In an early scene from Nashville (1975), Robert Altman’s sprawling epic set in the country music scene of the 1970s, the Grand Ole Opry singer Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) is in the studio cutting a patriotic record called “200 Years.” The song is blustering and hacky, but Hamilton is nailing his take. “We may have had our ups and downs, our times of trials and fears,” he sings, his perfect sideburns unmoving, his rhinestone-studded suit uncreased. “But we must be doing something right to last 200 years.”
The only problem is the piano player, Frog, who “plays like a frog” by Hamilton’s estimation. Frog is a session musician, one of the cogs that keeps the hulking machinery of Nashville’s music industry from grinding to a halt. By the looks of him, he’s probably a little too cool to be playing schlock like “200 Years.”
Hamilton cuts the session short to chew him out, but it’s not Frog’s playing that’s incensed him so much as the sense that these hippies are leaving him behind. “Get your hair cut!” Hamilton fumes. “You don’t belong in Nashville!”
Frog does belong in Nashville, though—just not the version of Nashville that Hamilton and his retinue built. We see Frog several more times in Nashville, as a sideman for a wide range of frontpeople, in nightclubs and honky-tonks, and at an especially memorable (if inaudible) gig at a racetrack. His simultaneous ubiquity and anonymity imbue him with a kind of quotidian heroism that all working musicians should be able to recognize. Whether the top-billed stars of the Opry care to admit it or not, there have always been many more Frogs than Haven Hamiltons in Nashville.
In a film full of Easter eggs, the best one is Frog’s casting: He’s played by Richard Baskin, the movie’s music supervisor, soundtrack producer, and main composer. Like his character, Baskin was comfortable wearing a variety of hats, making himself as invaluable to Altman’s production as Frog was to its fictionalized musical underworld. The Nashville musicians of today, especially those working in country music and its adjacent styles, have to be just as agile. They’re the session players contributing banjo to a hit record; the bandleaders playing marathon sets at the bars on Lower Broadway; the touring musicians jumping in the van to hit the national honky-tonk circuit; the prolific sidepeople who know the layout of every green room in town. They’re also, increasingly, making some of the most exciting records coming out of Nashville.
Just as Altman’s Nashville couldn’t capture everything that was happening in Nashville in 1975, this piece won’t paint a complete picture of the city’s music scene in 2024. Nor will it try. Instead, this selection of interviews, impressions, and experiences is meant to capture a cross-section of country music’s working class—the people who are in Nashville, making a living in the music industry, usually by some other means than recording and releasing their own songs. But everyone featured here does put out albums, and those albums are uniformly excellent. My advice: Listen to these records, and then search up the names of everybody who plays on them and check out their records. It should quickly become clear that Nashville, despite undergoing profound changes over the past 50 years, still deserves to be called Music City, USA.
Nowhere has been more transformed by Nashville’s gentrification and corporatization than the Lower Broadway area of downtown. What was once a slightly seedy strip of beer joints and porn shops has become home to a glut of garish, celebrity-driven bars: Garth Brooks’s Friends in Low Places, Morgan Wallen’s This Bar, Blake Shelton’s Ole Red. Among the handful of classic honky-tonks that persist is Robert’s Western World, which has remained essentially unchanged since its founding in the early ’90s. A self-proclaimed “Broadway guy,” Joshua Hedley started playing the Robert’s stage shortly after moving to Nashville in 2004. He’s worked here ever since.
“I enjoy it, obviously, or I’d do something way more lucrative,” he says. “But especially when you put in a lot of work down here, it becomes a grind, and it becomes a job. Even though I do love it, for me, it’s always been: Ted is a plumber, and Ted goes and does plumbing for work, and I’m a musician, and I come here, and I play a four-hour shift, and that’s my work.”
