The Whole Nashville Experience. Oh Yeah.

Wow. It’s contagious. After talking with Music Valley dealer, Karen Buckingham, I’m more excited about Nashville Week than ever, and so is she.
Although she’s lived in Texas for nearly thirty years, her accent will tell you she grew up in New England. Karen has an interesting background. “As a kid, back in the 60’s” she began going to the markets in Brimfield, Massachusetts to carry her mom’s purchases. Before she knew it, both she and her sister had become dealers. She told me, “I collected myself into the business. Once your house is full, you have to sell”. Sound familiar? Although her home’s in Texas she maintains her membership in the New Hampshire Dealers Association and she does shows across the map from New England to Texas.
Her taste in antiques is high country. In her booth you’ll find an elegant mix of American antique furniture in paint or original surface, early wallpaper boxes, pewter, great primitive hooked rugs and wonderful landscape paintings and portraits. She’s especially drawn to early portraits of children because she finds them to be a bit more colorful. And about her painted furniture, which she usually finds in New York, New England and Pennsylvania, she does her own dry scraping. She’ll find a great piece that’s been “over painted” and she scrapes it down to the original paint, all by hand. It’s very time consuming and labor intensive but, she says she found out while raising teenagers that it’s cheaper than therapy. You’ve got to visit her booth….she’s a hoot and her inventory is amazing.
Karen was quick to point out that the talk at antique shows is all about Nashville Week. Folks are just plain pumped about the shows being back together again. She loves the idea of running a shuttle between shows. “That’s going to be great for customers who fly in to shop”. She’s emphatic, “Customers want the whole Nashville experience. They want to shop all day, go back to their rooms to rest and hit the restaurants at night”. Yep, that’s what we want, The Whole Nashville Experience