Ellen Angelico
Nashville is known to most as the Music City, and has become a city of big dreams and a mecca for those with aspirations of celebrity. That identity is a part of Nashville’s DNA, but it’s also left a skewed view of success in its wake. “Making it” in Nashville is measured by metrics here that are simply nonexistent elsewhere. For the hyper-successful — the Taylor Swifts and Garth Brookses of the world — it’s a catapult to international fame. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. But for most, it lays out a game where talent is currency, but that particular “money” doesn’t always talk. Most need the right look, the right contacts and a whole lot of influence to make it big.
Nashville-based podcast platform We Own This Town’s latest series, Girl in a Hurry: The Shelly Bush Story, is a (re)introduction to a Lower Broadway stalwart, country singer-songwriter Shelly Bush. For decades you couldn’t go long into a trip downtown without hearing Bush’s naturally polished vocal prowess, whether she was covering the hits of the ’90s and Aughts or playing her chart-worthy originals with her all-female backing band, humorously known as BroadBand. (The podcast shares its name with one of Bush’s own songs.) Those who knew Bush remember her talent, her humor, her dogged determination and her devotion to her work. She seemed destined to make it big before her untimely death in 2015.
“I loved Shelly, I played with Shelly, and I missed the shit out of her,” says Girl in a Hurry host Ellen Angelico, explaining why she wanted to start this project — an homage to the memory of her late friend. Angelico played in Bush’s BroadBand for the last year-and-change of Bush’s life, and it’s an experience she never forgot. She originally set out to preserve Bush’s story as an oral history project on her website, but quickly discovered there was far too much information for the uninitiated to parse through alone.
“My goal with this whole project, even before it was a podcast, is to correct the historical record about Shelly’s importance,” says Angelico.
And correct it she does. The podcast, out Friday, Feb. 14 — the 10th anniversary of her death — covers Shelly Bush’s life story, stretched across six episodes with commentary from Bush’s family, friends and bandmates, many of whom still work in Nashville today.
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“Shelly is gone, but the people who lived this story are not,” says Angelico. “They are still around, they are still playing gigs. They are fleet managers of auto-part delivery services, they are parents, they are still in the community, and they matter. This is now for them. Shelly can’t listen to it, so that’s who I’m trying to honor.”
It’s a weighty thing to try to capture the life and legacy of someone you care about so deeply, especially when that person can no longer speak for themselves on the matter. This wasn’t lost on Angelico, who worked carefully to honor Bush’s memory and wishes while still discussing important parts of her life that she preferred to keep behind closed doors. Bush lived with a congenital disability as well as Tourette’s syndrome, knowledge of which is crucial to contextualizing her story, but it’s difficult to find the balance between erasure and posthumous martyrdom.
“I realized how much history is in the telling when I made this podcast because I told it — it’s through my lens,” says Angelico. “Shelly might’ve seen it differently. Her best friends might’ve seen it differently. Her parents might’ve seen it differently. It feels like a lot of responsibility to be holding Shelly’s story this way.”
There’s no way of knowing how Bush would’ve told her own story to the world, but as Angelico tells it, Bush was a star. She never got the record deal she dreamed of, but she was a big deal to many of her peers, and that remains true today.
From her propensity for misquoting song lyrics mid-performance to her insistence on looking good onstage no matter how big the crowd, Bush lives on through the memories of her friends and family — and now with the rest of the world. Her longtime friends and fans new and old are invited to a release party and special live taping of a bonus episode on March 6 at the Analog at Hutton Hotel.
If only Shelly Bush could be here to see it — she might understand how much success she really had.
“You are more than your accomplishments,” says Angelico. “You may be accomplishing more than you realize. Just because you’re not famous doesn’t mean you don’t matter, and Shelly mattered a lot.”
