MANY WHITES IN the old town still clung to their segregated neighborhoods and institutions, including the public schools, whose integration had begun with some promise in the 1950s, only to stall in the 1960s. By 1970, a stubborn dividing line marked racial territory in the schools, prompting a federal court to order Nashville to dramatically accelerate desegregation. Mayor Beverly Briley, who had succeeded the pragmatic Ben West in 1962, was defiant. “The courts should stay out of education, and education should stay out of the courts,” he railed. But it was no use: Briley and Nashville bowed to the courts and implemented a controversial busing plan.
As if the court’s scolding were not enough, corruption and urban decay worthy of a Lincoln Steffens exposé plagued the city. When federal investigators realized that raids on illegal gambling joints coordinated with Nashville police frequently came up dry, they found that many cops on the vice squad were on the take. In addition, news stories about fishy dealings in the sheriff’s office and in the chambers of council members furiously rolled off the presses, some of them written by a young Tennessean newspaper reporter named Al Gore Jr.
Dilapidation pocked virtually every sector of the city. Lower Broadway near the Ryman Auditorium in downtown became the preserve of winos, prostitutes, and cheap souvenir shops, while white flight hastened the collapse of many once-prosperous neighborhoods. Music Row—a quiet residential area in earlier years—deteriorated, too. Vacant houses wild with overgrowth multiplied as the music industry looked on in horror.
Music Row neighborhood in decline.
Courtesy of Metropolitan Government Archives of Nashville and Davidson County
The streets in and around Music Row fanned out in a southwesterly direction to the nearby Vanderbilt University neighborhood, where students and hungry musicians taking advantage of cheap rents found creativity, liberation from tired ideals, and hip fashion. While the city buckled under urban decline and Old South rigidness, many of the young people in the West End introduced at street level the ethos of the 1960s, just as the decade was coming to a close. They were outlaws, recalling the spirit of the lunch-counter demonstrators, testing the boundaries that family and society had erected and stirring up a countercultural mood that would soon drift into the beige-painted hallways of Music Row, where people like Waylon Jennings waited.
THE VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY community, which had leaned toward the establishment in matters such as the Vietnam War and civil rights, was fast taking up the torch lit by segregation protestors Diane Nash and John Lewis. In 1969, the Vanderbilt chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organized peacefully against navy ROTC activities on campus. But the peace wouldn’t last and protests sharpened in May 1970 when Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Vietnam War protestors at Kent State University. “The students were morally outraged,” says Paul Worley, who had entered Vanderbilt in 1969, “and we were already very much against the war and against the administration that was perpetrating the war. The idea that someone called in the Guard and killed college students who were just protesting blew our minds and instilled in us distrust for authority and fear and paranoia about Big Brother and big government.”
By the morning of May 5, 1970, the day after the shootings, the Vanderbilt SDS had blanketed the campus with fliers calling for demonstrations. “They were going to burn a flag on the quad,” recounts Lewis Shiner, a sophomore at Vanderbilt at the time of the protest. “And that got pretty hairy. Campus security was there, and they kept it from turning violent, but there was a pretty good shouting match.” Within days, hundreds of students abandoned the classrooms to continue protesting, and faculty members voted in a two-week suspension of classes so the Vanderbilt community could get out the vote for local “peace candidates.”
“We did a lot of community organizing,” says Shiner. “I know a bunch of guys went out to factories and dropped leaflets there. Some kids got beat up. I don’t think they were seriously injured, but those factory people did not want to be getting that kind of propaganda. What I did was cut my hair and put on a tie and went downtown with a bunch of people trying to get petitions signed against the war. No one in my group was physically attacked, but there was a lot of resistance. We weren’t getting a bunch of signatures. I remember this one group of guys pulled up in a convertible and asked what I was doing. I told them I was petitioning, so they grabbed the clipboard and drove off. Cops were following us around, like crawling along behind us as we walked. I started out saying, ‘Would you care to sign this petition for peace,’ and later I was just saying, ‘Peace?’ And people were shaking their head. ‘No peace. No peace. Not interested.’”
