There are two ways to come to this city for the music. One is the street of neon bars, which works and is loud. The other starts earlier in the day, in small rooms and office buildings, and chases a different question: how a song gets made and who makes it.
01 The song works out of houses here
Music Row is not a stage or an entertainment avenue. It is basically two parallel streets south-west of downtown, 16th and 17th Avenues South, plus a few cross streets, in what used to be an ordinary residential neighbourhood.
The takeover began in 1954, when the first commercially successful studios and music offices set up on 16th Avenue South. By the late sixties the major labels were recording most of their country releases here, and the neighbourhood filled with porch-fronted houses turned into offices.
You can walk it in a morning and there is almost nothing to «see» in the tourist sense: discreet plaques, small car parks, living-room windows with logos. The interest lies exactly in the mismatch between the domestic scale of the building and what gets decided inside. Lately something else shows too: new multi-storey blocks taking over plots where houses stood.
02 A 1957 studio still standing
In November 1957 a studio that cost $37,515 to build opened on a side street off Music Row. It ran for twenty years, until 1977, and more than 47,000 songs passed through its two rooms.
The figure that explains it best is another: during those two decades, around sixty per cent of the country hits on the national chart were recorded there. It is the building where the polished, string-backed sound that defined the genre in the sixties was cooked up.
Today it belongs to the genre's museum, which bought it in 1992, and it can be visited on a daily schedule. Inside there are still working instruments rather than display cases: pianos, an organ, a celesta. The visit works precisely because the place was never spectacular: it is a rectangular room with panels and cables.
03 Hearing the song before the record
The way of listening that sets this city apart was invented in 1985 in a ninety-seat venue opened in 1982 in a residential district to the south, inside a single-storey shopping strip. Four songwriters sat in the middle of the room, facing each other, and took turns song by song.
That circle format changes what you hear. There is no separation between stage and audience, the song arrives without production, and between numbers the writer explains where it came from. In 1988 a version featuring women songwriters appeared, correcting the imbalance of those first rounds.
The room has a long record of people who signed a deal after playing there: in March 1983 after seven months of regular sets, in 1988 filling in for a no-show, in 2004 at fourteen years old. It takes more than seventy thousand visitors a year in ninety seats, and that is the practical problem of the trip: booking.
Ninety seats and more than seventy thousand visitors a year. Getting in is the bottleneck of this trip, not the budget.
04 Rooms where people listen in silence
The other essential room on this circuit opened in 1974 and stands on 12th Avenue South, minutes from Music Row. It is a plain single-storey building, now surrounded by new construction, and programmes bluegrass almost every night.
If you want one bigger night without leaving the same logic, the brick auditorium downtown is the reasonable exception: 2,362 seats that are still the original wooden pews, refurbished and put back in place in the 1993–1994 renovation.
That building went up in 1892 for another use and hosted the country's best-known live radio programme between 5 June 1943 and 15 March 1974. It reopened as a concert hall on 4 June 1994 and has been a national historic landmark since 2001. Musicians talk about its acoustics as among the best they know, and the shape of the pews explains part of it: nobody moves around much.
05 How to organise the days
Three or four nights are plenty. Book the small rooms first — they are what can sell out — and build the rest around them. One room a night; two only if both start early.
Mornings are for the other side of the trade: the visit to the 1957 studio and a walk along the two streets of converted houses, which takes a long hour. Leave time between one thing and the next: the neighbourhood of the writers' rounds is well south of downtown and you do not get there on a stroll.
The ideal date is September or October, when the average high drops from 29 to 23 degrees and rain touches its yearly minimum. And an honest warning: if what you want is a long, loud night out, this trip will feel short and too quiet. It is designed for exactly the opposite.
