Despite the Witches, Cookeville Persists

Pastor Jimmy Fortunato spends a lot of time on parade floats every December. The leader of Pilgrim Baptist Church in Cookeville has especially looked forward to participating in the Cookeville Christmas Parade that, as we have previously reported, Mayor Laurin Wheaton bullied private citizens and church leaders to give up so she could hand control to two local activists who identify as witches (we wish we were joking). But for the first time in the five years, Fortunato has been involved, he learned that parade organizers have banned participants from handing out literature, a rule that he sees as specifically directed at participating churches. 

“If you don't want the gospel to go out, you can always find a reason that will hide your real reason,” said Fortunato. “You know, we don't want the trash on the ground. We don't want the cleanup. If we say yes to one, we're going to have to say yes to all. But historically, our town has come to expect the Christmas parade to look a certain way. And historically, in the past, churches have had the liberty to pass out gospel literature.”

Both Monterrey and Algood, two Cookeville-adjacent cities in Putnam County, do not prohibit participants from handing out religious tracts. In fact, Fortunato has boxes of them ready for dispersal at Algood’s parade this evening. 

According to multiple sources with whom The Pamphleteer has spoken over the last week, parade participation is down 40-50% with many community groups pulling out after they learned that Mayor Wheaton appointed local activist Sam Raper of Cookeville Inclusive to the parade board. Prone to expletive-filled political posts and public identification as a witch, Raper and another local witch activist, Montana “The Maker” Chambers, who owns the occult shop The Tiny Cloak, have spent the last few weeks reveling in what both have referred to as their takeover of the parade. 

🦹🏼‍♂️ From Waylon To Wallen Yesterday, Morgan Wallen was sentenced to serve a week incarcerated in a DUI education center and two years probation for yeeting a chair off the rooftop of Chief's Bar. He opted to plead guilty to reckless endangerment in accordance with Judicial Diversion, which Judge Cynthia Chappell explained is “a particular statute for first offenders that allows you, if you successfully complete all of the terms of your probation and have no other arrests or problems with the law, you may then petition the court to expunge all public record of these offenses.” The two Nashville police officers nearly hit by the chair approved of the plea, which is final given that there will be no jury trial, sentencing hearing, or appeal. 

When addressing his 2020 public intoxication arrest (in which charges were later dropped) in a 2023 Billboard interview, Wallen opened up about his rocky relationship with alcohol: “I used to be scared to even think about what it would be like to play a show without drinking….And now I’m almost scared to wonder what it’d be like if I was drunk.” As far as drinking off tour, “I’m still figuring out my personal life,” he said. “I probably always will be.”

Morgan Wallen’s behavior mirrors the same mythos of many country music legends. From George Jones making his beer runs on a John Deere, to Johnny Cash’s and Waylon Jennings’ rap sheets, Wallen fits the bill as country’s modern-day bad boy—but with his own twist. “For us, ‘outlaw’ meant standing up for your rights, your own way of doing things,” wrote Jennings in Waylon: An Autobiography. Though the highwayman was referring to the music industry outlaw movement he started with Willie Nelson in the 70’s, Wallen’s guilty plea on Thursday displays his own type of ruggedly individualistic code of conduct that lives up to the outlaw spirit.

🏛️ Blackburn Backs DOGE On Wednesday, Senator Marsha Blackburn and Representative Claudia Tenney (R-New York) introduced the DOGE Acts. “The American people have had enough of outsized bureaucracy and wasteful government spending,” Blackburn said in a press release. “The DOGE Acts are the first step to achieving government efficiency by requiring federal employees to get back in the office, moving federal agencies into the heartland of America, cutting bloated federal spending across the board, and freezing federal hiring and salaries until we can rightsize the federal government.”

The package includes:

• The Federal Freeze Act, which would put a one year freeze on salary increases for federal civilian employees, along with both decreasing and capping federal agency positions.
• The Commission to Relocate the Federal Bureaucracy Act, which would “relocate non-national security-related agencies to states across the country based on financial efficiency, existing infrastructure, and related industries.”
• The Federal Employee Performance and Accountability Act, which would establish a “performance-based pay structure” for federal employees.
• The Stopping Home Office Work’s Unproductive Problems (SHOW UP) Act, which “would require federal agencies to return to pre-pandemic telework levels within 30 days” and would prevent permanent expansion of telework without the permission of the Office of Personnel Management.
• One Percent, Two Percent, And Five Percent Across-the-Board Spending Cuts, which is a three-bill package to “cut bloated spending” in certain non-security departments.

