The Nashville Basin and Country Music
Music has been big business in Nashville for a very long time. Hymnal publishing started there in the 1820s, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who performed across the U.S. and Europe, brought huge crowds to Nashville for their concerts in the 1870s. In 1892, the Union Gospel Tabernacle building was completed, and soon renamed The Ryman Auditorium. By the early 20th century the Ryman had earned a reputation as the “Carnegie Hall of the South” for its wide-ranging and eclectic musical presentations. It would be another 40 years before it became home to the Grand Ole Opry.

If you look at country music as a business, it was radio that really pushed Nashville over the top. In the mid-20s, radio stations WSM and WLAC won clear-channel status from the federal government, ensuring the music from the Grand Ole Opry could be heard across the country, and cement the sound of early country music in the hearts of people across America. That's how Nashville became a magnet for music talent. It's no wonder that, in 1950, WSM announcer David Cobb proclaimed Nashville as “Music City USA.”

The "Nashville Sound"
In 1958, Owen Bradley built a music studio, marking the first business on what would become "Music Row", an area on the southwest side of downtown Nashville with hundreds of businesses in the country, gospel, and contemporary christian genres. That same year, Bradley and Chet Atkins started creating the "Nashville Sound”, a new production technique that added strings, background vocals and pop music techniques to what had been a coarse and minimalist hillbilly sound. The Nashville Sound produced country music’s first pop crossover stars: Jim Reeves, Eddie Arnold, Ferlin Husky and Patsy Cline. With Bradley's success, most of the major record companies and many more independent labels opened offices on 16th and 17th Avenues. By the early 60s, Nashville was second only to L.A. and New York in music recording. By the mid 60s, country music was Nashville's core business. Even Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan came to town to record. Here are some good examples of what the Nashville sound was all about:Ray Price's "Heartaches by the Number"George Jones' "He Stopped Loving Her Today"Tammy Wynette's "Stand by Your Man"Crystal Gale's "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue"Dottie West's "Together Again"Porter Wagoner's "Your Old Love Letters"But there were even bigger changes to come. The National Life Company launched "The Nashville Network" (TNN) in 1983. National Life owned and operated the Grand Ole Orpy and WSM radio, but TNN put country artists on national TV around the clock. The growth of the network over the next two decades followed the growth of country music. Another big part of that growth was the success of the Country Music Association (CMA) under the leadership of Jo Walker-Meador. The CMA encouraged radio stations to adopt a country music format, and the number of country music stations rose from a few dozen in the 1960s to more than 2,000 today. Country music was becoming very big business."The vampires are sucking all of the good blood out of this town."
- Margo PriceThe Nashville Sound may have faded away, but the idea of making country music mainstream is stronger than ever. The Nashville corporate music machine took the lessons learned from those early days and refined it, polished it, and went on a 30 year hit-making roll. But just like taking the idea of a home-made oatmeal-raisin cookie into the world of mass production, they compartmentalized, sanitized and standardized each step in the music-making process until they'd developed a few, sure-fire cookie-cutter recipes that now produce some of the worst music ever to be called "country". Here's a few examples of this business-driven country-pop:Brett Eldredge's "Lose My Mind"Easton Corbin's "Let's Ride"Luke Bryan's "That's My Kind of Night"Blake Shelton's "Boys Round Here"Little Big Town's "Pontoon"Kip Moore's "Somethin' 'Bout a Truck"Randy Houser's "We Went"Thomas Rhett's "Crash and Burn"The homogenization of mainstream country music is now so pervasive that satires like this one from Sir Mashalot have begun appearing. This article from Entertainment Weekly sums up the problem, and this one from CMT postulates where the corporate country machine will next take the genre.

Outlaw Country Music
Outlaw country music isn't really a sub-genre of country so much as it is a business model. It's not about bandits or bank robbers or even motorcycle gangs. It's about artists taking control of the creative and production processes - doing it the way they hear it in their heads.

The movement started in the early 1970s with people like Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jimmy Buffet, Kris Kristof-ferson, Guy Clark, Jerry Jeff Walker, David Allan Coe and Bobby Bare. Each of these artists were feeling the strain from the Nashville record labels to fit into the mold.
The story of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings is typical of what was going on. At the time, Nelson had been rejected as a recording artist by the Nashville labels and had gone back to Texas. In Austin, the Armadillo World Headquarters asked him to play a show there, and the audience couldn't get enough. He played a dozen more shows for Armadillo in Austin, and realized he was onto something. The audience was tapping into an old Texas tradition of good time hell-raising. Nelson called his friend Waylon Jennings. “I think I’ve found something. Come down and check it out.” As it was, Jennings was fighting with RCA records; being told he couldn't record the songs he wanted to or use his road band to record.

Willie took his blend of Texas country and rock into the studio and made his album, Red Headed Stranger. His record label didn’t want to release it, but Nelson fought hard for it, and finally won release in 1975. It became his first No. 1 album.

About that same time, Jennings finally won his contract battle and got full artistic control of his recordings. The first album he made this way was Dreaming My Dreams in 1975, and it became his first No. 1 album.

Jerry Bradley, General Manager of RCA in Nashville, decided there must be something to the idea, and put together tracks from Waylon, Willie, Jessi Colter and Tompall Glaser and called it Wanted: The Outlaws. The album became country music’s first million-selling album.

Some think the outlaw movement died-out by the 80s, but the fight between Nashville corporate music giants and indepen-dent artists biting the bit continues to this day. The powers of Nashville want to control the theme, content, instrumentation and singers. But just like the first generation outlaws, artists like Cody Jinks, Jamey Johnson, Nikki Lane, James McMurtry, Whitey Morgan, Margo Price and Lucinda Williams have each found their own way to change the rules, bypass the Nashville corporate giants and win audiences of grateful music lovers.

Here's an example of how many artists see Nashville today; it's from Margo Price's: "This Town Gets Around". Many others ignore Nashville completely and go there own way. Here's a list of some of the more recent songs in outlaw country:Cody Jinks' "We Get By"Jamey Johnson's "High Cost of Living"Nikki Lane's "Gone, Gone, Gone"Sturgill Simpson's "Call to Arms"Lera Lynn's "The Only Thing Worth Fighting For"James McMurtry's "How'm I Gonna Find You Now"John Moreland's "Cleveland County Blues"Whitey Morgan's "I Ain't Drunk"Sonny Ledfurd's "Place to Stay"Dale Watson's "A Real Country Song"Lucinda Williams' "Ghosts of Highway 20"A White Knight for Nashville
Dave Cobb is a Grammy award winning record producer based in Nashville. He's best known for his work with Shooter Jennings, Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton and Jason Isbell, and some consider him the second coming of Sam Phillips. In the five years since he moved to Nashville, Cobb has produced Jason Isbell's Southeastern and Something More Than Free, Sturgill Simpson's High Top Mountain and Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, and Chris Stapleton's Traveller. He's hot, which brings with it a lot of pressure to cash in. But the very artistic Southern Family compilation album he released in early 2016 proves that he's focused on the music and not the money. It's a beautiful collection of stories about the human condition, emotions and memories that are personal and universal at the same time. His secret? Let artists be artists, and support them in whatever way they need it. Here's what he said in an interview: “If there’s a part that needs to be written in a song, I’ll help write it. If it’s moral support, I’ll be there. It varies every time. Sometimes it is showing up and smiling, and sometimes it is getting really deep into it.”.

There's a lot of Sam Phillips in that approach, and it makes you wonder if Cobb's work marks the start of another change in the way Nashville makes country music.

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