Seven Times That Saturday, Somebody Fires a Cannon. In Between, There Is Music.
There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over Stones River on a fall morning, and it is worth understanding what you are standing in the middle of before somebody fires a cannon into it.
On Saturday, October 17, the battlefield hosts Arts in the Parks, its annual nod to National Arts and Humanities Month — a day built around live music, artillery demonstrations and the work of artists who have spent time in the park. It costs nothing to attend. Stones River is a fee-free park; there is no entrance pass and no admission charge, so the only thing the day asks of you is a folding chair.
The schedule, and why it alternates
Everything happens on the patio and lawn behind the visitor center, and the day runs in a deliberate rhythm — a cannon, then music, then a cannon again:
- 10 a.m. — Artillery demonstration
- 10:30 a.m. — Two Rivers Fife and Drum
- 11 a.m. — Home Sweet Home Band
- 1 p.m. — Artillery demonstration
- 1:30 p.m. — Two Rivers Fife and Drum
- 2 p.m. — Home Sweet Home Band
- 3 p.m. — Artillery demonstration
Concert seating is limited, which is the polite way of saying bring your own. A folding chair or a blanket is encouraged, and on an October Saturday on that lawn you will want one.
Two very different kinds of music
The Home Sweet Home Band is made up of local musicians playing the songs that actually moved through camps and parlors during the Civil War — the music soldiers and civilians sang, alongside later material written in the long shadow of that period. It is a repertoire most people have heard fragments of without ever hearing it played straight through.
The Two Rivers Fife and Drum, the duo of Shirley Gauthier and Neil Rutland, does something older and stranger. Fife and drum was not entertainment. It was the communications system — the martial airs that told men where to go and when, from the founding of the country onward. Hearing it in the open air, on ground where it once carried real instructions, is a different experience than hearing it indoors. Their set carries an America's 250th flavor, which is fitting: the anniversary is close enough now that the parks have started building programming around it.
The cannons are the point, not the punctuation
The artillery demonstrations are scheduled ahead of each concert set, and the framing the park uses for them is the interesting part: gunnery was as much an art as a science. That is not showmanship. Nineteenth-century artillery was a trade built on judgment — range, elevation, fuse timing, reading ground and weather — practiced by crews who had to do all of it together, quickly, under conditions that punished hesitation.
Which is a reasonable thing to demonstrate on this particular field. The fighting here began on the last day of 1862 and ran through January 2, 1863 — and it was artillery that ended it. On that final day, fifty-seven Union cannons firing from a single line brought the battle to a close in under an hour. Standing on that lawn while a crew works one gun is the closest most visitors will come to imagining fifty-seven of them.
Inside, the artists
The visitor center will display work created by past Artists in Residence — the park's program inviting writers, painters, photographers, sculptors, musicians and composers to spend time here and make something out of it. It is the quietest part of the day and arguably the most unusual: a battlefield that commissions art about itself, and then hangs the results where visitors start their tour.
The park is at 3501 Old Nashville Highway in Murfreesboro.
If October is shaping up as your month for this sort of thing, the battlefield also has a living-history day on September 12 with all three branches of the army represented, and our guide to the best historic places in Rutherford County covers what else is worth the drive. For a broader list of what the city has running this fall, the October events calendar is the place to start.