Lewis Shiner’s pass to the Vanderbilt world.
Courtesy of Lewis Shiner
THE MOOD OF Vanderbilt’s very own Prague Spring drifted across the West End, creating an appetite among young people for Kris Kristofferson’s genre-smashing songs and awakening the consciousness of Waylon Jennings, who began injecting realism into his recordings. Johnny Cash went as far as to film an episode of his television show at Vanderbilt, where he met students who inspired him to write his own protest anthem, “Man in Black.”
Denizens of Music Row merely had to walk by the school’s grounds to see that change was the order of the day. “The entire campus was painted with psychedelia; some of the most wonderful artwork that I have ever seen existed in the tunnel between Towers One, Two, Three, and Four,” explains Paul Worley. “It was like walking through an M. C. Escher painting.” The Vanderbilt Student Arts Alliance sponsored art exhibits, poetry readings, and musical performances (including one by a gawky coed named Marshall Chapman and a mellow maverick based in Nashville named Jimmy Buffett). Nationally known musical acts such as Parliament Funkadelic, the Grateful Dead, Poco, the James Gang, Commander Cody, Sun Ra, and the Allman Brothers Band visited the university, replacing Skeeter Davis, the Platters, and bland Motown bands.
Student Michael Minzer encountered jazzman Roland Kirk, who played an open-air concert on Neely Lawn. “Since I had a car, I was enlisted to go pick him up at the airport,” says Minzer. “And that was one of the most amazing experiences I had, meeting an artist of that caliber and getting to interact with him for two days, three days. I remember him wandering around with this fantastic spirit cane that he had, with a little caster on the bottom, feathers hanging off of it, and sort of talking to no one in particular. I remember him saying, ‘If I was the Allman Brothers, you’d be lined up here for three miles to hear me play.’”
They lined up for home-grown Vanderbilt talent, too. In the campus coffeehouses, on Neely Lawn, at fraternity houses, or under the oak trees at nearby city parks, students gathered to hear the local rock bands, folksingers, and bluegrass pickers. “There were musicians everywhere,” observes Minzer. “I can recall walking into music stores and just sitting down and joining in jams with guys that were fantastic players. It was very underground in the sense that no one knew where or how to get to the big time.” Minzer, who played bass and sang, and fellow student Lewis Shiner, who drummed, formed a cover band called the Other Side, while Paul Worley pulled together the Vandy-centered band Just Friends.
Vandy students enjoys a campus concert.
Courtesy of Vanderbilt University Special Collections and University Archives
Just Friends sponged up the sound and energy of the Buffalo Springfield and the Who, as well as the big rhythm-and-blues vibe of Wilson Pickett and James Brown, to build an impressive following at Vanderbilt and beyond in the early 1970s. They pulsed with the times, and their superior sound system gave them an edge in the boisterous fraternity houses and bars. By the time Worley graduated in 1973, the band counted audiences of four and five hundred wherever they appeared. “During the summer, things would dry up for us because school would be out,” says Worley. “You could go park at a Holiday Inn lounge on West End Avenue, but you had to play top forty and it was just hell. We found a gay bar at the corner of Fifth and Lee. It was called the Other Side, and they loved our m
usic. And by then we were throwing in some jazz and fusion and stuff, Stevie Wonder. They would let us play whatever we wanted to play and then on the break the jukebox would come on and they would get out on the floor and dance to their favorite songs, but they liked us. I remember one night I was playing, and I looked up and out on the dance floor was my mother and her best friend dancing.”
