Country Music: The Nashville Sound

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The Nashville Sound, its practitioners claim, is absolutely indigenous to the town and can't be had elsewhere. It is something about "the warmth of Nashville," they explain, almost misty-eyed at the thought of it. Guitarist Grady Martin says he has tried playing C & W in New York and Hollywood with "foreigners," but it never worked. Explains one musician: "Country people play their feeling and feel their playing. That's the big difference."

Prized and Prime. Nashville Sound is now so prized that performers of all musical persuasions, from Doris Day to Fats Domino, have flocked to Nashville to cash in on it. Distilled into a variety of musical idioms, the Sound has made Trumpeter Al Hirt, for example, into the hottest instrumentalist around. Tele vision now has a prime-time C & W program in The Jimmy Dean Show. The Nashville folk have even gained some measure of respectability from folk-music buffs, mindful that C & W traces its roots to Scottish, English and Irish ballads brought to the U.S. two centuries ago. Earl Scruggs, virtuoso of the five-string banjo, Lester Flatt and the Foggy Mountain Boys have been admitted to the folk pantheon. So has Johnny Cash, the most popular as well as the best of the modern country singer-composers (Ring of Fire, I'll Walk the Line).

The fact that Nashville is Cashville has attracted a lot of big-city operators to town, and there is some concern that the Nashville Sound might lose its pure rural flavor. Cautions RCA Victor's Sholes: "It behooves Nashville to remain unhip, that is, to avoid losing the attitudes and points of view which have made country music the great culture it is."