Seems ironic that you’d be expected to play cover songs when you move to Nashville to make a career as a songwriter, no?
That’s the way it goes for many of the aspiring artists who move to Music City to chase their dreams. The honky tonks of Broadway are filled with musicians who hope to make a career out of making music.
But if you’re playing on Broadway, you’re not playing your own songs.
The tourists come to Nashville and want to hear the hits: Walk in any bar on Broadway and you’ll probably hear the band playing ’90s hits like “Brand New Man” and “Should’ve Been A Cowboy,” or newer stuff like “Whiskey Glasses” or “When It Rains It Pours,” or for $100 they’ll even play “Wagon Wheel” or “Devil Went Down To Georgia.”
Oh, and don’t forget about the “country” classics like Blink 182’s “All the Small Things” or Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer.” And “Mr. Brightside” is probably played on Broadway as much as any country song these days.
But what you don’t hear much of are original songs from these artists.
Sure, maybe they’ll throw in one or two during a four-hour shift. But for the most part, the bands in the honky tonks (and I use the term “honky tonk” loosely) are expected to stick to the cover songs.
And I get it. Give the people what they want to hear, give them something familiar, keep them drinking. But when you’re a new songwriter in Nashville and want to get your music out there, the last thing you want to do is play “Pontoon” for drunk bachelorettes for the 10th time during your shift.
That’s the problem Eric Church ran into when he first packed up his two-tone Chevy Blazer and moved to Nashville.
Church wanted to make it as a songwriter, but when he tried to find a job as a musician to pay the bills, he ran into a problem as he headed to where all of the other musicians head when they come to Nashville: They didn’t want to hear his songs. They wanted to hear him sing other people’s songs.
During an interview with CBS Mornings, Church spoke about striking out while he was trying to strike it big:
“I did what a lot of dreamers do. You pack your car…you put a guitar in it, and you go to the center of what Nashville is, which is Broadway.
And I couldn’t get a gig on Broadway. Nothing. I couldn’t even bartend on Broadway.
They didn’t want original music. They wanted you to play whatever the songs were at the time. I didn’t really do that. I was a songwriter.”
And while he couldn’t find a home on Broadway, he found one just a few blocks away:
“I found a place not far from here over in Printer’s Alley, which is a seedy kind of area. But I found my tribe there, because that’s where all the people that also got kicked off Broadway all ended up.
So I ended up with those guys. And what I found with those guys was, these were all old-dog songwriters that had written for George Jones and Waylon Jennings and Conway Twitty. And that’s where I learned. I learned the craft of songwriting from the same guys that came to town and had the same thing happen to them that happened to me.”
The bar that Eric Church found himself in was called the Fiddle & Steel Guitar Bar, which closed in early 2015. But while he was there, Church was not only able to hone his craft as a songwriter, but also meet other artists who hung out there – guys like Toby Keith:
“My first time I met Toby, we both frequented a bar in Printer’s Alley in Nashville called The Fiddle and Steel Guitar Bar. And I remember walking in my first time and apparently some of the patrons had been harassing a bartender behind the bar and as I walked in, Toby had taken the guy harassing the patrons and had drug him by his shirt collar all the way down the bar.
And as I walked in the door, the guy dropped in front of me, and I look up and there’s Toby Keith, and I kinda stuck out my hand and said, ‘Hi.’
Toby was always a guy that did things his own way, and I think of that, I think of that fondly now when I think of him. We got to be friends later and toured with him, but that’s how I met him. He laid a guy out at my feet at the Fiddle and Steel.”
With the Fiddle and Steel playing such a big part in Church’s career, when he opened his own bar on Broadway (the same street that didn’t want him two decades earlier), he tracked down the original sign from the Fiddle and Steel and hung it above the stage in Chief’s, a reminder of the home and the tribe that he found when he first moved to Nashville.
Oh, and something else that he did with his own Broadway bar? The musicians who play there get to play original music, like he wanted to do when he first moved to town.