ILLUSTRATION: JACQUI OAKLEY
I fell in love in a barn in Tennessee. It was an hour east of Nashville, in a tiny town called Granville, on the banks of the Cumberland River: a place of white-washed, storybook houses and American lags in every yard. I’d come because I’d heard about The Sutton Ole Time Music Hour: a bluegrass jam held in the town’s general store, broadcast live on the radio every Saturday night. But I wasn’t hopeful. Country music, to me, meant guns, bad lyrics and pick-up trucks — the soundtrack of a world alien to my urbanite lifestyle.
Stepping inside the 1880s-built T.B. Sutton General Store is like stepping inside a time machine. There are vintage signs, soda pops and patchwork quilts on the walls, the smell of sweets and old wood; everything creaking and leaning, as if it might topple at any second. If John Wayne were to walk in dressed in full cowboy gear, no one would’ve batted an eyelid. And, as the only Brit in the room, I was swarmed — being British in Granville is, perhaps, the closest I’ll ever come to genuine celebrity.