ARCHIVED ESSAY
Excerpted from my introduction to the book Based On: Words, Notes and Art from Nashville, compiled and edited by Chuck Beard, published by East Side Story in 2015. It’s posted here in recognition of the 25th anniversary of my move here on Nov. 6, 1996.
Nashville is a calling as much as it is a city. We’re each called in our own peculiar way.
My first impression of the city’s creative romance was the half cheesy, half charming 1993 film The Thing Called Love, which projected a sentimental aura around Nashville’s songwriting culture. The lead characters, played by River Phoenix and Samantha Mathis, shout from a rooftop to the rather modest 1990s skyline: “Look out Music City! ‘Cause here I am and I ain’t never leavin’!” I’d never thought about a place that would make somebody holler like that—a place worthy of a vow of determination and fidelity.
At the time, I was living in Washington DC—a Capitol Hill reporter covering politics and the wonky side of the health care business. But I was also a recently converted disciple of bluegrass, country, and roots music—a citizen picker and dabbler in songs. I was reading a lot about Nashville’s giants—Chet Atkins and Hank Williams and Bill Monroe—and there seemed no bottom to that story. I also became aware that many of my musical idols lived in Nashville. It seemed that one could hear or perhaps meet Jerry Douglas, Béla Fleck, Sam Bush or Tim O’Brien in the ordinary course of life. And on the first night of my first-ever visit (a reporting trip for work), I heard David Grier play flatpick guitar at the Station Inn, which for me was like getting to watch Degas draw.
Before long, I was ready to make a new start some place in my native South. While I had not one intention of chasing the proverbial Music City Dream, a couple of happy accidents made it possible for me to move into a cute Victorian house on Fatherland Street in East Nashville. It was November 1996.
What a different neighborhood it was. There was no Margo or Marché. There was certainly no Holland House, Barista Parlor, or East Side Story. A barge building complex lay rusting where today there is an NFL stadium, and the Shelby Street Bridge was for cars—a thrilling narrow skyway into the heart of a transforming downtown. The idea of boutiques or scooter dealers on Gallatin Road would have been implausible at best. My house was smashed into one night while I was at a show, and I was relieved of my guitars and stereo. My neighbor had his air conditioner stolen—not a window unit but a central heat exchanger, which he found had been unbolted from its concrete pad and carted away. I sought camaraderie down at Five Points, but the only bar was a musty joint called Shirley’s with neither charm nor music—only sideways looks from guys from a tough part of town who seemed grafted to their stools.
But there was the Radio Café, the pulsing heart of the proto-new-Nashville, with Lonesome Bob behind the counter, Skip “Play A Train Song” Litz ever present, and Mac Hill booking nationally worthy talent on a charming stage. The newly renovated Ryman Auditorium was open for musical church, with awe-inspiring bluegrass in the summer months. The Station Inn was more like chapel, right down to the Sunday communion of an open jam where an amateur musician like myself could play, engage, and make friends. The week I arrived, there was a big feature in the New York Times Magazine extolling the revival of Lower Broadway’s honky tonk culture and an insurgent, independent music sector. The city was, everyone seemed to agree, on the cusp of something. It would remain on that cusp for many years.
There was a tornado. April 1998. That was something. With one fatality, it could have been much worse, but it seemed pretty dire at the time. Most of the magnificent old trees in our neighborhood were uprooted, and a river of blue roof tarps and lots with collapsed houses stretched miles eastward from a shattered downtown. Was it the end? Far from it. The wind turned out to be a blast of creative destruction that set in motion the kinds of changes all the good government and citizen action in the world can’t plan. Insurance money kick-started things and entrepreneurs did the rest. The growth didn’t negate or deny the Nashville that had been but seemed rather to sprout from its oldest rootstock. In my ‘hood, it was the Turnip Truck and Bongo Java and the revolutionary Slow Bar—a miraculous club whose legacy now lives on at Grimey’s record store and the Basement below on 8th Avenue. In other parts of town, sleepy neighborhoods roused themselves, becoming more walkable, eatable, drinkable, and livable.
While this went on, I had one of the great adventures of my life researching Nashville’s history, particularly the music business and the radio station that made it possible: WSM. The cast of characters I encountered was electrifying. They were dynamos, eccentrics, schemers, and visionaries; many of them were still alive and quite willing to recollect. I learned of synergies between companies and their people that seemed to bring out the best in both. With the right balance of structure and freedom, people blossomed.[BL2] They tried things. They broadcast the sound of a steam locomotive running past the WSM tower to mark the end of the work day. They opened a recording studio in a disused hotel ballroom. They started a DJ convention. And they built a multi-million-dollar national cable network. These were game-changing initiatives that accumulated into an ecosystem and an engine. The life and hum of it, literally broadcast through high-powered towers, drew more people as if by magnetic force—people with still more vigor and ideas.
This immigrant factor can’t be ignored. Nashville’s natives and their multi-generational families are treasures. They have of course played a huge role in shaping the city, but in music circles, even natives will joke about how exceptional they feel in this city of arrivals. [BL3] Every transplant has his or her own version of the story I’ve taken the liberty of sharing with you about myself—a story of the lure and the decision and the arrival and the settling in. Everyone has a version of what-it-was-like-then versus the Nashville he or she knows today. And this is special. Nashville grew in large part based on its uncanny ability to take in pilgrims and make them feel like home folks in a relatively short period of time. This is a factor of and contributor to the city’s dynamic nature and its productive balance between continuity and change.
What endures in Nashville and what ties today’s city to its golden age is an ethos of respect for creators and creative work. Now more than ever, it seems there’s appreciation and empathy for artists, even as (and perhaps because) the industries that supported them for years have been shaken to their foundations.[BL4] Nobody who seriously engages with Music City’s creators—across all media—harbors illusions that art making is a lazy lark. It’s a city of works and a city that works hard. Yet that’s not the most unique aspect of Nashville’s culture of creation. Artists live everywhere, after all. What Nashville has had and continues to have that sets it apart is instigators. Instigators enable creators. They’re catalysts for others. They don’t have titles because they’re in new territory and not being supervised. They make scenes and rewrite rulebooks, and this was the source of Nashville’s bold, improbable rise. In the 1920s and ’30s, Edwin Craig built WSM, a nationally exceptional radio station, on the fifth floor of a conservative southern insurance company. In the ’50s, Owen Bradley gutted a house on 16th Avenue and attached a Quonset hut to it to make records and television shows. In the ’90s, Billy Block bootstrapped his way to a long-running radio show championing underdog music and musicians. All, in their own ways, made history and made Nashville the exceptional place it is today.