A Guitar Shaped Swimming Pool
Hello friend, let me tell you a story about a pool. I live in the heart of Music City, USA. My neighborhood is called “Music Row.” The best way to describe it is to call it the industrial section of a town whose main industry is creating Music. My neighborhood has everything a budding Music Star needs; hair stylists, dentists, gyms, rhinestone suit stores, detox centers, churches, accountants, banks, lawyers, record labels, and recording studios. It also has a 50’ swimming pool shaped like a guitar.
I have lived in this neighborhood going on 2 decades and this guitar pool is without a doubt the most interesting thing around. I have wanted to take a picture of it for a long time. From time to time I will stick my camera through the fence hoping to get a shot, but the size of it demanded some more. The building it is attached to is an apartment building that has been given over to AirBnB and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay a few hundred dollars just to rent a room on the opposite side of the building. I got my hands on a drone and went over on a Sunday morning a few weeks back and took the picture you see at the top of this post.
Yeah it’s not the best picture, but I wasn’t really going for a great shot, I was just seeing if I could get in, take the picture, and then get out without any fuss. I was just hoping for a test shot. What I found was a tall tale worthy of this neighborhood, and a story of social amnesia. A story of the third best tourist attraction in a town built to attract tourists and lawsuits.
I think the most compelling part of the pool photo is the name “Webb Pierce” emblazoned on the neck of the guitar. The name didn’t mean anything to me so, naturally, I googled “Webb Pierce swimming pool”. The results were enlightening and useless all at once; basic internet fair.. They were enlightening in that they started me down a path of discovery and useless in that the results didn’t tell me anything about the swimming pool in the picture.
So for those who, like me, didn’t recognize the name Webb Pierce a little history. In the 1950s Pierce was top of the country charts. He came to Nashville via Louisiana in 1951 and by late 1952 he was asked to fill a vacancy left by the firing of Hank Williams at the Grand Ol’ Opry. His most famous song, “In the Jailhouse Now” was #1 on the charts for 21 weeks, which was longer than any other song spent at #1 until 2013.
Webb was what I would call “Rhinestone Country” meaning he wore flashy suits, usually made by Nudie Cohen. He even had a ‘62 Pontiac Bonneville that was decked out with silver dollars on the dash and six-shooters for door handles. He probably taught Elvis a thing or two.
At this point let’s take inventory of where we stand. We have a man who’s pretty famous and a swimming pool that is pretty famous. So you might be asking yourself, how famous could a swimming pool be? Well, after being let down by google now that it is an AI cesspool, I turned to newspapers.com and did the same “webb pierce swimming pool” search and got back 201,514 matches. Articles were written all over the United States and Canada about Webb Pierce’s swimming pool.
Now I’m not a professional journalist, I’m just an ol’ country picture taker, so my research here is not going to be the deepest. Before the 1969 tourist season, Webb had a guitar shaped swimming pool at his home; not the one pictured above. He was letting tour busses stop at his house and would show people around. As time went on, things got a little out of hand; Webb had a record store on his property and even built special parking for tour buses on his property. To be fair, his swimming pool was the third most visited attraction in Nashville at the time. And Nashville’s motto at the time was “Be nice to Country Music Fans because they’re nice to us.” Webb took that slogan to heart. His neighbors, who included Ray Stevens, Minnie Pearl, and the Governor, were not too keen on hordes of busses coming to visit, no matter how impressive the swimming pool was.
In the great American tradition, lawsuits were filed. Ultimately, Webb prevailed against his neighbors, even leading Ray Stevens to sell out and leave the neighborhood. At least that how it looked in March of 1976 when Webb was greeting the first bus of the season. While he was greeting that bus, the city was getting involved and had filed an injunction that stopped him from letting busses stop at his house.
The Tennessean (Nashville, Tennessee) · Sat, Mar 20, 1976 · Page 1
So, what about the pool in the picture? Well once the city got involved Webb’s golden goose was cooked. Webb wasn’t a man to just give up and so he built a new pool on Music Row near the original Country Music Hall of Fame. The City of Nashville never being one to miss an opportunity to kick a good man while was down, tried to shame him into not building it with opinions like “It’ll be like if Tootsie’s opened a bar on Belle Meade Blvd”.
It is unsure if the it is the car or the pool people are not meant to swim in. Also, all descriptions of the car describe it has “having 6-shooters for door handles” leaving out the half-dozen other pistols and rifles that adorned the car.
The best I can tell Webb opened his new pool in 1978 at a cost of around $250,000 which is about $1.2 million in today’s money. By 1979 the new pool was embroiled in controversy when one of Webb’s partners dumped 20 catfish in it in protest, stating at the time “the catfish will draw more visitors that Webb Pierce ever could.” In 1979 it was sold at auction for $150,000 to the investor who dumped the catfish and added to the Hotel next door’s property. Any trace of Webb was removed and now the only way to see it is to peep over the surrounding fence.
So there you have it, the story of Nashville’s third most popular tourist attraction. As told by someone who is fairly lazy when it comes to research. If you liked this, please consider signing up for my newsletter. I promise not send too often - mostly because that would mean I had to create content more on the regular and I am pretty lazy.
