I mentioned in yesterday’s post that this weekend the CMA Fest is going on in Nashville. For those who don’t know, this is country music’s annual big ol’ time. It used to take place at the state fairgrounds, and was a marvelously tacky, up close and personal way for fans to meet and greet their favorite musicians. 
Long lines of little booths (curated to fit a particular image or motif) were set up within which the “artists” (that’s what country music musicians are invariably called here in Nashville) were located. Fans lined up for hours for the opportunity to pass by for handshakes, photos, and quickly scrawled autographs on posters, hats, cd’s, etc. I have to say that I loved everything about the original incarnation: folksy, unpretentious, and FUN. To give you an idea of its flavor, picture super-/mega-/uber-star Alan Jackson in 1990 at the very beginning of his career, meeting fans on the other side of the front end of a vintage Ford truck that his people had rigged up for his booth. (Perhaps this was a harbinger of his hit song, “Drive,” a decade later. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQe3DKDQRRs The lyrics of this song excited me so much the first time I heard them that I waylaid my colleague and fellow writer Tony Earley in a Vanderbilt parking lot and forced him to drive around with me for close to an hour while I analyzed the wording… )
A few years ago, the Festival was relocated in downtown Nashville, with indoor and outdoor performances, and smaller tent events taking place all over the city. It feels tamer, and as if it’s trying to be a bit more upscale, but it’s still a gas. Just wandering around, eyeballing the sights, music rolling out of every honky tonk’s open door on lower Broadway, or ambling along the Music City Walk of Fame on Demonbreun Street gives you an idea of how essential words and music are to this place, and how much raw talent in both is just laying around the city.
Not just musical talent, but musical genius is almost common as dirt here in Nashville. 
People who don’t live here tend to think it’s all country music all the time, but that’s not true. For a taste of Nashville’s musical variety (with a poetry connection) check out classical composer Michael Rose http://michaelalecrose.com/ who has a penchant for composing pieces like "Five Songs for High Voice and Piano," with texts by Novalis, Lorca, Mary Oliver, Robert Francis, and Rilke; “Five Buccolics: A Cycle of Songs on Poems by (contemporary Kentucky Poet) Maurice Manning;” and “Black Branches,” a setting of four poems by William Carlos Williams.
I often think how odd it is that both country music and the so-called Southern literary renaissance sprang up in the same place at the same time: Nashville in the 1920s. One has flourished until this very day, while the other flourished initially, and then more or less withered. I have spent a lot of time ruminating on why this is/was so. And although there are obvious immediate answers (let’s just start with the racist beliefs and retrograde social policies that doomed the Southern Agrarians (some of whom were also Fugitive Poets) to irrelevance), there has to be more than that…
Part of country music’s success has to be attributed to the fact that it is popular music, and thus, primarily an entertainment medium. But I’ve lived in Nashville for far too long now to believe that the music made here is only, or primarily, an entertainment endeavor. There is something in the way that country and crossover country musicians use words, as well as the staggeringly high level of pure musicianship, that keeps people compelled by the medium. Here are a couple of musicians I’ve been listening to recently who manage to pull me out of my books of poetry, and away from WPLN 91.1 Classical radio. They’re both enormously talented in different ways, and that they write their own lyrics and music is part of what makes their songs stand out.
Sonia Leigh http://www.sonialeigh.com/ lives in Atlanta, but spends a lot of time in Nashville. She looks like a troublemaker, and maybe she is. But this could be just the right medium for her; country music has long been tolerant of troublemakers. 
She looks like it would take a lot to rile her up, but also – once riled – like she will kick your ass in an eye blink. Bucking the pinched-in, squeezed-up, bleached and plucked, near-starved-to-death, glamour girl look that is annihilating the would-be Loretta Lynns of this generation of country music, Leigh remains her own woman. Her persona – jeans and t-shirts, old tennis shoes, and a raggedy haircut to match her raggedy voice – is as authentic as her songs and her singing. Take a listen. Her voice is unbelievable : there’s some kind of bluesy, back-talking, sassy bitch-thing going on, along with her very distinctive Georgia accent that doesn’t let a song stop her from bending her vowels and stretching out the syllables of consequence. (As a Southern poet, I especially thrill to her long i’s and short a’s…)
Joshua O’Keefe http://www.joshuaokeefemusic.com/ is a Londoner, singer and songwriter, currently living most of the time in Nashville. I guess we would call what he does country crossover. Just to look at him will break your heart. 
To hear him sing might just tear it right out of your chest. If he were singing classical, we’d call him a counter tenor, and it’s that breathy, almost-fragile quality of male falsetto that makes his voice so distinctively moving. (He’s a big fan of Rascal Flatts, and you can hear the influence of Gary LeVox on O’Keefe’s singing.) O’Keefe is still very young – only twenty two – and it may be that one of the things about his music that is so successful is the way it transports those of us who are no longer twenty two right back to the hot, perpetually-excited, psychic center of that time in our own lives – when all that was going to happen had not yet happened, and most of us, anyway, were hopeful and cheerful about everything that might transpire by the time we ended up where we are right now… Start with “No Doubts,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=C6cLABIHxOg unbelievably, a homemade video (see the Rascal Flatts poster in the background?) that showcases this guy’s amazing stage presence, heartbreaker of a voice, and fresh lyrics (who uses the word “elixir” in a song and then manages to rhyme it?) I’d say, some kind of a poet…
OK: I have to go now. I’m on my way downtown to listen to some words and music of the type that can only be found here in Nashville…
