Everyone thinks they know Nashville.   The very word is the instantly recognised representation of a gen-u-ine American commodity.  Whatever country music means to you, it almost certainly sports Tennessee plates.

The Nashville image incorporates both the modern reality of the slick, white-bread, booted and buckled franchise (copyright Tim McGraw, Alan Jackson, George Strait and a thousand imitators) and the myth of the romantic, dog-eared country and western lifestyle, once memorably represented by The Simpsons character Lurleen Lumpkin, with a fetching array of hits including I’m Sick of Your Lying Lips and False Teeth and Don’t Look Up My Skirt Unless You Mean It.

That old-school cliché, revamped by the likes of Strait and Garth Brooks, took Nashville through a billion-dollar boom in the Nineties, followed by a bust so big it could be on display in Dollywood.  Now the south is again on the rise, but this time it is showing a bit more respect for its own history, rising not from the A&R offices of the big producers on Music Row, but from hip young country musicians, creating their own underground scene in trendy new bars and clubs in the shadow of the big hats that have dominated the city.

Now, in the afterglow of the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which spawned the Grammy-award winning, six-million-selling bluegrass soundtrack that made 80-year-old Appalachian music the sexiest sound in all the States, the city is discreetly perfecting its latest trick:  real music, played by proper musicians with the motives of the artist, not the businessman. 

On the surface, the Nashville of 2003 is still the pop wannabe centre it’s been since Garth Brooks started printing his own money;  a capital dominated by unlovely commercialism and a lowbrow Muzak.   But stay awhile, and you find a new truth:  a city with the intimacy of a town, overflowing with jaw-dropping musicianship and unselfconscious cool that’s now blossoming into a vivid variety of styles, some of them not country at all.

In the frontline, here comes Venus Hum, an electronic rock trio more likely to remind you of Bjork than Brooks & Dunn.   But they have the new Nashville generation’s appetite to take the city on, tweak its traditions, and never mind what anyone says, including the radio programming gods who supposedly must be obeyed.

“Everyone from the northwest, where I’m from, was like, ‘Why?’” says Venus Hum’s lead singer Annette Strean, who came here from White Fish, Montana.   “They said ‘if you don’t want to be a country music superstar, why would you move there?’   I say I moved here because I felt like I should.”

“Nobody who lives in Nashville is from Nashville”, says her colleague Kip Kubin.   This is where we live and where we make our music, and we like being here.”

Venus Hum’s sound may be a long drive across town from the latest new traditionalists on the O Brother album, but there’s a heartening consensus that even if the country music industry didn’t quite know what to do with the bluegrass renaissance it heralded, that laid the seed for greener creative pastures where some wild flowers are now growing.

Dan Tyminski is a member of Union Station, the platinum-selling acoustic outfit fronted by fiddle-toting, angel-voiced Alison Krauss.   Tyminski will now and forever be known as the voice of George Clooney in the Coen brothers’ film.   As the O Brother wave was breaking in 2001, Krauss was winning audiences by telling them:  ”When Dan’s wife saw the film, she said this was her fantasy come true.   Her husband’s voice coming out of George Clooney’s body.”

“There’s a lot more interest in bluegrass now, and it’s largely due to that movie and the soundtrack”, Tyminski says, adding wryly:  “You see all the usual people at the shows, but also those asking the first-timer questions, ‘What is that thing again?’  ‘A banjo’”.

Fellow frontrunners of Nashville’s new Third Way are Gillian Welch and her boyfriend David Rawlings, who are crafting rural American music of stark, heritage-steeped beauty.  At a show at London’s Barbican before Christmas, the couple managed to conquer a huge stage with nothing more than Welch’s exquisitely desolate vocals and Rawlings’ lithe, exhilarating fret work.

“I had a romantic notion of Nashville”, says Welch, “because ever since I was pretty young I liked old-time country and bluegrass.   There were other albums I loved that I didn’t even know were from Nashville.   Besides Lefty Frizzell and Bill Monroe and the stuff you would expect, there were multiple records by Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and JJ Cale, that great album Naturally.

“I moved here in the summer of ’92 in the new traditionalist boom.   This is after Dwight Yoakam was having success, and Mary Chapin Carpenter, right when Steve Earle was making his big push.   Garth was in ascendant, but there were some pretty liberal records being made.   They hadn't really honed the machine to the razor-fine edge they've got now.  It was a very receptive time and songwriters were given a pretty warm welcome.” 

