, in enjoying life with full-hearted gratitude. The Grand Ole RV Resort offers a place of rest for the weary traveler. On Sunday mornings, a young pastor even travels down from a nearby town to offer a small service on the back porch, with picnic tables open to those looking to come as they are.

At sunset, this is where the music also plays. Every night. The Grand Ole RV Resort offers live music seven nights a week, with local artists on rotation. Sue says it’s perfect for guests who want to experience the charms of Music City without the city crowd.

“People can sit out in their lawn chair with a beer if they want to. We do meals every night. They can definitely experience Nashville here each night without going downtown.”

Every single night, musicians like Merna Lewis, “the Barefoot Fiddler,” take their place on the back porch where, with hardly an introduction, they begin, letting the music sweep across the campground and make its own announcement. Emerging from a small sea of RVs, campers are drawn from their Jaycos, Denalis, and Airstreams to move toward the music, making their way up the gentle hill where the resort stands tall. Before long, over 30 people have set up in lawn chairs and at picnic tables around the musicians. For good reason. The music is radio quality, tonight featuring sweet-sawing, crowd-drawing fiddle work and baritone-rich singing. The local talent gives credence to Nashville’s reputation: Musicians here are as common as silver in the days of Solomon.

As country music favorites play in the air, the crowd settles in and gets comfortable. A young father listens as he pushes his kids on a nearby swing. An old woman huddles into her lawn chair with a black chihuahua in her lap. The dog's face is so whitened from age you could mistake it for a pocket beagle. After the first hour, a new couple arrives late and settles at a back table but catch the eye of the vocalist, Mark Whitehead.

“Hello in the back!”

The couple smile and wave shyly, then Mark turns back to the music. As it often goes, songs start with stories from the road, mentions of old friends from towns like Amarillo, and absurd questions, like “Is it alright if I do a Merle Haggard song?” (It's always OK to do Merle here.) People come and go at their leisure, but the music stays and fills the campground for two hours with almost-too-perfect lyrics like, “Down this road there’s always one more city, the highway is my home.”

Sunset’s blue sky turns gold over the wooded western horizon till the whole lawn is gilded with dusk. With music that takes travelers to some distant place that the soul is always searching out. Here on the green grass in that dying light, in the soft shadow of the Grand Ole RV Resort, the work of a master builder is complete—a place of fellowship found in the places we meet, in the music we make, in the moments we have. Taking us to a place where we can both know and be known.

Maybe, at one time, that was found at a frontier fort, the pages of a celebrated novel, or the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. But tonight, it’s the musical twilight of the Grand Ole Resort.