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Mr. Jukebox Joshua Hedley
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We’re talking in the pre-opening quiet of a Friday morning at Robert’s. At 10 A.M., Hedley will be onstage with his band, the Hedliners, belting out Johnny Paycheck and Charley Pride tunes to a rapturous audience. He plays two of those four-hour sets here each week, splitting his time between fiddle and guitar as the band works through an impressive repertoire of classic country and western. If you want to experience the old Nashville—or at least one beer-stained corner of it—Robert’s is the place to be.
“Not only is it special on a personal level, I just think it’s important, period, that a place like this still exists, hasn’t changed and is not in any danger of being bought out, torn down, [or] rearranged.”
Broadway was Hedley’s first proving ground in Nashville. He grew up in Naples, Florida, but as a kid, he spent a few summers at a fiddle camp that bluegrass legend Mark O’Connor put on in Dickson, Tennessee. “My parents would take me, and we would spend a week in Dickson at the camp, and then we would come to Nashville for a few days or a week and finish out the family vacation,” Hedley says. “I would come down here to Broadway, and I would try to sit in with the bands. I was 12. And that was it. It was that first trip, and I was like, ‘Yep.’”
Hedley’s first Nashville gig was at Tootsies Orchid Lounge, another old-school holdout three doors down from Robert’s. He was 19. A year later, he started working at Robert’s, sharpening his skills while picking up additional work as a fiddle player for people like Nikki Lane, Jonny Fritz, and the late Justin Townes Earle. Playing other people’s music was a good living; making records of his own was never the plan. At Fritz and Lane’s urging, Hedley finally made his first album, Mr. Jukebox, in 2018—almost 15 years after he moved to Nashville. “Now, I guess I make records,” he says. “I don’t know, it’s still weird to me.”
Mr. Jukebox is a tour-de-force debut by a musician who unwittingly spent a lifetime preparing to make it. It’s steeped in the strings-heavy countrypolitan sound pioneered in Nashville in the 1950s, but it has a lot more to offer than mere homage. Hedley plumbs the past to make music that feels timeless, a fact that shouldn’t be surprising when you consider that he learned how to play hundreds of songs before attempting to write his own. “I would have never written that record if it wasn’t for all the time that I’ve spent here [at Robert’s], playing covers and teaching myself about the history of this music,” he says.
If Mr. Jukebox introduced one of Hedley’s alter egos—the living repository of country music who will “play your favorite song just one more time”—then its follow-up, 2022’s Neon Blue, gives away his long game. It’s on that album that Hedley proclaims himself “a singing professor of country and Western” over a soundtrack that’s more Brooks & Dunn than George Jones. (That’s not just talk—he once taught a music class at Vanderbilt University.) It turns out Hedley is just as good at replicating the country radio hits of the early ’90s as he is the Nashville Sound. On his next album, he promises to try out yet another subgenre.
“My goal is to introduce people to the different forms of country music, because there’s so many,” Hedley says. “I use this analogy all the time, but you can take the Carter Family and Ronnie Milsap, and they couldn’t sound more different, but they are both country music.”
Onstage at Robert’s, where time stands still, Hedley is more Mr. Jukebox than singing professor. On the Friday when we spoke, the bar filled up with regulars, authenticity-seeking tourists, and wristbanded attendees of Americanafest, which was happening that week in Nashville. Amid the ’50s and ’60s covers that made up the bulk of the Hedliners’ set list, Hedley took an audience request for an original. Fiddle in hand, and with several hours to go in his second show of the week, he addressed the packed house with a reassuring refrain: “If you need me, I’ll be here/ I’m Mr. Jukebox.”
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Down Home Teddy and the Rough Riders
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Teddy and the Rough Riders
Nashville, Tennessee
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Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Like Hedley, Nashville natives Jack Quiggins and Ryan Jennings started playing music downtown as preteens. They weren’t gigging at the bars, though. “Yeah, we were busking downtown,” Jennings says. “We would take the bus down here and busk bad stuff. My friend had a baritone ukulele. We had a harmonica.”
“We would sing [Old Crow Medicine Show’s] ‘Wagon Wheel’ all the time,” Quiggins adds.
