Featured Image: Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp
Nashville cats, play clean as country water
Nashville cats, play wild as mountain dew…
Well there’s thirteen hundred and fifty-two guitar pickers in Nashville
-John Sebastian, 1966
Tonight, 60 years later, at the Station Inn there are not quite 1,352 guitar pickers. A half dozen, perhaps, along with one standup bass, five mandolins, two fiddlers, 10 banjos and the odd singer. It’s the Sunday night bluegrass jam in a longstanding Nashville music shrine—and the place is packed. Every chair taken, standing room along the walls, toes tapping, songs as old as the hills filling the air. “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” “Wayfaring Stranger.” Everyone knows the right key, the chord progressions and all the words. No one’s texting their hairdresser. Maybe the babysitter.
Where else would you find this? On our whole planet? On a Sunday night?
There’s only one Music City. Just one.
It all started with Queen Victoria.
The 19th century’s preeminent monarch drew performers from around the world to the Court of St James, and that’s why in 1873 a group of singers traveled to London from Tennessee to perform spirituals for the queen. Memorably impressed, Victoria remarked on the beauty of their singing and declared they must surely be from a “music city.”
The city was Nashville, home of Fisk University—and the queen’s remark about the Jubilee Singers has applied here for 150 years. Music City USA is undeniably the best place in America for music lovers to visit, maybe in the world, and an identity that had the humblest of beginnings (the 1873 Jubilee singers were formerly enslaved people who had been free less than a decade) has grown exponentially.
Of course, it didn’t really start with Queen Victoria.
And spirituals are just part of the story.
The complete story is that the South gave birth to the music of America, and Nashville is its capital city. The heritage of homegrown music below the Mason-Dixon Line and east of the Mississippi is one of the most indelible American legacies. Here in the hills, valleys and fields of the Southern countryside, Scotch-Irish folk tunes were blended with Delta blues to form country music, bluegrass, soul, jazz, gospel and rock ‘n roll. One could argue even rap was born here long ago when it was known as “talking blues.” Those forms have spread around the world and shaped humanity’s most meaningful art into a 21st century kaleidoscope that 19th century musicians could have never imagined. From Beale Street in Memphis to Congo Square in New Orleans, from Muscle Shoals in Alabama to the hollows of Kentucky, the music rang out and still does… All the way from Alabama to Australia.
Even today you might wander Jackson Square in New Orleans’ French Quarter and come upon a pickup band of buskers playing “St James Infirmary,” a century-old blues standard whose mournful minor-key lament has echoed in a million songs since its early 20th century origins. Upriver, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, home of the Delta Blues Museum, you may well wander into a local bar on a Friday night and find a disciple of BB King holding forth.
In Muscle Shoals, one of the most revered music studios lives on, with its visitors putting on the occasional set at local taverns. You may hear old standards by Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave. In Austin, Texas, home of the premier American music show, Austin City Limits, the metro area claims to host more live music performances than any other, and no purpose would be served by trying to declare a winner between the Texas and Tennessee capitals. Both carry almost identical musical roots from the 19th century into the 21st. Both offer more music than any fan could sensibly digest in a lifetime.
But if music is the universal language, Nashville is the most multilingual city of all. Its everyday musical agenda embraces the rhythms of plantation life, the Scotch-Irish plaints of the Appalachians, the blues of the Mississippi Delta, the thumping gospel of little country churches. Toss in one of America’s best symphony orchestras and four major concert venues ranging from a massive stadium to a historic 19th century church—plus dozens and dozens of small venues such as the Station Inn and innumerable bars, concert rooms and taverns in the city center.
On any given night one might hear bluegrass, gospel, Latin music, thrash metal, cowboy music, Mozart, old fashioned pop, honky-tonk, soul, blues… and on and on. Yes, spirituals too: The Fisk University Jubilee Singers are active still, 155 years on. But while the sheer magnitude of the Nashville musical spectrum is obvious, a little attention adds multitudinous data points.
• At Nashville’s very user-friendly airport, BNA, the sound system eschews the Pandora/Spotify dreck you find in most airports. Instead, enjoying a superb hamburger at Pharmacy, I hear a 79-year-old song by Hank Williams, “Move it on Over,” that is often labeled the first rock ‘n roll song—11 years ahead of Elvis’s “Hound Dog”—which was an old blues tune by Big Mama Thornton, anyway.
