CAVEMAN CHRONICLES

In Mayo’s debut memoir, necessity and fatherhood help a longtime gambler strike music gold.

Mayo is a caveman, to the extent that he’s done his best work in a cave. The Caverns is a naturally occurring underground system of caves located in Grundy County, Tennessee, that Mayo managed to turn into a music venue of international renown—it’s the setting of a PBS concert series, among other things. Mayo has always loved to gamble, from sports betting to casino roulette, and even worked as a professional sports tout (someone who sells picks to gamblers) for a time. His high tolerance for risk has sometimes worked in his favor—the Caverns being one prominent example—but it has also gotten him into trouble. With the memoir, Mayo recounts his rise from a young hustler break dancing for tourists on the streets of Nashville during summer vacations through the ups and downs of his work in radio. “Very early in my career as a radio advertising salesman in 1998, it was explained to me that there were two types of clients you had to get cash in advance from: strip club owners and preachers,” he muses. The birth of his first child led Mayo to take his greatest risk of all: transforming a cavern into a music venue. Mayo writes with tremendous energy and Southern wit, painting a colorful portrait of his picaresque rise to success. “I was tingling with thoughts of the future,” he writes of his first cave tour. “I was in dreamtime now. I could see it all. I had a vision.…My imagination was roaming free, and I could see how magical and possible it could all be. My head was in the sky, and my feet were not just on the ground, they were underground.” Though digressive and at times disorderly, the narrative is an alluring marriage of a big personality and a bizarre quest, making for an entertaining read even for those with no previous knowledge of the Caverns.

A fun, rambling yarn from a longtime salesman who found his calling in a cave.