Curious Nashville

Before he was an international superstar, Jimi Hendrix spent a year on Nashville’s Jefferson Street. It’s a chapter in Hendrix’s musical life that many biographers gloss over. We explain why he came here — and what it says today about the city’s most prominent African-American neighborhood. Our question comes from Curious Nashville listener Joe Gramelspacher: "I understand that Jimi Hendrix played on Jefferson Street. What is the musical history of Jefferson Street?"

This episode wanders into supernatural territory in the search for unmarked graves. It began innocently enough: A listener asked us about Nashville’s oldest structures. But as we visited some of the city’s oldest homes, we found family graveyards that date back 200 years or more — and some owners, it turns out, relied on a generations-old practice with mysterious power to find unmarked graves. Which led us to the question: What’s up with “water-witching” in Nashville?

The Curious Nashville inbox has received several variations on the same question: What happened to passenger rail service in Nashville? Residents are right to be curious. Nashville is one of the largest cities in the country to have no rail connection to another city.

The winning question came from veteran Nashville record producer Mitch Dane. "I’ve heard rumors of a mysterious tunnel system winding beneath downtown Nashville. Is this true?" Here's what we found.

WPLN listener Rachael Edge asked the question: "In the Nashville City Cemetery, there’s a grave that says ‘Margaret H. McCutchen — She Turned From Bloodkin.’ What’s the story behind that?" Finding an answer led us on a circuitous path.