“Because ‘Wagon Wheel’ was relatable when we were in seventh grade,” Jennings laughs.
This is what it’s like talking to the best friends who met through skateboarding and now perform as Teddy and the Rough Riders—or Teddy’s, for short. They complete each other’s sentences, set up each other’s punchlines, and get lost deep in the weeds of decades-old stories. That lived-in intimacy is the foundation that Teddy’s sturdy country-rock sound is built on. Quiggins and Jennings call it “fake blood harmony,” a nod to acts like the Louvin Brothers and the Everly Brothers whose familial bonds made for uncanny musical chemistry. “You’re going to sing harmony the best with the person whose voice you hear the most,” Quiggins says.
There isn’t a straight line from busking on Broadway as kids to being the fixtures of the Nashville country underground that Quiggins and Jennings are today. They both spent time attending various colleges, but they always wound up dropping out. They lived together in Knoxville, where they jammed and drank a lot of George Dickel whiskey but didn’t manage to get Teddy’s off the ground. Eventually, they made their way home to Nashville and started going up at Santa’s Pub, a Christmas-themed dive founded in 2011 that quickly became an offbeat alternative to the downtown scene.
“It was very open mic, but if you knew cool old-school country, the band is a good enough band that all you have to do is say the key of a song, and they’ll figure it out,” Jennings says.
Neither Quiggins nor Jennings is sure exactly when, but at some point, Teddy and the Rough Riders became a real band. Margo Price collaborator Luke Schneider joined up on pedal steel, and he got Teddy’s a slot opening for Price at the release show for her Midwest Farmer’s Daughter album in 2016. They also continued to work steadily at Santa’s, which is where they met the country singer Emily Nenni. Soon after, Quiggins and Nenni started a romantic relationship, and Teddy’s became her touring band.
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Drive & Cry Emily Nenni
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Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Backing bands in Nashville tend to be an assemblage of loose parts. If you’re lucky enough to be in town for the session and good enough to land the part, you’re in the band. If not, well, there’s a long list of people in Nashville who can play bass. It’s not like that with Emily and the Teddy’s guys. They’re an essential part of the way her records sound. “We got to record with her early on, and she was like, ‘I want y’all to sound like you for the recordings, too,’” Jennings says.
Even more significantly, Teddy’s backs up Nenni on the road. This past summer, they toured Europe together for a month, pulling double duty every night—Teddy and the Rough Riders opening, Emily Nenni backed by Teddy’s headlining. (“I sweat way too much for that now,” Quiggins jokes.) Besides keeping them from having to get regular jobs again, touring like that helps Quiggins and Jennings stay loose and adaptable as musicians. Nenni’s set is precise; Teddy’s likes to go off the rails a little bit.
“It trains a different muscle, for sure,” Quiggins says. “It’s like, ‘I can play the same thing every night, and do it even better than the night before.’ And then we get to go back to Teddy’s, which is like, ‘Okay, shit, I don’t have to do that now, and I can play this crazy fucking thing I’ve been hearing in my head.’”
That uninhibited spirit shows up throughout Down Home, the latest Teddy and the Rough Riders record. There’s room here for shit-kicking Southern rock, Byrds-ish cosmic country, honky-tonk two-steppers, carefree folk-rock, and even a tear-in-my-beer ballad about a dog. It sounds a lot like a Teddy’s live show, in other words, especially one where they play with a second guitarist. That’s how they played at their Americanafest showcase at The 5 Spot, with Sean Thompson and Quiggins ripping harmonized leads like a country-fried Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing.
“That’s so much fun,” Quiggins beams. “Working through that stuff in the studio, too. Sean and I both, I think, have a little bit of a knack for it. Somebody starts playing it, and then when we both end up going to the harmony, and we’re doing that in unison, it’s fucking weird.”
As Nashville kids, Quiggins and Jennings grew up around a lot of middle-class musicians who made ends meet as session players and songwriters. That path is narrowing. Teddy’s can only function as a full-time gig when they get on the road, both on their own and with Nenni.