Across the way the airport bookstore has two large cartons of LPs for sale. Yes, honest authentic vinyl.
• In Nashville you won’t hear the piped-in algorithmic feculence common across Middle America from pancake houses to sports bars to white linen restaurants. That would be like serving Folger’s in Seattle.
• A greater share of Nashville residents work in the music industry than in any other city. The industry provides 81,000 jobs and accounts for $15 billion in the local economy. Perhaps one should add tourism’s 100,000 jobs and $19 billion—visitors are not coming to Nashville for theme parks. In fact, Opryland USA shut down in 1998, though one might consider the Lower Broadway district’s “Honky Tonk Highway” and its dozens of music venues to be a theme park unique on Earth.
Number two musical city is a place from which Nashville borrowed one of its iconic instruments—Honolulu, birthplace of the steel guitar. New York, by the way, is far down the list, at #22. Too many hedge funds, of which there are few in Nashville. (Or Honolulu.)
• The Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Musicians Hall of Fame honor the craftsmen who have made the city’s music superlative. The Nashville Songwriters Association International (“world’s largest songwriting community”) has thousands of members in 100 chapters around the globe, offers any aspiring songwriter guidance and support, and is currently doing battle with AI plagiarism.
• The Country Music Hall of Fame has resisted the artist bloat that plagues the Rock Hall in Cleveland; a stroll among its 158 plaques is a compact sprint through American music, and the hall’s exhibits are memorably impressive and equally straightforward.
A Nashville visitor would be advised to sample all these items. Throw in a tour of the historic RCA Studio B on Music Row, holding the ghosts of Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers, Waylon Jennings and many, many more; and then head just out of town for the unmistakably premier music venue in America, the Grand Ole Opry.
My 3-day Nashville odyssey into American music concludes at the Opry on a Tuesday night honoring a 1970/80s icon, Ronnie Milsap, who has an astounding 32 #1 records to his name, classics such as “Smoky Mountain Rain” and “Stand by My Woman Man.” Trace Adkins, Keith Urban and Blake Shelton all take the stage to pay their respects, a musical royalty lineup barely conceivable anywhere else except, possibly, London. Urban strides to the microphone by himself, guitar in hand, and proceeds to demonstrate something you’d never know without seeing him live—he is a shockingly good acoustic guitar player.
But for me the highlight comes when a long, long, long-time star, Vince Gill, strides on stage, tall and assured, guitar in hand, three accompanists (all guitarists) alongside. Yes, Gill’s one of those 1,352 pickers, and one with quite a resumé himself.
Vince Gill’s in the Country Music Hall of Fame. He’s in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. He’s in the Musicians Hall of Fame. He’s won more Grammys than any other solo male country artist. He’s married to Christian contemporary music queen Amy Grant. He started out a half-century ago in Pure Prairie League, and for the past 10 years he has toured the world as a member of the Eagles, one of music’s all-time biggest bands. Gill’s most famous song, “Go Rest High on that Mountain,” won a Grammy in 1995. It blends all the Nashville musical flavors—gospel, blues, country, hints of 19th century spirituals, into an elegy for fallen friends. It’s heartfelt and heartbreaking, and whoever hears it cannot help remembering their fallen friends.
Gill doesn’t sing “Go Rest High” tonight; after all Milsap is still with us, and about to take the stage for one last appearance after 50 years in the Opry. Instead, Gill dips into his personal songbook for a classic country blues lament, “Take Your Memory with You,” a straightforward goodbye song with a rollicking honky-tonk piano, fiddle flourishes and ringing steel guitar. It could be a soul song, could be a bluegrass song, could be a gospel song.
It perfectly illustrates songwriter Harlan Howard’s legendary description of country music:
Three chords and the truth.
That’s Nashville. Only place on Earth.
Lifelong journalist and editor Eric Lucas lives on a small farm on an island north of Seattle, where he grows organic hay, garlic, apples, beans and corn. He was driven away from pop music by the Jackson Five, and, turning the radio dial, stumbled on Charley Pride singing “Crystal Chandeliers”… three chords and the truth.