The DOGE Acts were packaged to “coincide with President-elect Trump’s recently announced Department of Government Efficiency, which will be led by entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.” It’s also worth noting that Blackburn has attempted to pass several of these measures in years past.

DEVELOPMENT

• Shipley Do-Nuts, Sweet Paris Crêperie & Café head to Nashville Yards (Post)
• Anthropologie will take space in Pine Street Flats in the Gulch (Post)
• Charlotte Avenue religious buildings sell for $15.6M (Post)
• Reinvented Beer Sellar unveiled on Third Avenue North (Post)

✹ HUNTING FOR DUMMIES

Hunting tends to mystify the uninitiated more than any other pursuit. A large portion of the general public sees learning to hunt as a kind of esoteric ruralite knowledge that can only be passed down from older family members. PeePaw takes you out, shows you what deer scat looks like, you sit in a blind for a long time, a deer walks by, you shoot it, he makes you eat part of its heart, etc. However, today there’s really no difference between learning to hunt and learning any other time-consuming hobby. The information is so widely available that you can learn far more from the first page of Google than PeePaw would have ever been able to teach you.

Alternatively, maybe your conception of the hobby is similar to what I described, and you’re actually wondering why anyone would want to spend their time doing something so brainless. Perhaps these simple hill-people have some latent pagan fascination with deer antlers, so they subject themselves to hours of mind-numbing boredom to kill innocent creatures and fondle their bony protrusions. Alas, you would (mostly) be mistaken because the hobby can be—and really should be—far more layered and complex than that, and I’d encourage you to give the method I describe here a try on public land, because it will give you a taste of what hunting really should be.

THINGS TO DO

View our calendar for the week here and our weekly film rundown here.

📅 Visit our On The Radar list to find upcoming events around Nashville.

🎧 On Spotify: Pamphleteer's Picks, a playlist of our favorite bands in town this week.

👨🏻‍🌾 Check out our Nashville farmer's market guide and yearly festival guide.

TONIGHT

🎄 Big Band Holidays - Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra @ Schermerhorn Symphony Center, 7:30p, $60+, Info
+ featuring vocalists Ekep Nkwelle and Robbie Lee

🪕 All-star Bluegrass Night @ Station Inn, 9p, $25, Info
+ feat. Gena Britt, Michael Cleveland, Brandon Rickman, Johnathan Dillon, and Alan Bartram

🎄 Dee's Christmas Spectacular hosted by Chris Mitchell ft. Timbo, Sweet Megg & Charlie Treat @ Dee's Lounge, 6p, $5, Info

🎄 Daniel Donato's Cosmic Christmas @ Brooklyn Bowl Nashville, 8p, $28.50, Info

🎸 Little Big Town + Sugarland @ Bridgestone Arena, 7p, $37+, Info

✹ WEEKLY FILM RUNDOWN: December 13-19

The latest releases and special screenings hitting Music City this week. For a complete list of upcoming releases, check out our 2024 Film Guide.

Kraven The Hunter (Dir. J. C. Chandor; Starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Russell Crowe)  Its brutal reviews make other Spider-Man spinoff Madame Web look like an Oscar contender. Still, who doesn’t want to see the kid from Kick-Ass getting superpowers from a lion bite and going vigilante on his hammy Russian mob don father–especially with the director of A Most Violent Year at the helm? Now playing in theaters. 

The Belcourt’s Holiday Classics As expected, Nashville’s nonprofit cinema brings the Christmas cheer with holiday classics (Love Actually, It’s a Wonderful Life, Die Hard) and some inspired seasonal cult fare. This week brings Home Alone, Babe, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2, Night of the Comet (35mm), Deep Red, Edward Scissorhands, Brazil (Director’s Cut), Blast of Silence, Bad Santa, and Rosemary’s Baby. Note: AMC jumps into the festivities by playing the 2018 version of The Grinch during the week.

Lord of the Rings: The War of Rohirrim (Dir. Kenji Kamiyama; Starring Brian Cox and Miranda Otto) Who ordered an anime prequel to Tolkien’s classic for Christmas? Now playing in theaters.

📰 Check out the full newsletter archive here.

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