Eddie's Tennessee Page

My home now

Fall Creek Falls State Park

I'm not a sports nut, but I do like baseball and football (that includes the arena variety). Nashville has them all. The Tennessee Titans are periennal contenders for the AFC championship. The Nashville Sounds are the AAA farm team of the Oakland A's. The NHL's Nashville Predators make their home in Nashville's Bridgestone Arena arena. I used to be a season ticket holder for Vanderbilt football (they're actually fun to watch.) I let the tickets go after LSU's visit to town in 2004. I might re-up one of these seasons, espeially with Vandy winning games like they have the past few years.

There's lots of music in Nashville too. Everyone's heard of the Grand Ole Opry. The Opry used to be held in Ryman Auditorium, which is where we saw it when I was a kid. The Ryman is now home to dozens of concerts while the Opry has moved to the suburbs, although it does come back to the Ryman during the winter, when crowds aren't as large. That's Mary-Chapin Carpenter performing with Ricky Skaggs at the Grand Ole Opry in the Ryman on Feb. 10, 2001. It was part of a tribute to Bill Monroe. There's a shopping mall, called Opry Mills on the site of the old Opryland, near the Grand Ole Opry Auditorium. The Opryland Hotel is a nice place to visit, too.

Tennessee is a really beautiful place. That's Hurricane Mills in the picture to the right. It's across the creek from Loretta Lynn's house, about an hour west of Nashville. The mill is a store and museum dedicated to Loretta Lynn. There are tours of her house and property available there.

Another nice place is Fall Creek Falls State Park near Pikeville. (Pictured at the top of the page). There are dozens of well-kept state parks across the state. One of my favorite areas is Percy Priest Lake. It's part of the Army Corp of Engineers lake systems in Tennessee and Kentucky. Mammoth Cave National Park is a little more than an hour's drive north of Nashville, near Bowling Green, Ky.

Although it's not a national park, the Jack Daniel's Distillery is worthy of the hour and a half drive south of Nashville. This is a picture from the tour I took on a trip there for my former newspaper. The guy standing behind me (looking over my left shoulder) is Mike Keyes, the managing director for Jack Daniel's global operations. The guy in the light blue shirt, third from the end, is the late Jimmy Bedford, who was master distiller when I took this tour. He and the big guy on the end, Goose, were our tour guides.

Jimmy Bedford was only the sixth person to hold the title of master distiller. Jack Daniel was the first. He was a really neat guy who worked offshore as a roughneck out of Venice, La., during the summer when he was going to college. He grew up 2 miles from the distillery and lived on his family's farm all his life.

The two guys on my right are Nelson Eddy and Mark Day, who work for a Nashville public relations firm. The rest of the people are journalists who specialize in writing about whiskey.