Welch had been surprised to get a look-in even then.  “To be commercial, everybody wants happy love songs”, she says.   “People would flat-out ask me, ‘Don’t you have any happy love songs?’   Well as a matter of fact I don’t.  I’ve got songs about orphans and morphine addicts…”   She never resented what she calls the “brighter, shinier” Nashville.   “They didn’t hinder us in any way.  It’s not like Garth Brooks was ever coming over to our house and shaking his fist in my face.”

Nevertheless, once that machine went to work, many of the town’s most fertile talents were driven underground.   “Things creatively got really strangled”, says Welch, “but eventually it strangles itself.   You narrow your base too much and it goes the other way.   Things bottomed out so badly, people thought, ‘We gotta go looking around for something.’   So they’re kind of open again.  In a funny way I feel like Nashville has come full circle and is back about where it was when I moved to town.”

Pinmonkey are among those to benefit.   The quartet’s unflashy versatility spans the Eagles at one end and rock’n’roll at the other, with a connecting current of open-air Americana.  Their self-titled album isn’t the edgiest record you’ll hear this year, nor is it alt.country, but it’s a significant nudge in the right direction for a major corporation such as BMG, and the band aren’t shy of calling it as they see it.   “Like all of corporate America, nobody puts anything back for a rainy day”, says vocalist Michael Reynolds.

Acoustic trio Nickel Creek, still in their early twenties, have fiddled and twanged up a storm by taking the bluegrass canvas and adding bold daubs of jazz, folk and rock colour.   Raised in southern California, their sound is nevertheless as scented as the Appalachian mountain atmosphere.  In their live set, a nimble mandolin-driven instrumental is quite likely to sit next to a playful remake of the Beatles’ Taxman.

Nickel Creek’s second album, This Side, produced by Krauss, continues to amplify their name here, but while they have been Grammy-nominated and written about in Time magazine, good old country radio shuns their “dangerous” nonconformism. 

“With the exception of a few artists, every song seems to include these certain qualifications that give it the ‘country stamp of approval’”, says fiddle player Sara Watkins.   “I just wish there wasn’t this preconception of what a song should do, even down to where the drums should come in, the harmony, the big build of dynamics.   When I went to Nashville the first time, I went to the Station Inn to hear some of my favourite bluegrass musicians – Tim O’Brien, Jerry Douglas, Mark Schatz, Scott Nygaard.   Those were our rock stars.”

So what chance in the modern system for a troubadour who hits Tennessee with a guitar slung across her back and the traditional dreams of recognition tattooed on her heart?   Kentucky-born Molly Slone is one such ingenue, set on being the new Emmylou Harris, although she’d settle for Patty Griffin, to name another recommended, rootsy song stylist. 

“Nashville felt like Disneyland when I first got here”, says Slone.   “I met so many people who seemed really friendly.   But I soon found out that if you don’t have a major label deal or a publishing deal, most doors stay closed.   They say the average time it takes to make it in Nashville is seven years, and I can see that.  I’m about two years into it and it feels like I’ve just begun.

“Some industry people say my music is refreshing and unique, and just what Nashville needs, others say it’s not mainstream enough and therefore has no shot of ever being on a major label.”

Wherever you go in Nashville you hear superb players, from cool club venues such as the Slow Bar, The End and 12th & Porter, to the bars on Broadway, where you can watch a band playing for tips at 11 o'clock on a Monday morning.   Right across the street, yards apart, stand two venerable stores stocked with marketable goods;  no, not “I Went to Nashville” T-shirts, but vinyl 45s, thousands of them, at Lawrence’s and the Ernest Tubb Record Shop.

Even in this downtown mini-Leicester Square area, the tourist bazaars are still outnumbered by famous honky tonks like Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge (“a beer-soaked stage and tear-stained bar”) and Robert’s Western World, where country revivalists BR5-49 made a viable career after being discovered literally playing in the window.

“There are millions of great players here who just want to play and have a great time”, says Pinmonkey drummer Rick Schell. 

“Bad players don’t stick around long because they come here and see what they’re up against and they’re back on the bus.”  Adds Kubin from Venus Hum.   “It’s not a city where you can throw a drum loop under a bad song and hope people ignore it and go, ‘That performer looked really great'.”

That’s the thing about even the average music in this town.  Even the wallpaper music is very well-made wallpaper.   “The players and studios are unbelievable”, says singer-songwriter Jeff Finlin, born in Ohio but a longtime Nashvillean.   “You have amazing players here that are painting houses.”

Finlin’s piercing, Dylanesque narratives and melodies have the ear of an increasing UK audience.   Delta Down, a song from his Somewhere South of Wonder album, was voted the No. 1 track of 2002 in a poll of listeners to Virgin Radio’s Captain America show.  He senses positive change in the air, and not only for himself.