“I want that, just to be a songwriter,” Jennings admits. “But me and Jack work good in this way, [as] the Teddy brothers. And I just have too much fun rocking out.”
In some ways, Americanafest is an anomalous week on the Nashville music calendar. The influx of visiting artists and fans means that every room in town with a stage (and many without one) can offer wall-to-wall programming for the duration of the festival. Industry suits wander the city looking for the next big thing—although, as with SXSW after 2012 or so, it’s unclear if anybody ever actually gets a career-making break from one of these showcases. For in-demand local musicians, Americanafest tends to merely magnify the existing insanity of their lives. Instead of playing three shows with three different bands in the span in a week, you might bang them all out in one night. That’s the kind of day Libby Weitnauer is having when we catch up at the Mexican restaurant where she’s playing fiddle for the neo-honky-tonker Hannah Juanita.
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Watch Me Learn Dallas Ugly
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Compact Disc (CD), T-Shirt/Shirt
Juanita frontloads her set that day with the fiddle-heavy tunes so Weitnauer can dip out in time to make it to her gig with the Cajun-influenced country group Runner of the Woods. After that show, she’ll meet up with the cowboy songsmith Sterling Drake. All told, Weitnauer will play eight shows over the course of two days—none of which will be with her primary band, Dallas Ugly, or in her solo singer-songwriter guise. That sounds like quite the daunting gauntlet, but she says staying so busy keeps her creatively fulfilled.
“If you’re in a romantic relationship, and you don’t have a lot of friendships, that romantic relationship is everything,” she analogizes. “Whereas the more friendships you have, the more each relationship can breathe and serve the role that it naturally serves. I feel the same way with creative projects. The more projects I’m involved in, the more each one can just be what it needs to be, instead of me being like, ‘I have to express my whole artistic voice through this one thing,’ which is impossible.”
Weitnauer was raised in East Tennessee, but she didn’t make her way to Nashville until after the pandemic hit, following stints in both Chicago and New York. (She earned classical violin performance degrees from DePaul and NYU.) In those cities, Weitnauer was ensconced in other traditional music scenes, but she hadn’t really started to play country. She played mostly bluegrass and old-time music in New York, including with the guitarist Jake Blount in their duo act, Tui. In Chicago, she met Eli Broxham and Owen Burton, who would become her bandmates in the indie-folk group Dallas Ugly. There was also a somewhat ignominious stint touring with a Broadway show: “This crazy, demented revamp of Oklahoma that everybody hated,” as Weitnauer puts it. In January 2023, after the Oklahoma tour, she started to fall in with honky-tonk people.
“I had a lot of connections with people in the acoustic world,” Weitnauer says. “I think the turning point for me was starting to play with Kelsey Waldon. And then I met Emily Nenni on a tour with Kelsey, and was like, ‘Oh, cool, this is a sound that I’m really into. Who’s doing this kind of thing?’ I ended up going to Santa’s Pub, and honestly, through that, just slowly started to meet people more in this world.”
Apart from Dallas Ugly, which sits in its own category as a band that Weitnauer co-founded, most of her gigs over the past couple of years have been for sideperson work. She didn’t land in Nashville wanting to write her own solo music; her first release under her own name, 2021’s Sixteen Kings’ Daughters, featured a pair of traditional ballads. But her first roommate in Nashville was the Canadian singer-songwriter Bella White, and White’s influence helped subvert her intended path. (The first time I saw Weitnauer play, Dallas Ugly was supporting White on tour, and it’s still one of the best folk/country shows I’ve ever seen.)
“Living with Bella, I feel like I was just really inspired to write, and see what that was like, because I didn’t write at all before I moved here,” she says. “And then that’s sort of grown alongside the sideperson thing.”
