At 9 o'clock on a Sunday night, 10 people are standing shoulder to shoulder in a Hillsboro Village home, forming a semicircle around the piano where Marcus Hummon is seated; the first rehearsal of the original work the singer/songwriter/playwright has created for Premiere Evening is under way. The annual event is the primary fundraiser for TPAC Education, one of the leading arts-in-education initiatives in the United States, serving more than 1.5 million students in the state over the past two decades.

There is no urgency to this introductory run-through, though the $500-per-person black-tie dinner at BellSouth and the subsequent show for the public at the Ryman take place in just six nights, on Saturday, April 30. In fact, the mood is relaxed and energized, loose and focused. Good-natured ribbing fills the interludes between songs, while the wail of electric guitars comes up from the basement, where two of Hummon's three sons—13-year-old Levi and 9-year-old Caney—have been dispatched. His youngest, 5-year-old Moses, runs in and out of the room. Stage manager Kelli McClendon offers suggestions from the perimeter, which she patrols with her baby on her hip; Hummon's assistant, Helen Naylor, notebook in hand, keeps tracks of every suggestion.

"I love doing it this way," Hummon says after the rehearsal has been called for the night. "Having everyone here at the house. This is one of my favorite parts of the whole process."

The process that takes an idea to a song, and a song to a hit, is the basic premise of A Songwriter's Story. Hummon will appear in his original production with seven singer/actors, and there will be special guest appearances from some of the country stars who have recorded his songs. As for the plot, it's a well-known narrative among Nashville's largest creative community, which remains at once highly visible and yet largely unknown outside the borders of Music Row, and it's what Premiere Evening's co-chair Brian Williams, a well-known music industry banker, asked Hummon to convey when he was invited to be this year's featured entertainer, a role that has been previously filled by stars like Michael Feinstein, Andrea Marcovicci and Dionne Warwick. Yet as told through script, music and images, A Songwriter's Story also examines how experience shapes a life, how going away can bring one home, how failure and brokenness become opportunity for renewal, how what one receives becomes what one is morally obliged to give.

It's a process that begins onstage with a scene at the Bluebird Cafe, but for Hummon, it begins at home every day, in front of the piano. "He has a morning ritual that he does religiously," says his wife of 17 years, Becca Stevens, pastor of St. Augustine Episcopal Church and a well-known social activist. "He gets up early, feeds the dogs, makes coffee, then sits down at the piano. He is like a monk coming to worship. Some artists say you have to be depressed to create, or alone in solitude. But not Marcus. He does it through everything. Through new babies crying, through his hip replacement surgery, through No. 1 singles and through no cuts at all. He starts the every day the same way and never doubts that the muse will come."

Hummon's creative path started with his family of origin, a clan of Midwesterners who refer to their genetically bred passion for music as "The Disease." His father worked for the State Department, in the Agency for International Development. Through his childhood and young adulthood, the family lived in Tanzania, Nigeria, the Philippines and finally Saudi Arabia. "It was a life of privilege amid extreme poverty," he recalls, "something we were all very aware of." He was educated in international schools, until he turned 15 while living in Saudi Arabia. The country's law states that Americans aren't permitted in the education system past the ninth grade, so the children of state department workers commonly get sent to boarding school abroad. Instead, Hummon's mother devised a unique version of home schooling, undertaking a year of "aesthetic education" that surveyed the great works American literature, classical music and art.

"That year was priceless," he says. "She felt that great art is as likely to change the world as anything else. I came to believe in the transformational power of art."

Music was already deeply imbedded as a way of life in his family, and Hummon learned guitar first, not taking up piano until college. Songwriting was an occasional endeavor. After eventually returning to the States and graduating from high school, he was accepted at Williams College, yet The Disease was taking hold. After his senior year, he and his younger sister Sarah took off to California, taking part-time jobs to support their pursuit of a music career. Advice from an entertainment attorney sent him to Nashville in 1986. "He told me that I was writing country music whether I knew it or not, and that Nashville is where I needed to be. He set up some meetings for me, Sarah went back to college, and I came here." One of his first meetings resulted in a writer's deal with Charlie Monk's publishing company, which had ties to a contemporary Christian management company.

"I was looking for a more diverse community, so I thought I would take some courses at Vanderbilt; I chose divinity school, because seminary school can inform everyone, in every part of your life, and that is where I met Becca. We were married just over a year later."

Hummon's goal professionally was to get a record deal. Over the years, he got several, but none of them panned out to fame as an artist. At the same time, he was finding some success as a songwriter, with the songs that "slipped out" of his catalog, notably "Only Love," which was cut by Wynonna and became his first No. 1 hit in 1994. "As a singer-songwriter, you want to keep your best stuff to yourself. I wanted to be an artist."

Columbia came courting with a record deal in 1993, and he accepted the proposal, spending two years on the road. A 12-day radio tour for one of his records came when Levi was 3, and Becca was due to give birth any moment to their second child. "I got to come home for one day, Becca and I took a walk, she went into labor, and Caney was born that night. I sat up with him all night while Becca slept, then I had to leave in the morning for four days. At that point, I was beginning to question what I was doing."

So was the label, and their partnership ended. Later, he met Stuart Adamson, the lead vocalist and writer for Big Country, and the two formed a band, The Raphaels, cutting an album for a London label. They were set to do a tour of Europe, when tragedy struck. "Stuart had one of the most severe addiction problems of anyone I have ever known. Just before our tour, he committed suicide. He died, and something in me died, the need for the road, for fame. What I discovered was that not only could I go home, but I had so much there to go home to. I knew that in spite of the fatal flaws of the music business, I still really had a love for music. I just wasn't sure what form that would take."

He began letting more songs slip out, and they were snatched up by artists like Alabama, Tim McGraw, Sarah Evans, The Dixie Chicks and, most recently, Rascal Flatts, whose recording of "Bless the Broken Road" stayed No. 1 for six weeks, his biggest success to date. But it was a meeting with Bill Feehely, founder of the Actor's Bridge Ensemble theater company, that led him down a path to what he believes is his true calling. "Bill asked me to write some songs for a production he was doing about Edgar Lee Masters. It was like falling in love." As soon as the production closed, he set to work on what would be his first musical for Actors Bridge, American Duet.

He has since written three more full-length musicals, two of which, Warrior and Francis of Guernica, were presented by TPAC Education to student audiences, giving him the chance to indulge another of his great passions: arts education. He has been deeply committed to TPAC's programs for children since he began coordinating songwriters' nights to benefit Wolftrap Early Learning for the Arts, which serves preschoolers, and he makes regular visits to Head Start classrooms.

It is a mission that is inspired by the people and opportunities along his path. "I think of the word praxis," Hummon says. "I understand it to be a Greek word that is the concept of where belief meets duty. That guides me. If the arts mean something to your life, and you believe in their transformational power, then it is your duty to share that. If you believe in what you are doing, and you are passionate about it, then you'll touch who you touch. The kid who is chewing gum and looking at the ceiling during Francis of Guernica might be listening after all—he might be inspired to become a painter, or to speak out against social injustice, the message of the play. You throw a pebble into the ocean, and the ripples spread out, and you never know what might happen. You have to throw the pebble to find out."