Gotta do what it takes in this town.
Nashville is filled with artists and songwriters who got where they are by never giving up and doing whatever it takes to get their music heard – and that includes Tim O’Connell.
These days you may be more familiar with Tim’s son, Freddie O’Connell, who just so happens to be the Mayor of Nashville. Freddie was elected mayor back in 2023 after serving on the city council for nearly a decade. But while Freddie was celebrating a big win recently with the passage of his transit plan for Nashville in the recent election, his father Tim was celebrating the release of his new album.
While his son has found his passion in government, Tim O’Connell moved to Nashville back in 1970 for the same reason so many others come to Music City: To be a songwriter. And like many others, his favorite artist at the time was the legendary Johnny Cash.
In fact, he had once even spent the night at the Ryman Auditorium after sneaking inside, just to watch a taping of Cash’s show.
While he was in college in Wisconsin, O’Connell and his wife found out that Cash taped The Johnny Cash Show at the Ryman on Monday nights. So on Sunday, they headed out to Music City – with no plans or place to stay.
Well they got to downtown Nashville, and realized there was a door at the Ryman that was unlocked. So with no other place to stay, they decided to just sleep inside the Mother Church of Country Music for the night so they could be there for the taping of the show.
And when they moved to Nashville a few years later so that he could pursue his career in the music business, O’Connell says his wife was determined to get Cash’s attention on Tim’s songwriting:
“She drove out to his house and waited at the end of his driveway so he could talk to Johnny Cash. And as it turned out, he came out in a Jeep and she was standing there and she said, ‘My husband’s a songwriter, he really wants to be a songwriter, you think you could help him?’
And Johnny Cash was mad. He said, ‘I’ve only got one day off, and this is my day off.’
So when he said that, the tears started coming down, and Johnny Cash was so nice. When he saw that he had made her cry he said, ‘Tell him to come out Thursday and bring me some songs and I’ll listen to them.’”
Well O’Connell did just that, and Cash told him that he had a future as a songwriter.
And Cash meant it: Years later, he ended up recording “A Singer of Songs,” which was written by O’Connell and featured on Cash’s Unearthed box set, released two months after his death in 2003.
All those years after his hard-earned meeting with Cash, O’Connell decided he wanted to write and record his own music, so in 2010 he dropped his debut album It’s My Song, Dammit. And he has no intention of slowing down: Just last month, O’Connell released his latest album On That Hillbilly Highway, the final installment to a trilogy he calls Terry and Jasmine: A Country Music Love Story.
The project tells the story of a man who, like O’Connell, moves to Nashville to chase his dreams in the music business – but also serves as a cautionary tale of all the dangers and tragedies that come with success. It’s a story that’s no doubt relatable to anybody in the music business, who’s worked so hard and done whatever it took to get to where they are today.
Including sneaking into the Ryman to see Johnny Cash…