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Sixteen Kings' Daughters Libby Weitnauer
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7" Vinyl
The next step for Weitnauer is to step out from the relative anonymity of collaborative work and into the spotlight as a singer-songwriter. The week after Americanafest, she played her first-ever full-band gig where she was billed as Libby Weitnauer at Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge. In December, she’s going into the studio to record original solo material for the first time. Playing fiddle on the road will likely continue to pay the bills, and Dallas Ugly and her other projects will certainly continue to feed her creative spirit. But it’s become increasingly important to Weitnauer to join the lineage of Nashville sidepeople who became known for making great records of their own.
“I turned 30 this year, and it was sort of a moment where I was like, ‘I’ve never given myself permission to stand on my own two feet and present my voice without other people’s input,’” she says. “And I just sort of felt like now is the time. For my 30th birthday, I’m going to give myself—this sounds so cheesy—but give myself the gift of, ‘You’re allowed to make your own music. You don’t have to stand behind other people.’”
“Even though I love being in a band, and collaboration is my favorite thing, and I love playing in other people’s bands, I knew that [not making my own record] was coming from a place of lack of confidence. And that’s not okay,” she continues. “I’m fine with not making my own music just because I’d rather play with other people, but I’m not fine with not making my own music because I feel like I don’t deserve to. So I’m like, ‘No, you’re gonna make your own music, and then you can do whatever you want. But you need to try.’”
Hanging out in places like Robert’s Western World and Santa’s Pub, it’s easy to forget that the arena-filling, multiplatinum-selling version of country music is also headquartered in Nashville. In most of my interviews, this came up only in small ways. “There’s another, more industry-minded world, but I’m not really part of that world,” Weitnauer told me, by way of explaining that her full slate of shows doesn’t feel like “hustling.” The Teddy’s guys acknowledged that most tourists visiting Nashville want to hear “Morgan Wallen-style music,” not the stuff they’re playing. “That’s what they spend billions of dollars coming here to do,” Quiggins said, somewhat resignedly.
Sometimes, though, a door opens, and the underground oozes out into the mainstream. Players beloved by Nashville’s musical working class do get opportunities to step onto country’s biggest stages. Josie Toney, a Berklee-trained fiddle player who landed in Nashville in 2020, first broke through on the national stage as Sierra Ferrell’s sidewoman. When they started touring together, in 2021, Ferrell was not yet the star she is today; I saw Toney play with her in a tiny barn in New Hampshire that summer. As Ferrell’s profile grew, Toney was there alongside her, stealing scenes with her fiddle solos and helping build gorgeous vocal harmonies. Not long after she and Ferrell parted ways, Toney teamed up with another rising star, the CMA-winning “Everything She Ain’t” singer, Hailey Whitters. (Ferrell, for her part, wound up singing on Zach Bryan and Post Malone albums.) All this time, Toney has kept up her solo practice—something she says has been improved by her experience playing those bigger gigs.
“I’ve learned so much from being on the road with Sierra and Hailey,” she says. “I’ve done other smaller tours with other people and myself, but those are the big exposures that I’ve had to the industry, and they’ve both been very eye-opening. Musically, it does keep me sharp. It keeps me playing at a very high level. It’s music that I need to be able to play really well because, I mean, this year, we’ve opened for Dan and Shay and Luke Combs and Jason Aldean. We’re opening for Alan Jackson in November.”
Toney says there’s a shared language among the musicians who live in two worlds the way she does. At her lone Americanafest gig, a solo set she managed to squeeze in between stints on the road with Whitters, Toney met the keyboardist Lee Turner. Turner was sitting in with Nashville’s Ohio Weather Band that night, but his main gig is touring with Darius Rucker, the Hootie and the Blowfish frontman turned country star.
“We’re playing a festival together in a few weeks, and we were just chatting about how much more nervous I was getting for this little show with my trio,” Toney says. “It went well, but I was nervous! And I don’t get nervous with Hailey. We were both agreeing that there was something about the little space, having a small audience of people who were really listening, feeling so exposed. You know, even though I’m playing in front of 20,000 people in a stadium, it feels much lower stakes than when I’m playing my music for people who I want to like it.”
