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.’”
After she drops Calliope off at school, Tiffany drives for Lyft. When her car’s air conditioning broke this summer, it was too expensive to fix. She had to drive in the morning before it got hot in the afternoon. She didn’t want bad reviews. “Lyft is a hard gig to do full-time. It’s exhausting, and it just ruins your vehicle,” she told me as Calliope chased their three-legged cat around.
But Lyft’s flexible schedule allows Tiffany to be a mom and the flexibility she needs to write, perform and record music. That weekend, she was organizing Music City Mamas, an event that would bring together Nashville moms who are also musicians, as well as putting together Calliope’s 10th birthday party at Dave & Buster’s.
Since moving to Nashville, Tiffany has written and co-written songs for other musicians. She’s performed all over the city, and even recorded an album. Yet, like so many musicians who moved here to chase a dream, Tiffany hasn’t made any money off her music.
“You put a lot of irons in the fire, you just throw a lot of daggers out there, and you just hope that something lands. And that this one song gets picked up by an artist, or that one movie wants my song in the credit.” She sounds resolute, not ready to give up. “You’re not somebody until you’re somebody in Nashville.”
Three problems have made it harder than ever for musicians like Tiffany to make it in the city.
First, there’s gentrification. Like San Francisco and Austin, where aspiring musicians used to be able to make ends meet by busking, waiting tables and working other side hustles as they pursued careers in music, Nashville has become a city for the affluent.
A July report found the Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin metro area experienced the sixth-greatest year-on-year rent increase of any metro area in the US. It beat Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim.
Tiffany is one of the lucky ones: she would have been priced out of her neighborhood, despite its reputation, if she had waited to purchase her home. She bought it in 2019, right before the pandemic inflated prices. Living in the RV, she was able to save up money for a down payment. With a first-time homebuyer’s incentive on an FHA loan, she only had to put down 3.5%. The house cost $219,000, with $10,000 returned to her at closing for repairs that needed to be made.
Not everyone has shared her luck.
In the mid-20th century, greater Nashville was a hub for Black Americans, a mecca for jazz, blues and R&B. Today, the postindustrial area north-west of downtown – now rebranded as City Heights – looks like SoDoSoPa, South Park’s parody of luxury apartment neighborhoods.
The name City Heights, coined 10 years ago in a room full of real estate developers and agents hoping to rebrand north-west Nashville, has stuck. City Heights is home to apartment complexes like the Crave, which promises its residents “modern finishes on the inside and industrial vibes on the outside”. Within a year of the Crave opening its doors, the first Whole Foods in downtown Nashville opened its doors on Broadway Street in 2020. (The chain has plans for two more locations in greater Nashville.)
While a 2016 report compiled by the metro planning department estimated that Nashville “will have a demographic makeup of 32% White, 27% Black, 7% other, and 34% Hispanic” by 2040, it is less than clear whether downtown Nashville will ever be that diverse. According to the last census, Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin is over 70% white. As the Tennessean reported in 2017: “Like the rest of the nation, Davidson county’s socio-economic divisions tend to fall along racial lines. Those who can afford the new and revamped housing surrounding downtown typically aren’t longtime Black residents.”
This isn’t the first time Nashville’s Black residents have been displaced. In the 1950s, the construction of Interstate 40 left its mark. As it uprooted more than a thousand Black residents, it also destroyed 128 businesses, 27 apartment buildings and 650 homes. In the words of the Nashville Scene, it “destroyed a business and cultural district on Jefferson Street that was thriving against all odds” during Jim Crow. It was Jefferson Street where Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Marion James and Little Richard blazed new trails in the history of music.
Today, Jefferson Street is home to the Jeffersonian, an apartment complex that will not rent to anyone who has been evicted in the past five years. The street’s history is preserved in the Jefferson Street Sound Museum, a white house located less than a five-minute walk from those apartments.
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.”
And then there’s the problem of tourism.
The gentrification of Nashville has turned it into the City of Bachelorette Parties. With posh places to Airbnb, dine, drink and dance, Nashville hit a single-year record in 2022: $8.8bn in visitor spending, and a growing reputation as a destination for getaways and bachelorette trips. Nashville has become a postmodern pastiche of southern culture full of invading armies of young people intent on a belligerently wild time.
“It’s almost Disneylandish,” the Nashville producer Cliffy D explained to me as we sat on a cement wall at the Nashville fairground. “There’s buses with dicks on them, there’s dick straws, there’s dicks everywhere.”
Cliffy D wasn’t exaggerating. As Tiffany and I drove through the city to grab a bite to eat before the Music City Mama’s event, we almost hit a pedal tavern full of young women in penis-shaped rhinestone tiaras who ignored a stop sign. Shortly after, we got cut off by a hot pink bus. It didn’t have a roof, but it did have dance poles. The bus blasted Man! I Feel Like A Woman! by Shania Twain. A dozen women in Daisy Duke jean shorts and bright pink T-shirts screamed the lyrics at us.
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.”
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.”
Today, when Steve mentors artists, he talks to them about diversifying, finding more income streams. Tiffany has taken his advice: she collects rent on the second half of her duplex; she buys and resells items from Goodwill; she drives for Lyft. “The idea of going into professional songwriting now, as a way to make a living,” Steve told me, “it’s daunting.”
After dinner, Tiffany took me to Germantown’s Sonny’s Patio Pub and Refuge for her Music City Mamas event. Germantown is another neighborhood in the new Nashville. Unlike on Broadway Street, where crushed tiaras litter the sidewalks, there weren’t any bachelorette parties at Sonny’s. The neighborhood restaurant and bar was filled with twentysomethings sipping craft beer and playing cornhole on the patio. Alissa Moreno and Casey Renee LeVasseur, two singer-songwriters, joined us.
Tiffany took the stage. “My name is Tiffany Gassette. I am the creator of the Music City Mamas. We’re basically a group of moms in the music business. We don’t get a whole lot of time to shine. This is for mothers supporting other mothers. We hope you guys enjoy tonight’s performance.” The room was quiet. There were only about a dozen people in the chairs around me. They weren’t here to sing along to the country music hits; they were here to listen.
As Tiffany’s fingers hit her keyboard, her voice filled the room: “Like a movie, we are all actors / I have a small, supporting role beside the main characters / I play the part, the hopeless romantic, led by your heart, not very smart, a little bit tragic.”
At the end of the night, she packed up her instruments and walked back through the noisy bar. A young woman stepped on stage to perform karaoke, for a much bigger audience than in the back room we had just occupied.