Why East Nashville Was More Hot Than Hip in 2015

Heartworn Highways, the classic 1976 songwriter documentary, got a second edition recently, featuring many of today’s East Nashville artists, including John McCauley, known primarily for his work in Deer Tick, Nikki Lane, Joshua Hedley and Jonny Fritz (who recently relocated to Los Angeles). McCauley, a criminally underrated writer himself, had found himself part of the community fairly quickly. But that wasn’t his goal.

“I didn’t move here for the scene,” McCauley says. “Honestly, I moved here about seven years ago because of a girl and I basically only stayed because of [producer] Adam Landry. . . I ended up making a lot of friends and enjoying all the music here and now it seems as though I’ll never leave, and I’m OK with that. There’s nowhere else in the world like Nashville. It is kind of a musician’s dream city — parts of it anyway.”

“It’s where everyone goes to find competent musicians to play your songs,” says the blues-tinged Patrick Sweany, who moved to East Nashville in 2008.”And you can go out every night and see some of the best music you’ve ever seen. But now, you’re getting rich kids who don’t have to work. That contributes to shitty art.”

“My most common wording when I introduce someone is, ‘Originally from blank, now calling East Nashville home,'” says Derek Hoke, musician and host of the 5 Spot’s $2 Tuesdays, a mainstay in the community where great bands from Nashville and beyond share the stage for short sets every week. “Everybody has just moved here.”

Wilkins began to notice it too. “Within the first season of Nashville, we’d sit by the back doors and notice people walking in, looking around trying to recognize the place,” he says. “At first it was funny. Until all of the sudden, half the crowd was made of people who had never been there before.”

There’s a clip in the 1996 documentary Hype!, about the commercialism of the Seattle music scene, where Eddie Vedder is talking to the camera about his hometown and its very en vogue aesthetic. “As soon as it starts going through those moneymaking channels,” he said, “everything changes.” East Nashville hasn’t yet reached those grunge proportions, but it’s rising fast, and one of its products — honest, songwriter-rooted country and Americana — is proving it not only moves hearts but units. Just look at Chris Stapleton, Sturgill Simpson and Isbell. But as the brandification of East Nashville and its consuming popularity continues, will new voices even be able to survive?

Terry Rickards, a booker for the Basement East, sums it up this way. “Music Row wants the coolness, and East Nashville wants the recognition,” he says. But it’s not just Music Row — people are flocking here in droves, driving real estate prices high and fast. Still, Rickards is wary of progress. “How long of a shelf life does that have? Is it going to be a Starbucks on every corner soon? Or will it hold on to whatever it is that made it cool originally?”