“Once, labels would sign Nashville artists on the condition they would move to New York”, he says.   “But with people like Ryan Adams and Lucinda Williams, it’s kind of changing.   When I was 19 I thought 'We can’t live here, what will people think?’   Now I don’t care what people think.”

Finlin’s fellow songman Will Kimbrough is seemingly known to every other musician in Nashville, even if the soulful power-pop of his Home Away CD would be anathema to Country Music Television.   Released in the UK, like Finlin’s album, by Gravity/BMG, it’s criminally low-profile where he lives.   Again, a proportionately bigger audience is getting to know Kimbrough abroad.   “But I’m comfortable here”, he says.   “I don’t really know what living in New York or Los Angeles would do for me.  I get to hang out with Rodney Crowell and run into Guy Clark at the grocery store, and occasionally sing harmonies with Emmylou.  I can’t think of a place that would be similar.”

In a city with a municipal population of 570,000, containing 1,000 songwriters with publishing deals, the almost villagey ambience sometimes conceals an intense competitiveness.   Says Welch:  “The flipside of that southern hospitality, which is real, is that everybody knows everything about everybody.  Hopefully it’s a healthy competition."

But Nashville has a higher percentage of musicians in the game for the love of it than almost anywhere.  On one visit there last year, the lunchtime after a fine gig by Kimbrough at 12th & Porter, I met his fiddle player, who’d sounded good enough to stroll into any band in London.  It transpired she was making ends meet by working most nights tending a hotel bar.

Our photo shoot with Venus Hum takes place at the Red Wagon Café, a sharp little eatery in east Nashville.  I’m sneaking glances at the café proprietor’s husband, who seems familiar.  Slowly and gormlessly I realise he is Paul Burch, sometime member of the splendid dysfunctional alt.country outfit Lambchop, who can sell out the Royal Albert Hall but barely get a second glance in Nashville.

Burch has made two marvellously disobedient albums of his own in recent times, Blue Notes and Last of My Kind, that refuse to have anything to do with modern country, instead using Hank Williams as a sort of celestial executive producer.  Like most of the new Nashville chapter, he’s a real troubadour and frequent transatlantic traveller, as distinct from the Music Row millionaires who simply never bother to come to Europe.   “To say, ‘I’ve sold enough records and I’m not going’, that’s fine”, says Burch, “but they’re approaching it more as a business.  I’m doing it as a matter of life and death, I have to do it.”

Will Kimbrough is all too aware of the image that modern Nashville sends to many.   “The word Nashville with a little copyright symbol means mainstream country, as it has been since Garth”, he says.  “It’s considered crass, and grasping, and ruthlessly chasing after the gold ring with no sense of history or reverence for music.  The CMA Awards this year had all this mediocre fluff, then Dolly Parton comes out, and she is the real thing, she’s a star and an old-school entertainer.  It was like Frank Sinatra came out, or Hank Williams.   The radio wants the conservative stuff, they don’t want Steve Earle talking about politics, or Merle Haggard or Willie Nelson.“

It’s a curious contradiction that such legends loom large in the impressive Country Music Hall of Fame, and yet they’re nowhere to be heard on the country airwaves.  At least Nelson, who’ll be 70 in April, has been condescendingly deemed fit for the format again lately with Mendocino County Line, his marvellous ballad duet with LeAnn Womack.   The song’s lyrics are by Bernie Taupin (yes, Elton John’s lyricist), who told me:  “Country music has become pop music with fiddles, and actually for the most part there aren’t any fiddles.  It’s a very generic form right now, and the one thing I’m proud of is that I got Willie back on country radio.”

The new Nashvilleans will never topple the Music Row monolith, nor do they seek to.   But they are marking out a different trail, and when they check behind them, more and more people are following.   “You can feel a little isolated here”, admits Welch, “Whereas in LA or New York there’s more of a scene.  In Nashville people don’t exactly know what we are, but they know where we are coming from.”

Pinmonkey’s self-titled album is released by Gravity/BNA on February 10.   Nickel Creek tour the UK from March 12, and Jeff Finlin guests on Steve Earle’s British tour from March 25.  Alison Krauss & Union Station’s Live album is out on Rounder, and Gillian Welch is completing a new album for WEA/London.   Venus Hum’s Big Beautiful Sky album is released by BMG on March 31.   Lost Highway, a BBC series charting the history of country music, broadcasts on BBC2 in March.   Information on all these artists can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/country.

Report by Paul Sexton, photographs by Mitch Jenkins

The Times magazine
Saturday 1 February 2003