It never dawned

My music purchases tend to come from Franklin, Tennessee. Naxos has eaten up every classical music distributor in the country, and the resulting warehouse probably holds upward of 3 million items. It’s a good location, close to Nashville’s airports and supplied with trucking arteries. But when I started looking at the area with Mapquest, I noticed this:

Franklin is entirely surrounded by plantations. It is as if the 13th Amendment never dawned. Likely the plantation owners send their chattel to the warehouse, where they pack and ship all day. I have known all along that Klaus Heymann would do anything to keep his costs low on his Naxos CDs — he is famous for inducing lesser musical organizations to record with him without royalties — but taking advantage of a rift in time to avail himself of Confederate labor practices goes beyond ingenuity. It may be difficult to find anyone in William Barr’s Department of Justice who will investigate this situation, let alone mount a prosecution. I hope that Franklin and its plantations will come to the attention of the next administration.

3 thoughts on “It never dawned

  1. I know the area. What is called a plantation in Franklin is what would probably be called a horse farm elsewhere. The land is hilly and not suited to cotton or tobacco, the classic plants of large-scale plantation slavery. On the other hand, if you’re a teenager in Franklin, you can go to Battle Ground Academy, located on a middling-important field of the Civil War.
    Nashville on the other hand is home to many vinyl plantations where ruthless recording execs monitor pickers and strummers as they sweat their way up and down the tone rows, each one on their “track”; the lucky ones get a token trophy known as a “plat’num” to hang on the cabin wall.

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