Photo: Tiffany Gassette | By Adam Szetela, The Guardian | In June 2016, Tiffany Gassette looked for a place to park her RV. She ended up in Lyles, Tennessee, an hour from Nashville. For the next six months, she and her three-year-old daughter, Calliope – named after the Greek muse of epic poetry and heroic song – lived off a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. For 20 miles, there was nothing but a Walmart.
Tiffany had never lived in an RV before. When winter came, the temperature dropped. The regulator on her propane tank froze. The space heaters blew out her breakers. One day, after she dropped Calliope off at daycare, she went into Nashville to busk. When she got home, her dog couldn’t see her. The cold weather had triggered her acute glaucoma. It was the loneliest, saddest time of her life. “What right do I have to be here with this child?” she asked herself. “This is no life.”
Before she parked her RV in Lyles, Tiffany was a middle-school teacher in Randolph, Massachusetts. A single mother, she moved to Nashville to pursue a career in music, like so many before her. Nashville is where Dolly Parton moved the day after her graduation in 1964. It’s where Johnny Cash moved into an apartment with Waylon Jennings a couple of years later. It’s where Taylor Swift decided to move when she was just 10 years old.
Every year, hundreds of artists make the same decision. Their struggle speaks to the question that has started to haunt Nashville: is it still possible for musicians to make it in the City of Music?
Tiffany and Calliope now live in a duplex in North Nashville. Their RV, which was their home for three years, is parked in the backyard. While their neighborhood is just a 15-minute drive from the famous Broadway Street, it still has a bad reputation. “There was this one woman on Facebook Marketplace,” Tiffany told me as we sat in her music room, “who was supposed to pick up a chair. When I told her my address, she was like, ‘Never mind, I don’t want to get shot.’”
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Dan Cornfield, a professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University and the author of Beyond the Beat: Musicians Building Community in Nashville, told me: “The affordable housing issue for musicians is part and parcel of the general affordable housing problem for marginalized folks already living in Nashville – who are being displaced – as well as new folks coming in who quickly discover that it is difficult to pay the rent.”
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There’s a cost to musicians: tourists tend to only want to listen to the hits. In the past, Nashville was the place for aspiring songwriters; today, it’s the place for cover bands. The armies of bachelorette parties marching down Broadway Street aren’t listening to original performers. They’re singing along to Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, and Tim McGraw covers.
According to a recent Arts and Business Council of Greater Nashville survey, which got picked up in this summer’s issue of Rolling Stone, “a quarter of Nashville artists said they likely would not remain in the city past the next two to three years. Among the reasons given: lack of creative infrastructure and cost of living.”
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The final nail in the coffin for artists is streaming.
When Tiffany moved to Nashville, she wanted to be a songwriter like her mentor Steve Seskin. She started to record and perform her own songs as a way to showcase them. But Steve – who has written for Tim McGraw, Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire and other country music legends – came up in the era of the album. Back then, a songwriter could make a decent middle-class income off album cuts. “I could have a song on a record that sold 3,000,000 records, and it would take care of a year’s worth of living,” he explained to me. “That’s nonexistent now.”
Unlike most creative industries, songwriters are still subjected to a 1909 law that requires the US government to set their royalty rates every five years. In the age of streaming, when Spotify, Pandora and other platforms hire the best lawyers, the rates have remained low.
Bart Herbison, executive director of the Nashville Songwriters Association International, has been fighting to increase those rates. However, they remain fractions of a penny a stream. In his office, he told me that the historical record was clear: “Creativity suffers when there’s a new distribution method for creativity.”
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Ah, the realities of living in Nashville! Read the full story here:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/06/nashville-musician-singer-housing-tourism
By Adam Szetela with photographs by Morgan Hornsby
[Thanks to Alex Teitz for contributing this article! http://www.femmusic.com]
Photo: Tiffany Gassette | https://www.facebook.com/TiffanyGassettMusic/photos
October 12, 2023| Research| Barb Dye