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Extra Like You Mean It Records
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Compact Disc (CD)
Toney’s own work is roughly situated within the country genre, but it doesn’t sound anything like Hailey Whitters. On Extra, her debut solo album, Toney brings in plenty of influence from the traditional, old-time, and bluegrass music she grew up playing, as well as the foundational country blues of Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams. (She even yodels her way through a sprightly rendition of Rodgers’s “Peach Pickin’ Time Down in Georgia.”) Notably, for a record by someone best known as a fiddle player, Extra is not a “fiddle record.” Toney spends plenty of time playing her signature instrument on the album, but she sounds liberated by the fact that it isn’t all she’s expected to do.
“Fiddle is my home. It will always be my home,” she says. “It’s the thing that I am by far the most comfortable doing. It’s the thing that I love doing the most. But I also play acoustic guitar. I didn’t sing any of the harmonies, but I really enjoy arranging vocal parts, and that kind of thing. I had a fantastic producer, Rachel Baiman, who is also a fiddle player, but she has a wider range of influences and sounds, and a lot more experience in the studio than me, so she brought in her own flavors. But I didn’t think, ‘Hey, there needs to be fiddle on everything,’ you know? In a way, it almost feels like Extra, and my Josie Toney projects, are a different part of my musical self than the part of myself that is, like, just ‘fiddle player.’”
Extra wouldn’t be nearly the album it is without Rachel Baiman’s production work. Like Toney and Weitnauer, she moved to Nashville with hopes of becoming a professional fiddle player for hire, with no immediate intentions of being a singer-songwriter. “I was 18, so I didn’t really know,” she says. “I didn’t really conceive of making records of my own, because I wasn’t writing at that time. That’s kind of been an evolving dream.”
Baiman spent her early years in Nashville studying anthropology at Vanderbilt, feeling frustrated that she didn’t have more access to the acoustic music scene that was exploding across town. She didn’t have a car, so when she heard about a weekly jam at The 5 Spot, she started begging for rides. “That was my thing I was holding on to,” she says, though she didn’t have the self-assurance to really make a go of it with music until she got back from a study-abroad program.
“I did a semester in Scotland, and it was this amazing experience of confidence building because I was so easily able meet people and be part of sessions and stuff,” she says. “Because I had that access, you know. I could go to bars. I could walk places. I was getting gigs in Scotland before I got gigs in Nashville, and I was like, ‘I can do this.’”
Baiman’s first band in Nashville was 10 String Symphony, an avant-folk collaboration with the fiddle player Christian Sedelmyer. The arrangements were often wild, with Baiman playing banjo and five-string fiddle and doing vocal harmonies with Sedelmyer, but at first, the songs were mostly traditional. Eventually—and, Baiman says, out of necessity—10 String Symphony became a vehicle for writing.
“A lot of that was me just falling in love with songwriting, and that was just the product of being in Nashville, and being around so many songwriters,” she says. “I mean, literally, from the ages of like 12 to 18, I only listened to fiddle music. I listened to hip-hop and rap and pop, because I was in Chicago, but I didn’t listen to any songwriters that were in line with what I wanted to do. I hadn’t heard Townes Van Zandt. I hadn’t heard Gillian Welch. I had never studied Bob Dylan. There was this huge wealth of knowledge, that a lot of people I knew were very deep into, and willing to share with me, and very passionate about. So I discovered John Hartford, Loretta Lynn, all of these things. You can imagine how exciting that would be. I was like, ‘I want to write like this. Imagine if I could write a song like that!’ And it’s so valued here, that if you write a good song, people notice, and they’re excited about it.”
Her first full album of original songs, 2017’s Shame, felt like a revolution. Baiman’s writing had begun to take on an intensely personal (and, consequently, political) tint, and without the rigid template of 10 String Symphony, she found that the arrangements could go just about anywhere. “I was like, ‘What if I could use drums and guitars? And, my God, bass!’ When you’re so limited, and then that space opens up to you, it’s amazing,” she recalls.
