Arts & Entertainment
Mention the words “music” and “Nashville” in the same breath, and the first association most people typically come up with is, of course, country music. That is, unless you actually live here—in which case it’s anyone’s guess what you might be thinking of. Chances are that it’s anything but country: It might be the too-cool-for-country Lucinda Williams, it might be local pop combo Joe, Marc’s Brother, it might be jazz saxophonist Jeff Coffin—but it probably will not be Garth Brooks. (Does he even live here? He’s never been spotted at the Kroger.)
When it comes to music, it’s like there are two Nashvilles: the one in the public’s imagination, and the much more interesting one that we all know and live in every day. It’s easy enough to trumpet the wealth and diversity of talent that lives in our city—so much so that it even seems a little indulgent to catalog it here. More intriguing and maybe even more important is the idea that the distance between the seemingly hermetic Music Row and the city the rest of us inhabit really isn’t all that broad.
Nashville, it’s always noted, is the quintessential big small town, and thus if you were to play the six degrees of separation game in an attempt to link, say, Dolly Parton and the charismatic local rock ’n’ roll god David Cloud, it wouldn’t be that hard: Cloud, a regular at the local watering hole Springwater, has shared the stage at the club’s “Working Stiffs Jamboree” nights with iconoclastic singer-songwriter Tom House. House, in turn, has collaborated with gritty tunesmith David Olney, whose song “Deeper Well” was covered by admirer Emmylou Harris. And Harris, of course, collaborated with Dolly Parton on the successful Trio projects.
That was easy enough—it took five degrees—and there’s a reason why: The lines between country music and every other kind of music have always been blurred in our city (and everywhere else, for that matter). It was certainly true during country’s formative years. In his biography of Nashville bandleader Francis Craig, local music historian Robert Ikard notes that Craig, who scored a massive pop hit in 1947 with “Near You” (a phenomenon on the scale of “Who Let the Dogs Out” today), could be considered at least in part responsible for the presence of the music business here. (Naturally, credit should also go to the Grand Ole Opry and early song publishers such as Fred Rose.) Craig opened one of the city’s first major studios, Castle Recording Studios—where such honky-tonk stalwarts as Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb would end up recording.
And that’s just one example. The great Decca producer Owen Bradley, the man responsible for countless classic recordings by Tubb, Loretta Lynn, Red Foley, Patsy Cline and others, was himself the leader of a popular dance band in the 1940s. If you lived in Nashville then, chances are, you went to a dance where Bradley’s band was playing.
Nashville in the years since has been a freewheeling place for cross-pollination among pop, rock ’n’ roll, country and R&B. Through the great harmonicist/multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy alone, there’s no telling how many musicians have been linked: George Jones, Elvis Presley, Tanya Tucker, soul crooner Joe Simon, Bob Dylan, Nancy Sinatra, the prankish duo Ween, and the list goes on. McCoy, along with such session-player colleagues as bassist/guitarist Wayne Moss, guitarist Mac Gayden and drummer Kenneth Buttrey, helped shape country music precisely because they brought a huge appetite for music, regardless of style or genre, to what they did.
Today, we don’t think of that happening as much—but it does. It happens nightly on local stages, where musicians draw on the city’s deep history and filter it through their own sensibilities. A few years ago, singer Mandy Barnett released a lush, Owen Bradley-produced album that earned highest praise from none other than the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. But there may be no better example of the city’s fecund talents than the husband-and-wife team of Buddy and Julie Miller. Together and on their own, they’ve released some half-dozen albums, and their colleagues include some equally luminous musicians: Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Victoria Williams. And yet their songs have been covered by such country hitmakers as Brooks & Dunn and the Dixie Chicks—and there they were on TV recently, backing Lee Ann Womack at the Country Music Association Awards.
There are plenty of reasons to find fault with country music today, to hold it at arm’s length and consider it a part of some other Nashville. But so long as we have folks like the Millers invigorating it, we should never write it off. The more we think of country music as something that we don’t have a stake in, the worse it’ll get. But the more we think of it as a part of the tightly woven fabric of the city—as something that feeds off and feeds into everything that happens here—the better it’s likely to be.
There are only two kinds of music: good and bad. Ask any committed musician, and at some point he or she will have to agree. But too often, we get hung up in classifying, separating, assigning by genre. And yet we have our own city as proof of just how interconnected all music ultimately is—and just how solidly music connects all of us who play it and listen to it. In the end, it’s why Nashville’s called Music City.
