Nashville

Maybe I am not the demographic that Honky Tonk Row is designed for? But upon getting the email, a friend from work and I opted to travel to Nashville, in June, and spend two days learning about a software program that only kind of worked for us. Work paid for the hotel, the travel, and, provided I didn’t have alcohol on the itemized tickets, my food. With that, we were going to Nashville, and I’d take the opportunity to absorb what it means to be in “Music City.”

After checking into the hotel, the conference organizers put together a meet-and-greet at a café down the road. It was just down the road: The Bluebird Café.

This place was great, an inauspicious café in a strip mall in the Hillsboro part of town. It was a listening room and musicians got a chance to play originals and talk about their songs or process in an intimate setting. From what I could tell, all 3 of them: Tony Arrata, Marv Green, and Leslie Satcher were successful and their bios suggested that.

In fact, Marv Green told a story about selling three songs to Hollywood and sharing the news of that with friends the first two times that it happened only to discover that his songs were only used for few seconds and you’d have to stick around for the credits to see his contribution. When he sold the third song, however, he stopped telling his friends about it and only later learned that it was the first time that…