The town that makes and breaks songwriters
Nashville gets written about by the people who came to make it there and by the ones it wore out and sent home, and this list keeps both. Down on Music Row is Dolly Parton telling the hopeful pilgrim’s arrival, sleeping on steps and washing up in a fountain. Guitar Town is Steve Earle kicking against the same grind from the other side. Music City is a place people chase a dream to, and the songs about it split cleanly between the ones still chasing and the ones who caught it or got caught.
The love letters are warm and specific. Nashville Cats is the Lovin’ Spoonful marveling at the city’s session players, the unsung hands behind a thousand hits. I Love This Town is Bon Jovi, an outsider, saluting how welcome the place made them feel. Nashville Without You is Tim McGraw watching the city’s icons dissolve without the right person beside him. These songs know the town from the inside, its streets and its studios, and they sing it with the affection of people who owe it something.
The warnings and the weary
The other half of the list is jaded, and honestly so. Murder on Music Row is George Strait and Alan Jackson mourning the death of old-school country in the town that supposedly protects it. Leaving Nashville is Charles Kelley laying the songwriter’s grind bare, honest and bruised. Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down is Kris Kristofferson at his lowest, alone in a city full of dreamers. For every arrival song there is a departure song, because Music City breaks more hearts than it makes stars, and the music tells that truth too.
The weird entries keep it human. Visit Me in Music City is Bobby Bare Jr.’s warm, strange invitation, a town where the best guitar players might deliver your pizza. Devil, Devil paints Nashville as a seductive and dangerous woman, which is how the place feels to a lot of people who move there. Rhinestone Cowboy is the long, hard climb to the dream, sequins and all. Nashville is not one thing in these songs, and that is exactly why it keeps producing them.
Related lists
Nashville sits inside a couple of bigger places here. The state it anchors runs through songs about Tennessee, and the neighbor to the west fills songs about Texas. The bars along Broadway connect to songs about drinking, and the road that brings the dreamers in lives in songs about travel.
If a fragment brought you here, some line about Music Row or a neon sign, the search bar on our home page finds songs from remembered words.
The songs here run from the sixties to the last decade, and the town keeps generating them because it keeps generating the same story: someone arrives with a guitar and a dream, and the city decides. This shelf holds the love letters and the warnings alike, all of them written by people who knew Music City from the inside.