While Nashville lay wrapped in a blanket of snow, a piece of the city’s soul slipped away. Singer, songwriter and painter Ann Tiley, a fixture of the most democratic music scenes in Music City for more than four decades, has died.
Tiley’s longtime partner Tim Jones posted on Facebook that she suffered a brain aneurysm as they were preparing for their regular performance at Springwater’s songwriters’ night on Wednesday. She did not regain consciousness and passed away Friday at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Arrangements haven’t been announced at press time.
At the end of the 1970s, Tiley’s love of Bill Monroe and Townes Van Zandt inspired her to move to Nashville from her home in West Virginia. A few years later, she began writing her own songs. She was encouraged by friend John Allingham, who also co-founded the Music City folk institution The Cherry Blossoms and the equally venerable Working Stiff Jamboree.
Importantly, that recurring event was conceived as an informal hangout for artists rather than a showcase for aspiring commercial songwriters. Over a few years of performing there and elsewhere, Tiley developed a distinctive, intimate songwriting approach. She frequently wrote about happenings in her personal life, among other observations. She sang and accompanied herself on acoustic instruments like guitar or mandolin, and friends and associates joined in on fiddle, harmonica or other instruments. As late, great Scene editor Jim Ridley put it when he profiled Tiley in 1997: “Some people send out newsletters every Christmas for a quick update on their lives. Ann Tiley does something similar — only she makes tapes, and they’re a lot more fun.”
Tiley also painted extensively. Her friend Peggy Snow, also of The Cherry Blossoms, is a visual artist too, known for preserving buildings that are slated for demolition in her paintings. Tiley’s paintings, on the other hand, are a lot like her songs. They contain impressions of people she knew, places she performed — Springwater, Bobby’s Idle Hour, Brown’s Diner — and other scenes of life around the town she called home since 1979. In both, she created a priceless historical record that traces the character of a city in motion.
With the current breakneck pace of change in Nashville, the immense value of work like Tiley’s is too seldom appreciated. Regardless, remembrances from friends and fellow musicians that have poured in over social media thank Tiley for her constant kindness and encouragement. You can hear that in the sampling of her music that’s available on her ReverbNation profile, on YouTube and via suchfun.net. Sit with it a while. It will do you good.
Below, see a video of Tiley and Jones offering sage advice in “Let the Time Go By.”
