Member-only story
A Journey to Nashville
Reflections on Music City’s Musical Legacy
US Census data reveals that, for the 12-month period ending July 1, 2016, Nashville was growing at a rate of 100 people a day. It’s a nearly unbelievable statistic until you meet a few people, hang a little bit, and realize that the town is, indeed, made of transplants, that very few people are actually from here. We call them unicorns, the ones who are — the homegrown, Middle Tennessee born-and-breds who didn’t just show up one day with with starry eyes, a tattered backpack, and an acoustic guitar. The others, like me, neither native nor naive, remain nameless.
I had no intentions of moving here, no singer-songwriter fantasies or visions of stardom. Kansas City was my home, and my love for my city and commitment to its growth ran/runs deep. I’d left only once for an extended period — to study sport management at Georgia Southern University — and had been back but a few years when I met my husband, the person who’d eventually draw me back down south.
We were both working on the Vine then. I was in the marketing department at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and he had founded a band, called Vibe, that played happy hour in the American Jazz Museum’s Blue Room. Back then, my future husband and I spent our days and many nights there, in the heart of Kansas City’s Historic 18th and…
