Midnight Melodies: Unearthing Nashville’s Secret Sound in Night Train to Nashville, The Greatest Untold Story of Music City
Porter House reviews 'Night Train to Nashville'.
“Paula Blackman’s Night Train to Nashville: The Greatest Untold Story of Music City (Harper Horizon, 2023) is a sentimental love letter to Nashville and to her grandfather, E. Gab “Blackie” Blackman. This heartfelt work of historical fiction explores the art of creative nonfiction by blending the stories Paula was told as a child and years of research around the history of WLAC, the historic Tennessee radio station that helped introduce R&B to the world, and more specifically the friendship between her grandfather and a Black man, William Sousa “Sou’ Bridgeforth as authentically as possible.
Blackman’s writing feels as though you are present with her, sitting on a southern porch with a glass of sweet tea, listening to her grandfather in a rocking chair with a photo album reminiscing about how music brought two disparate communities together—Black and White during the 1940s to the 1960s in Nashville, Tennessee. Notably, the author takes on the issue of white saviorism in relation to historical movements, often related to the rise of black voices in popular culture and the commercialization without fair compensation of Black artists.”