Road to Nashville 3

Nashville sweats music.

Sure, as a newbie to Nashville you see the evidence of "Music City" everywhere -- on the roads and highways coming in to town, by the many guitar and sound-equipment shops, on the billboards that tout the music-city connection, by the transients with guitars strapped to their backs. Nashville, on its face, is music.

But it is during nighttime on Broadway, near 2nd Street South deep Downtown, that you see Nashville truly sweat its music. You feel the drive and the rhythm that made this city and transforms it today.

On this night, it's freezing cold. But inside The Stage, Paradise Park, Bluegrass Inn, Full Moon Saloon and other dives, it's hot. The amps pound, the guitars sing, the beer is good and flows. The dripping band members tell of love lost and gained, of tragedy overcome. The music vibrates through the shaking, streetside windows, pummeling those on the sidewalk. It's not just country music you hear ... it's more.

Oddly, while walking Broadway, I remembered when Hollywood ripped into Nashville's political soul in 1975 with the Robert Altman film by the city's name.

"Nashville" was one of Altman's best films and featured a great cast - Ned Beatty, Lily Tomlin, Shelly Duvall, Henry Gibson, Keith Carradine and many more. The plot was complex but basically portrayed most of Nashville's country-music community as simple-minded patriots singing various versions of "My country, love it or leave it."

It was a classic post-Vietnam political film, and though the plot was complicated, the potshot at Nashville was pretty simple-minded, too.

In fact, Nashville was then -- and definitely is, now -- a complicated music community.

Sure, there's white-bread history here. Wander Broadway and you see Ernest Tubb's record shop (including, inside, a "Bargain Tubb" of discounted CDs) next to Paradise Park.

The Tubb-shop sign defiantly, stubbornly shouts above a hanging American flag: "Real country music lives here." (If it could, I imagine it would say, "Real country music lives here" -- as if the music that's followed Tubb's generation is not worthy or even worse.) 

A shop near 5th Street features traditional-country touristy junk, plus an Elvis fortune-telling machine that incessantly shouts at you.

But those shops were nearly empty this night. Time has passed them by. Nashville has changed -- like the rest of America, grown more diverse. More politically diverse, too. (Nashville/Davidson County voted in Obama over McCain by a 3-to-2 margin.)

Altman couldn't make "Nashville" today.

There aren't too many cities that can boast the geographical concentration of live music that Nashville's Broadway provides. South Beach in Miami comes to mind. And of course New Orleans' Bourbon Street.

But to this newbie, Nashville seems to be playing it smart, even in its old haunts like the Broadway strip. It has welcomed the indie movement that's taken root in Music Row. It's moving beyond the predictable "country" and even "modern country" to embrace a variety of genres. Really, it had no choice. The old-style concentration of a few music studios already has imploded under the weight of digital delivery.

In short, Nashville's music still sweats plenty, but not out of worry of changing times. It sweats the pure joy of creation.

A new voice, a new time.