In the Rotunda
This is a round room, maybe 100 feet in diameter. Could be bigger. It soars overhead and is lit all around by expanses of glass. The floor is, I assume, normally and open span.
But tonight it was set with fancy tables for the reception. Formal wait staff, quiet and efficient, circulated with trés eleganté finger food (look, it's Nashville, I'm not gonna look up that hor's whatever spelling), towels draped across their arms.
Serving tables served up fresh fruits, vegetables, roast beef, savory turkey, cheese, crackers, and dips. Refreshments of all sorts were available.
And a band was set up straight across the Rotunda from the entrance, under the overhang of the walk of fame itself.
Gretsch guitars waited silent in their cumulative craft and beauty to respond to the touch of players and let the latent music out.
Guests milled about, meeting and greeting, talking quietly, laughing, breathing in the ambience. Old friends and new acquaintances, FMIC folk, Gretsch family and friends of the family, artists, dealers and their guests. (And it's the dealers for whom these parties are really thrown.)
Everyone I saw looked pretty happy.
My eye was drawn to the inscription running in a circle around the circumference of the room, on the facing of the overhang of the walk of fame. You couldn't help but get the significance of the phrase, repeated twice: "will the circle be unbroken."
The circle was unbroken tonight.
I nabbed some munchies and made the walk around the circumference, under the overhang. It's lined with bronze plaques bearing bas relief sculptures of faces. So many faces. Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, Jimmie Rogers, Tex Ritter, Red Foley, The Carter Family, Bill Monroe, Patsy Cline, Owen Bradley, Johnny Cash...they're all there. The cornpone humorists, the heartbroken balladeers, the rough and the smooth, those who made the music, those who did the business, those who brought them together.
No one was missing. The vibe of the room gives mute and eloquent testimony to the motto of the CMHoF: "honor thy music." With equal reverence for saint and sinner, designations which have no meaning when recognizing and revering talent: all equal in the music.
We were there to honor them, and to carry it forward with instruments which had been an integral part of it. I spent a moment at one plaque in particular. (And wished I had a tripod for better photography.)
Hanging overhead, dead center in the room, is a peculiar obelisk. Maybe it's a radio tower, WSM beaming laughter and comfort and community and magic over the entire midsouth, the Grand Ole Opry and King Biscuit Flour ads, the ether humming with plaintive melody and hot licks, warm radio tubes glowing in country kitchens and city parlors.
Or maybe it's the stylus on a record player, all those crackling 78s, Jimmie Rodgers and Mother Maybelle, or the 45s Hank carried from radio station to radio station, or the 33s Chet helped introduce.
I suppose the Hall of Fame's brochure would make it clear, but for the night I was free to assign my own significance to it.
I hoped it wouldn't fall. After my circumnavigation of the walk of greats, the last table available in the room happened to be dead center, exACTly under the thing.
Looked like this when I peered up:
. 
