Music Row's Soul Threatened By Development, Mainstays Say

NASHVILLE, TN -- Nashville's summer tourist surge is nearly upon us. The bachelorette parties that inundate Lower Broadway will soon be joined by the visitors in search of the town that made country music famous.

Particularly during CMA Fest - this year it's June 7-10 - some of those visitors will wander off Lower Broad and up Demonbreun, in search of Music Row. They'll stand at the roundabout, confused as much as by Musica's spiraling nudes as by the office buildings with their gleaming windows and the little houses with huge signs blaring about some newly charting hit.

"Is this Music Row? This is what we've heard about? This is what they sing about?" they'll ask. Yes, yes, it is. People speak of the "country music industry," a turn-of-phrase that only applies to that genre; no one speaks of the "jazz fusion industry," for example.

And if country music is an industry - and it is - Music Row is to it what River Rouge is to automobiles. The little houses are where songwriters model the early versions of the product, the studios are where they're polished, the record company headquarters are where they get their sheen and the ASCAP and BMI buildings are where the beancounters and lawyers do their important work.

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But the assembly-line metaphor notwithstanding, there is some soul there and decades of history people find worth fighting for, most notably in 2014 when a group came together to preserve historic RCA Studio A.

Denizens of the Row say another fight is afoot. While the locations threatened don't have the heft of Studio A, they are no less beloved: venerable bar Bobby's Idle Hour Tavern, former recording studio and current nuptial venue Rhinestone Wedding Chapel, which averages two weddings per day. There's also rows and rows of century-old homes.

Panattoni Development plans a six-story office building in the heart of Music Row on 16th Avenue South, which will require it to demolish the Idle Hour, the Rhinestone and several homes.

Among those advocating against the project was Oak Ridge Boy Duane Allen, who sent a letter urging people to turn up at the meeting.

"Recording the old fashioned way can happen anywhere, just as recording with all of the bells and whistles of modern technology," Allen wrote. "However, there is an appreciation that goes with recording in a historic place, like RCA Studio A, on Music Row, that encourages excellence, because so much excellence has preceded.”

Metro Councilman Freddie O'Connell said Pannatoni has met with neighborhood groups in an effort to assuage their concerns.

"I watched them go to extraordinary lengths to reach property owners, business owners, stakeholders in Music Row," O'Connell said.

But that's not enough for some.

Songwriter Terry Bruce, who is a member of Historic Nashville, said if things keep going the way they are, Music Row will be unrecognizable.

"It might seem like we fight everything that comes along, but 43 buildings have been destroyed since 2013 and how many times have we really put up a fight that put a blip on the radar?" he said. "All of the songwriters that laid the pavement in this town, they went through there. That is something you have to preserve."

Songwriter Jan Buckingham said that, at the least, the Idle Hour needs to be saved because it's a crucial cog in the songwriting process.

"If you would find a way just to preserve Bobby's because that's where all the kids go," she said. "That's where all us old people come to help the kids. We all go there. You take that, and you've taken the heart of Music Row away, and you have, no offense, the Gulch."

Panattoni said they are willing to work for a compromise before breaking ground.

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