The Jefferson Street Kids
Dave Gore and Robbie Bowden at the Brown County Playhouse in May. photo courtesy of Michele Wedel Photography
~ by Jeff Tryon
Onstage at the Brown County Playhouse, for a recent benefit concert, local music legends Robbie Bowden and Dave Gore shared with the audience that it was not their first time to work in the venerable Nashville performance space.
“ When we were kids, they used to hire us to come in after the performances and clean up the trash,” said Bowden.
Bowden and Gore grew up to share a passion for music and played together in different bands, including a near-miss at fame and fortune with the locally-famous String Bean String Band.
It all started on the streets of Nashville, in a simpler time, when gangs of baby boomer kids stormed around town on their bikes, swam in Salt Creek, and sometimes got into mischief.
“ The Playhouse at that time was open air, they just had these canvas flaps that they would put down and it had a tin roof,” Bowden recalled.“ The alley running down the side there wasn’ t paved— it had gravel on it.”
Gore remembered,“ We would sneak down, especially if there was a play going on that maybe had some suspense to it, was kind of scary. We’ d hang out in the alley and we would pick up a handful of that crushed stone and— at the appropriate moment— throw it up on the metal roof, which made a horrible racket.
“ You’ d hear women scream— it scared the hell out of them. Then usually a backstage assistant would come running out—‘ Get out of here, you crazy kids!’— and chase us uptown,” he said.“ But we knew all the good hiding places. We’ d run between the buildings, sometimes there were little alleyways and things that you could hide in, so they never did catch us. That was fun.”
It wasn’ t just the two of them, of course, there was a whole cadre of kids looking for fun in a Nashville of the 1950s that was smaller, slower, and sleepier than today.
38 Our Brown County • July / August 2019