Alanna Royale, photographed for the Scene's Summer Guide 2023
When I get on the phone with phenomenal soul singer and songwriter Alanna Royale — who came to Nashville a little more than a decade ago, and who appears on our cover this week — she’s bursting with excitement. She’s got a new single called “Run Around” on the way, she’s got a summer tour lined up opening for Australian soul-funk ensemble Surprise Chef, and she’s making her fourth appearance at Musicians Corner; fifth, if you count one of the program’s lockdown-era livestreams.
On May 19, Royale and her glove-tight band will play ahead of groovy Louisiana outfit Seratones on opening night of the new season for the long-running free concert series in Centennial Park. The show kicks off five weeks of concerts whose roster runs the gamut from rocking songsmith Amythyst Kiah to cosmic pastoral ensemble William Tyler and the Impossible Truth to the Nashville Symphony. As a teenager, Royale didn’t often have money for concert tickets, but she was deeply passionate about getting as close to music as possible. She recalls reaching out to her local concert promoters, hunting any opportunity to work a show for free, just to see some of it.
“Anytime I see an opportunity to support an organization — or a concert series or a foundation or anything — that’s putting on entertainment that’s free and open to everyone, I just want to do that,” Royale says. “[In Nashville], we now have an extremely mixed range of income and privilege. It’s really important to continue providing that entertainment for people. I can barely afford to go to the movie theater, and people are out here with kids.”
Making sure everyone in town has access to a broad range of excellent performances — spanning Americana, country, R&B, rock, hip-hop and beyond — has been Musicians Corner’s guiding principle since the nonprofit Centennial Park Conservancy launched the program in 2010. For the past several years, series executive director Justin Branam (whom you might have seen perform during the series’ inaugural season in 2010) has led a team of Conservancy staffers and a small army of volunteers in putting on what amounts to 10 to 15 small festivals each year.
They pull together funds from Conservancy memberships, corporate sponsorships, grants and more that pay for things like production and security, as well as paying artists for their performances — not something every free festival is able to do. They book a lineup that is consistently diverse in terms of race, gender and style, aiming for the series to represent the full range of Nashvillians’ identities. And they work hard to make the atmosphere amid the West End park’s venerable oaks and maples fun and welcoming for everyone — especially families with young kids. Whole families can come together to Musicians Corner’s afternoon and evening shows and see rising stars to legends who only the parents might be able to see at a regular nighttime gig; if they can book a sitter, that is.
“Every year, I look out there and I see kids dancing in front of the stage and really enjoying the live music,” says Branam. “And I think it’s only a matter of time before one of those kids is gonna be all grown up, and they’ll be playing on the stage. And it’ll be like a full circle moment of, ‘I saw music here when I was 3, and it changed my life.’”
Summer Guide is presented by Black Sheep Tequila
From family activities to concert series and beyond, here’s our roundup of great summertime stuff to do and where to do it
