T
he bus is nothing fancy. It’s just like the one you rode to school on when you were 8 (assuming your school bus was pink). It sits on the east side of the Farmers Market just off Rosa Parks, north of the state capitol and the rest of the skyline you get from that view. The bus is emblazoned with the NashTrash Tours logo and the names of your hosts: Sheri Lynn and Brenda Kay — the Jugg Sisters, longtime East Nashvillians with feet planted firmly on both sides of the river. A bit shy of 11 a.m., they welcome their passengers onto the bus, most of them tourists from out of town. “Good mornin’!” the sisters crow. “Now sit your ass down!” Sheri Lynn dresses like a country star, with teased hair, teardrop eyeglasses, and a knotted neckerchief; Brenda Kay is a little more dressed-down, a denim jacket and a NashTrash cap holding back her long hair. They both wear earrings with dangling pink guitar picks. From the moment the passengers board, the two ladies greet everyone and learn everyone’s names, adding a personal touch to
they riff on Davy Crockett and point out that Andrew Jackson is indeed dead. (Which is as political as they get.) The pair’s funny song and dance routines usually (but not always) have something to do with the site the bus is passing by at the moment. At some point, God knows why, but the ladies pass along the German word for Vaseline (der weinerschleider). At another point: “On your left is the Davidson County Jail, former home of Randy Travis, Marty Stuart and, of course, Hank Jr.” Born and raised in Kalamazoo, Mich., Sheri and Brenda Schnyders were performers from the start, starring in school plays and suchlike. “In those early days we performed very rarely together,” Sheri Lynn says. “One time we did ‘Fiddler on the Roof ’ at the Kalamazoo Civic Theatre, but we were five years apart, so in the world of teenager stuff, I was driving and Brenda wasn’t, and we had a brother between us, so I kind of grew up before her. And I was out of the house while Brenda was still in high school, so we didn’t do a lot of things together until NashTrash. But we have always been very, very, very close.”
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Good mornin’! Now sit your ass down! Sheri Lynn would wind up on the west coast as a cabaret singer and Brenda Kay wound up singing in bands. “Brenda did blues, and was also an actress, too. But we were both known as actresses who could sing really well. Brenda did a couple of things at the Ryman when we first moved here. She understudied for the original part of Louise [Seger] in ‘Always … Patsy Cline,’ when Mandy Barnett played Patsy, and she originated the role of Mama in ‘The Lost Highway: The Music and Legend of Hank Williams.’ ” While the sisters lived in different parts of the country, their bond was strong enough and their vocations so similar that it seemed almost predestined that they would wind up working together at some point. “Sheri has traveled all over the world singing the music of Edith Piaf,” Brenda says. “Vanderbilt hired her a couple of times, she’s done some stuff for their French department. When one night our friends did [The] Doyle and Debbie [Show] at the Station Inn, they had a special guest. Sheri brought her piano player in from LA, who has toured all over the world with her, doing this one-woman show that was written specifically for Sheri — ‘The Miracle of Piaf ’ — and so she performed that one woman show at the
the whole excursion. On the trip your humble scribe rode on, there were tourists from New Mexico, the Bronx, and Canada. To the couples, they ask, “Are you married, or are ya doin’ it?” For 21 years, Sheri Lynn and Brenda Kay (who really are sisters) have been putting on their headset microphones and escorting tourists and natives alike around town, pointing out landmarks while deploying side-splitting remarks on the sites to be seen — and almost anything else that crosses their minds, too. They have the comic repartee of Martin and Lewis finishing each other’s sentences, but their act is not for your Pentecostal grandparents. Bawdy is too small a word, no cow too sacred to be slaughtered. Ad-lib jokes range from the endowment of male passengers to personal dryness to anything else that crosses their transoms. (Sheri Lynn once riffed, apropos of nothing, about her “court-ordered hysterectomy.”) They stop just short of the F-bomb, and we’re talking just short. One street inspires the classic story of George Jones and his lawnmower trip to the liquor store; another street brings about, “On your left, that’s Fort Nashborough, and some historical shit happened there.” At other points
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