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Take a spin through Tennessee history

Nashville carousel is a work of art

By Angela Wibking

Whistler had his mom, Monet his water lilies and Da Vinci his smiling Mona Lisa. Even Warhol had his soup cans. Sooner or later, most successful artists get saddled with an image from which they cannot escape.

For artist Red Grooms, saddled is the operative word. The Nashville-born artist has enjoyed decades of critical and commercial success in his adopted city of New York with his cartoonish sculptural tableaux and softer-styled watercolors. But his lasting legacy may turn out to be a bunch of saddled merry-go-round figures known as the Tennessee Fox Trot Carousel, Grooms’ most ambitious art project to date. The carousel is now spinning in Riverfront Park in Nashville.

Given Grooms’ oft-professed love of the circus, the possibility that a working carnival ride could become his signature work is not exactly surprising. Indeed, when the project was proposed in 1993, a lot of people assumed Grooms’ style and the merry-go-round motif would go together like, well, Monet and lily pads. But others questioned the fit of a Grooms piece of public art in downtown Nashville. After all, Grooms three-dimensional works can border on the garish and even grotesque.

Fuel was added to the fire when the artist proposed a carousel figure of Minnie Pearl depicting the late comedienne and civic leader in a bent-over position that can best be described as rude. Minnie’s estate gave it a swift thumbs-down and Grooms went back to his sketch pad and came up with an image of country crooner Kitty Wells figure-heading a tour bus instead.

All that is now water under the Shelby Street Bridge, in whose shadow the $1.75 million Fox Trot Carousel sits. The carousel is a hit both with the art critics and the public, who has been flocking to it for rides ever since it opened on Thanksgiving last year. In this Grooms creation, the artist has hitched his clownish style to a gentler artistic star. That is not to say the colors aren’t eye-popping and the figures’ features exaggerated. You don’t get much more extreme than a temple-headed rabbi, a sawhorse-bodied architect or a green, red and yellow striped-and-dotted chigger.

What’s most apparent in this work, however, is the artist’s genuine affection for his subject matter. Grooms lives in New York but he loves Nashville and means to celebrate it in all its nutty, even schizophrenic, glory. Famous and not-so-famous figures from Nashville and Tennessee history, legend and commerce go merrily around together on the carousel and it really does take a scorecard to keep up with the players. (Luckily one is provided: A display panel explains just who all these carousel figures are.)

Charlie Soong, an 1885 Vanderbilt University graduate who made a million selling Bibles in the Orient, rides a Chinese dragon alongside folk legend Bell Witch, bedeviler of many a Tennessee child’s dreams. Davy Crockett wrestles a bear, while H.G. Hills, founder of a local grocery store empire, pilots a packed shopping cart. Prominent  Jewish leader Rabbi Isadore Lewinthal trots by with prayer book in hand, as Reverend Sam Jones preaches a little fire and brimstone at his Union Gospel Tabernacle, which would go on to become the Ryman Auditorium and home of the Grand Ole Opry.

A freckled-face kid opens wide for a bite of Nashville’s home town candy, the Goo Goo Cluster, and self-taught sculptor William Edmondson -- the first African-American to have a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York -- carves a peaceful dove.

Grand Ole Opry comedians ride a hot dog horse and Sequoyah pens the Cherokee alphabet. Kitty Wells, the Everly Brothers, Chet Atkins and bluesman Leroy Carr contribute to the carousel’s chorus saluting Nashville’s musical heritage.  You can also ride along with aviatrix Cornelia Fort, women’s rights activist Anne Dallas Dudley, Olympic multi-medalist Wilma Rudolph, steel magnolia and Belmont Mansion builder Adelicia Acklen, and Parthenon replica sculptor Belle Kinney Scholz.

In all there are 36 carousel figures – and about 1,000 times as many offbeat details to delight or confound the eye. Study the “saddles,” for example, and you’ll find architects Moses and Calvin McKissack’s is actually a blueprint, the Everly Brothers’ is a record complete with one of those yellow plastic adapters in the center, and H. G. Hill’s grocery cart saddle is a bag of “Fit for a King Coffee.”

Then there are the painted scenes on the rounding board. These pictures, which rim the carousel’s canopy, depict everything from the Grand Ole Opry and Fisk Jubilee Singers to the 1912 bursting of the Eighth Avenue South reservoir. Mirrors and scenes from Nashville’s Iroquois Steeplechase also chase themselves around the inner structure that houses the carousel’s mechanics. Heads of Belle Meade Plantation-raised horses pop, game trophy style, out from the rounding board as well. 

This dizzying array of Red-renowned Tennesseans is more than a great ride -- or even great art. The carousel, with its figures drawn from so many different eras and social, cultural and racial backgrounds, serves to remind natives and visitors alike that diversity makes Nashville – and the world -- go ‘round.

Rides on the Tennessee Fox Trot Carousel, in Riverfront Park in Nashville, are $1.50 for a spin of approximately two minutes. Hours are 10 a.m.-sunset, Jan. 2-Memorial Day. Extended hours are planned for the summer.

Photos by Angela Wibking.

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