How a Boston couple does Nashville
NASHVILLE — Here in the heart of Nashville’s Honky Tonk Highway, she’s the real deal. When Eileen Rose leans into the microphone and throws herself into Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,’’ onstage at the classic country bar known as Robert’s Western World, you can almost believe she wrote it herself.
In fact, she’s a daughter of Saugus. Her dad worked with the ground crew at Logan Airport and collected tolls on the Tobin Bridge.
Rose and her husband, guitarist Rich Gilbert, knew each other on the Boston music scene back in the 1980s. Gilbert, who went to Berklee, was in Human Sexual Response and the Zulus; Rose was in a few bands, including Daisy Chain, before launching her own solo career.
It wasn’t until about a dozen years ago that they went full-on honky-tonk together. After Rose asked Gilbert to join her band for a European tour, he convinced her to move to Music City, where he’d already relocated. Already married to the music, they traded wedding vows.
“The living was easy here then,’’ says Gilbert, sitting over a breakfast plate at the Sky Blue Cafe, one of the couple’s favorite spots in East Nashville. Now they own three houses in the mid-century Nashville suburb of Madison, renting out one of the ranches on Airbnb for $99 a night.
Musicians, of course, have been moving to Nashville, home of the country music industry’s Music Row, for decades. But in recent years, the city has become a powerful magnet for newcomers. The most popular statistic claims that 60 new residents arrive in the metropolitan area each day.
And they’re not all songwriters. They’re artists and cooks, retailers, and marketing professionals. The city’s vibrant creative economy, in turn, has fed its robust tourist trade, drawing visitors from around the world with new attractions, shops, and restaurants. In 2016, Nashville set a US record for consecutive months of tourism growth.
The tourists tend to hit the usual sites, and with good reason. The Country Music Hall of Fame is world-class. The historic Ryman Auditorium for years hosted the Grand Ole Opry, the “home of American music.’’ And the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, which opened in 2001, occupies the city’s former main post office, a spectacular Art Deco building.
But Rose (full name Eileen Rose Giadone) and Gilbert prefer the hidden Nashville. Though there’s nothing hidden about Robert’s Western World, where their band the Silver Threads holds down a coveted afternoon time slot several days a week (the bar has continuous live music from 11 a.m. until 2 a.m. every day), it’s known as the most old-school, tradition-loyal venue on the Lower Broad strip. For these Boston ex-pats, the authentic Nashville is the one to write home about.
Nashville has drawn national attention lately for such industrial-chic restaurants as Pinewood Social and Rolf and Daughters. But Rose and Gilbert are partial to low-key options like Bella Napoli, a wood-fired pizza and pasta place, and Monell’s in Germantown, a historic brick Victorian where southern diners tackle waves of biscuits, cornbread, and peach cobbler at shared tables.
“Everyone always says it’s the best fried chicken they’ve ever had,’’ says Rose.
For nightlife, they’ve grown to love Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge in Madison, a throwback ’70s-style watering hole that the fast-rising country star Margo Price has claimed as her local. Rose and Gilbert also press friends to check out Honky Tonk Tuesday, an ongoing series of live music events at the American Legion Post 82 in East Nashville.
Besides being talented, versatile musicians, they know how to look the part in Nashville. Gilbert, who half-jokingly bills himself as “The Legendary Rich Gilbert’’ (“I was tired of having a name like an accountant’’), has a rotation of classic western pearl-snap shirts, and Rose shows up for breakfast in a vintage boucle jacket.
They shop at the Hip Zipper in East Nashville and the Spring Hill Antique Mall, about a half-hour south of the city. Even better, says Rose, are the neighborhood yard sales, which tend to pop up on any given day, not just weekends.
In between performing and managing their properties, Rose squeezes in time as a yoga instructor. She’s also a published author, including a children’s book called “Natasha the Party Crasher.’’
On the rare afternoon that the couple has free, they might visit the Cheekwood Botanical Garden on the grounds of a Georgian-style mansion, where tens of thousands of tulips bloom each spring. Or they’ll stroll around the Parthenon in Centennial Park, the full-scale replica of the original temple in Athens.
The stately building is famous as the site of the outdoor rally scene in Robert Altman’s “Nashville.’’ But lots of visitors don’t realize there’s a museum inside, Gilbert says, with a nice collection of paintings and an enormous, 42-foot statue of Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom, warfare, and the arts.
“There’s something serene and Zen about walking around in there,’’ says Gilbert.
Onstage at Robert’s, the Silver Threads are a virtual jukebox of country music’s golden age, from Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried’’ to Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.’’
Having thoroughly sussed out their adopted city, Rose and Gilbert are ideal guides. “We can rev it up or we can be real delicate,’’ says Rose. “We’ve been doing it so long, we know how to read the room.’’