Andrew Marlin from the folk duo Watchhouse produced Shame, and the Australian musician Olivia Hally produced its follow-up, 2021’s Cycles. But Baiman was fascinated by the process, and she became determined to start producing herself. “I just started to feel really passionate and at home in that environment, and excited about it,” she says. “My confidence had built over making those different projects and being a part of other people’s records as a session musician. So I just had a little dream in my head, and I thought, ‘If I produce my own record, I can use that as sort of a portfolio piece to say, ‘Hey, I trusted myself with my own record, so you should trust me with yours.’”
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Common Nation of Sorrow Rachel Baiman
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Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl LP
2023’s Common Nation of Sorrow was that portfolio piece, though that bloodless description undersells what should already be considered one of the towering masterpieces of modern folk music. Even at a tight 31 minutes, Common Nation feels enormous, with vibrant, politically urgent songs that seem to stretch across space and time. (One tune, a bold reworking of John Hartford’s “Self Made Man” played on the late musician’s banjo, literally marries past to future.) It’s the best Rachel Baiman album, and the way her hands were all over the process plays a major role in that. “I was happy with the record, and I think production-wise, there was a lot of my own style in it, so that was cool to be able to show people,” she says.
That initial experience with self-production opened a door to what Baiman hopes will become a bigger piece of her livelihood. Josie Toney was her first client, and Extra was the first test of the skills she acquired making Common Nation. “Josie has such a similar role [to me] that I felt like I really knew what I could do,” Baiman says. “And she hadn’t really recorded her own music before, so even though she’s such an incredible musician, she just didn’t have an idea of the process of what the studio was. I was terrified, because I was, like, “I’m telling people I can do this. I better freaking do it!”
It clearly went well. When we sit down to chat at a coffee shop in the northeast Nashville suburb of Old Hickory, Baiman is in the middle of three more production projects. And after spending more than a decade gigging around town and picking up session work, she’s especially attuned to using the resources of the scene to bring all this music to life. “It’s such a fantasy because, especially in Nashville, you can go, ‘Who would I love to hear play this specific song?’ I often will move through different guitar players, especially, because of the tone of the song, or who I think will really be able to capture the exact part,” she says. “My whole philosophy is, ‘Get people in who you want to play as themselves.’”
It’s a philosophy that works for Baiman in part because she’s been on the other side of it. Session work is still a major piece of the puzzle for her. In addition to her contributions to Toney’s Extra, she’s played on records by friends like Kelsey Waldon and Molly Tuttle, the indie-rock troubadour Kevin Morby, and the singer-songwriter Caroline Spence. Most recently, she appeared on one of the biggest albums of the year, laying down some banjo for Shaboozey’s Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going.
“I got that through [singer-songwriter and in-demand session musician] Erin Rae, and I went in there and tracked a rhythm track to this track. We were like, ‘Is he gonna use it? Is he gonna use it?’ We were so excited,” Baiman laughs. “And he did use it! It’s quiet. Very quiet. But I’m there, okay?”
Like just about everything else in America, the Nashville music industry often looks like a tiered system, where the money and resources go to the top while everyone below has to figure it out for themselves. Up close, it feels, if not like a true meritocracy, at least like a deeply interconnected ecosystem. A true scene, even. It would be naïve to say that anyone with a banjo and a dream can move to Nashville and play on a platinum record. But anyone with a modicum of musical talent, a dogged work ethic, and a little bit of luck can find a way to make a living as a working musician here. Is that true anywhere else in the country? In the world?
“I’ve been all over this planet, and there’s nothing like this city for music,” Joshua Hedley tells me, just a couple of minutes before he steps onstage at Robert’s. “If you’re a pastry chef, you go to Paris. If you play country music, or really any music these days, come here. This is it, man. This is where you’re supposed to be. There’s nowhere else on Earth where you could treat music like a 9 to 5 and make a living, and you never have to wait a table. You never have to dig a ditch. You never have to do any of that. You just play music.”
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