Nashville this week, to interview what remains of Dolly Parton. I don’t think she’d mind me putting it like that. It’s certainly not meant to be a criticism. At 63, she could be an ambassador for some sort of strange and beautiful race out of Star Trek. She’s the prototype for Pamela Anderson; what Joan Rivers was aiming at when she missed. There’s always a temptation to disapprove of plastic surgery, but that somehow falls away when the results just make no pretence of aping what’s real. Parton is living sculpture, and you can’t help but marvel at both the effort involved, and the results.

Whenever I’m in the US, and outside the older bits on the East, it’s the effort behind everything that always sticks with me. Like many American cities Nashville doesn’t feel quite finished yet. European cities rise up out of the ground from roots, like old warts. American ones feel placed on the crust lightly, as though you could prise a giant shovel beneath them and just shift them a few miles down the road. See the grass verge by the railroad tracks in Nashville, and it’s not an aesthetic nicety like it would be back home. It’s because nobody has built anything there, ever. You look around, and you suddenly notice how much work they’ve done in the past 200 years on everything else.

Let there be neon

Something else that makes me feel British in Nashville is the brazen Christianity everywhere. We have Christianity in Britain too, of course, but it’s a favourite old cardigan of a thing. Our churches are just pleasant detail on the street, like post boxes. In Nashville they’re breezeblock and neon, and on every street corner with a giftshop attached. Faith is everywhere, with all the ineffable divine mystery of your last gas bill.

A lecturer at Middle Tennessee State University, the local newspaper reports, has hit on a novel way to stop his students cheating in exams. First thing of a morning, he sat them down and gave them all a form to sign. It had the Ten Commandments at the top. “I have neither given nor received assistance during completion of the examination,” it read, underneath. “If I have cheated last week, then I (fill in name) have violated God’s Ten Commandments, will be sorry for the rest of my life and go to Hell.” Might work.

Over on the next page, meanwhile, we learn that the face of Jesus keeps appearing in the condensation on a pickup-truck window in nearby Jonesborough. Jim Stevens, retired, who owns the Isuzu is question, says he isn’t even particularly religious. “Even rolling the window up and down,” reports the paper, “has not stopped it from reappearing.”

Quite a lick

To the Country Music Hall of Fame, post Dolly, to bone up on my local history. It’s ludicrous, the European conceit that America doesn’t do history. They’ve just crammed an awful lot in, very fast.

It’s a jolt, though, how foreign it all seems. One early country music pioneer, I see, was a chap called Blind Riley Puckett. “The Bald Mountain Caruso!” says the exhibit. “Best known for Hen Cackle by the raucous North Georgia stringband Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers”. I basically don’t understand a single word of that. I can only guess what a stringband is, and I wouldn’t even know where to find North Georgia.

What’s a skillet? Why would you lick one? I know more about Ancient Rome.

Gradually, though, it all falls into place. The evolution of styles, from black slave songs to white rock. The metamorphosis of the cowboy, from strong, silent thug to gaudy, rhinestone popinjay. The way Elvis didn’t suddenly come out of nowhere, but was actually just the most successful in a long line of slightly creepy bum-faced men who dressed like matadors. The thrilling, sexy explosion of rock’n’roll, like a spark on dry kindling, and how it soon turned country music into a fossilised art.

Isn’t that history? And barely 90 years gone, since old Blind Riley first put tongue to skillet, or whatever, and made the girls go wild. What was Britain up to, culturally, while all this was going on? Not much. Slowly phasing out the bowler hat.

Filth and faith

Dolly was charming and delightful — and will be discussing her faith on our screens this Christmas, alongside Desmond Tutu and Tony Blair. Strange how, among that triumvirate, it’s Blair, not her, who seems the odd one out. Blair seems to talk about his faith quite a lot, but I’ve never really been able to discern any sort of link between it and anything he’s ever done. With Parton, despite the hair and the boobs and the filthy jokes, it’s all so much easier to see.

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