From a coffee shop in East Nashville, Otis Gibbs can point to the spot where Marty Robbins wrote "El Paso" in 1959.
Gibbs also can point to the spot where a band made up of former Army enlistees stationed in Fort Campbell, Ky., called The King Kasuals, played gigs at Del Morocco and Club Baron on Jefferson Street in the early '60s. The guitar player of The King Kasuals would observe sit-ins at the downtown Nashville Woolworth in 1960. The Woolworth is long gone, and the Del Morocco was demolished to make room for Interstate 40.
That guitar player was Jimi Hendrix.
Nashville has its share of landmarks honoring Music City history, but for every relic in the Country Music Hall of Fame, a story doesn't make its way to an exhibit in a museum, or Wikipedia for that matter. That's where Gibbs steps in.
"Stuff like that is important to me," Gibbs tells the Scene. "Most cities, if they had one little piece of that, that would be their museum. Since it's Nashville, we do a bad job of preserving that."
The East Nashville songwriter and musician is nearing 120 episodes of his podcast Thanks for Giving a Damn, a twice-a-month show that retells these nuggets of music history. The show isn't necessarily Nashville-centric — he's interviewed English folk musician Billy Bragg and Detroit punk music forerunner Wayne Kramer of the MC5 (a former Nashvillian) — but it can't help but be given the wealth of people with stories to tell within a few miles.
The podcast is an ongoing history of country and rock, told by musicians, journalists, historians, friends and acquaintances, recorded in hotels, airports and — most recently — a barn in England.
"In my most delusional moment, I would think I was doing something like John Lomax or Alan Lomax would have done, preserving these stories that might have been lost to history," Gibbs says. "It's an oral history of a sort."
John Lomax and his son Alan collected American folk traditions during the New Deal, preserving songs for future generations. Gibbs may call comparisons to the Lomax family delusional, but they're actually not too far off. He's capturing snapshots of music, history and culture in danger of falling through the cracks. It's cultural anthropology.
"I decided to create a platform that I wished I could walk onto," he says.
As a musician, Gibbs rarely enjoyed the process of answering questions in media interviews. And as a reader, he rarely found interviews of musicians talking about their influences or the meaning of their songs to be particularly interesting. While on tour in Sweden, he called his partner, Amy Lashley, in Nashville and told her of an idea to start a podcast that would avoid those tropes and instead focus on stories of being in and around the action.
He didn't necessarily need to interview the artist, just someone who could share a few good anecdotes.
On the podcast, W.S. Holland shared stories of drumming and touring with Johnny Cash in the '50s and recording with Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis for Sun Records. Bluegrass singer Mac Wiseman discussed traveling from Minneapolis to Alabama with Hank Williams and Bill Monroe as Williams wrote "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." Bill DeMain, a music journalist and proprietor of Walkin' Nashville tours, shared his reporting of Paul McCartney's six-week stay in Nashville and meeting Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner in 1974.
Thank You may have been the impetus for an unexpected email this spring from Pandora. The music streaming service offered Gibbs a chance to host a program called Country Built, essentially a mixtape telling the history of country music. Gibbs would select a couple of songs, tell a story about the artist or the recording and so on.
Gibbs is the kind of listener who reads album credits for musicians, composers, producers and studios, but even in an era dominated by streaming music, he's not alone.
The details and the stories still matter.
"The person who digs that kind of thing," Gibbs says. "That's my kind of people."
David Fox is a Nashville-based journalist, not to be confused with the mayoral candidate.
Email music@nashvillescene.com
