Beverly Keel

Guest columnist

While watching an episode of the Ken Burns documentary “Country Music,” I realized I was watching the official memorial service of the old Nashville that I love so much.

Our city, as well as our musical genre, is in a transition. While I understand that change is not only necessary but inevitable, I feel like the progression is leaving some of the city's soul and heart behind.

We've lost the personal connections and time that made life worth living and music worth listening to. I long for one more Wednesday afternoon in the bar at Maude's Courtyard, when it seemed like the hang would last forever. We weren't in a hurry to be anywhere else. After all, was there any place better than a room full of songwriters and the people who loved them?

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All this technology, for what?

But now, efficiency is taking its toll. Why visit when we can call, especially given our traffic? Why call when we can text? Why text to one person when we can post for everyone on social media? Why listen, read or watch for ourselves when we can read a review online?

We are building a life devoid of human contact. Yes, we are more productive than ever, but is this a life worth living? Downtime is filled with emails and work, so we are never truly off. The technology designed to improve our lives is ruining it instead. We aren't doing better, only more.

We are also losing what made Nashville special.

Country is a genre that provided a voice for the voiceless, a recorder and interpreter of the nation's saddest hearts and lowest times. With everything going on in the country, why aren't we hearing more of their stories in country music? There is so much that should be said, that needs to be said, yet we're only hearing about beer, trucks and boots. Is this what we want representing us in a documentary 50 years from now?

Nashville's prosperity is pushing out the very working folks on whose backs the city was built. While we were preoccupied with proclaiming to the world that Nashville is the “it city,” we forgot to take care of the people and problems back home.

Like the superficial veneer projected in today's social media, it is often sheen over substance, fiction and fantasy over reality. Make no mistake: we were broken then and we are broken now. Human nature hasn't changed. What has changed is that now there is no escape from the pressure. We are all hurting behind our happy Facebook photos, yet no one says a word. There is noise everywhere, and it is drowning out the poetry of our music and lives.

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Bigger isn’t always better

In Nashville, the lonely quiet of Sunday mornings coming down have been shattered by the ear-piercing wooos of the visiting weekend warriors. I don't know about you, but I hate it. The new Nashville lacks dignity, class and respect.

We have earned a reputation as a one-weekend stand kind of town for a generation who can love us and then leave us behind, crumpled up like the plastic cups still reeking of the remnants of watered-down drinks that caused the puddles of vomit left for others to remove without a second thought. Perhaps this is a fitting metaphor because we're increasingly left to clean up the mess of the recent economic prosperity.

That's not to say that the creative spirit is dead and gone. I attended last month’s Nashville Songwriter Awards, and I was reassured that the common thread of the legends like Kris Kristofferson and Cindy Walker continues to pulse through the veins of today's songwriters. Just like Willie and Loretta, young aspiring singers are arriving in Nashville every day with big dreams.

Whether it is delivered through a turntable or a download, a song's effects on a heart hasn't changed. We still need music, and the world still needs to hear what Nashville has to say.

But as the next generation takes the microphone, it's up to us to shape the city that greets, mentors and loves them. As a city and genre, are we who we want to be? Are we losing what makes Nashville great and separates it from Charlotte, Cincinnati and Birmingham? Let's come together and decide what we want to be before more of our friends feel they must leave the city to soothe their souls.

Beverly Keel is a veteran journalist and the chair of the Department of Recording Industry at Middle Tennessee State University.