The musicians in Just Friends led a small troop of Vanderbilt scholars graduating into Nashville’s wider music community. Marshall Chapman, Woody Chrisman, and Doug Green—all of whom would later thrive in the city’s music industry—found stages around town, as did Randy Scruggs, who studied at Vanderbilt while emerging as an in-demand session artist (appearing on many of Waylon’s records) and a more-than-worthy heir to his father Earl’s musical tradition. Pennsylvania native Dick Bay, a 1970 graduate in philosophy, failed to rise as high as Scruggs and Chapman, but the bands he joined embodied the town-grown pollination that nourished Nashville’s underground music scene and drifted to the edges of Music Row.
An antiwar protestor at Vanderbilt.
Courtesy of Vanderbilt University Special Collections and University Archives
Bay played piano with his group Dick Bay and the Bay Area Bombers, which also featured songwriter John Hiatt on bass. Proffering a country-blues sound with a heavy dependence on original numbers by Hiatt, the band played Vanderbilt’s Graduate Student Pub and a black joint called Rufus Carter’s Place in Mount Juliet, east of the city, where it found a reverse image of black R&B band performances at Vandy frats. Tracy Nelson’s Mother Earth—which was based in Nashville at the time—played there, too.
Dick Bay of the Babushka Brothers.
Courtesy of Dick Bay
“It was pretty much local-locals,” recalls Bay. “The clientele was pretty much all black. So we and whatever entourage we brought with us from Vanderbilt were the only white folks there. And it was very much out in the country. The only heat was a potbelly stove. It had pool tables in one area and then the bandstand, such as it was. At least once a night Rufus Carter managed to grab hold of the microphone and he’d go off on some long tangent, which usually started with ‘This band gon’ play tonight!’ And then he’d go off talking about God knows what. Usually somewhere in there he’d sing ‘You Are My Sunshine.’”
Finally, the band disintegrated over creative differences, sending Hiatt off to a prosperous singer-songwriting career. “I remember him as a very nice and humble fellow,” says Darrell Berger, a Vandy student who hung with the band, “yet someone who was very aware of how talented he was, and he fully expected to make it big, though he didn’t know how or when back then.”
The Bay Area Bombers morphed into a gypsy-rock jug band called the Babushka Brothers, which replaced Rufus Carter’s Place with the Exit/In on its itinerary. The Exit/In had opened in the fall of 1971, pasting inaugural ads in the Vanderbilt Hustler that earnestly pledged to offer “really good music” in a quiet setting with plenty of Budweiser and Michelob on tap and, with a subversive wink, “a whole bunch of munchies.” Nestled on Elliston Place, which was a short dash across West End Avenue from campus, the club’s first advertisement in the Hustler touted Lana Chapel, a singer-songwriter on staff at Combine Music, and David Allan Coe, a menacing character whom many students saw cruising the streets in a black hearse and jamming in nearby Centennial Park. In time, Kris, Willie, and Waylon took turns on the club’s stage.
The Babushka Brothers reached their pinnacle as part of a two-day festival at the Nashville War Memorial Auditorium in the summer of 1972. “We were playing with a whole bunch of other people, a lot of whom were names at the time within that singer-songwriter circle,” says Bay. “The headliners were Mac Gayden’s Nameless Band, Dianne Davidson and Friends, Chris Gantry’s Turkey Farm Surprise, Jay Bolotin, John Hyatt, and Rich Mountain Tower.” When the festival closed, the band disintegrated. Few people remembered the Babushka Brothers after their demise, but they forged another link—as did Just Friends—between the rock-and-folk–influenced creative spirit that had taken root at Vanderbilt and the musical revolution slowly permeating the rest of Nashville.
Advertisement for the Exit/In, 1971.
Courtesy of author’s collection
Handbill plugging a Nashville music festival.
Courtesy of Dick Bay
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON EMBODIED the independence and the happy mingling of various styles that marked Nashville’s musical scene. Among the more ambitious young musicians, Kris was proof that money and fame could accompany artistic freedom. Unlike any Nashville-based artist, he climbed to prominence in long hair and corduroy pants, recording his own songs without any particular allegiance to a set of country music standards. “He was my milepost,” says singer-songwriter Guy Clark, who hit town in 1971. “He wrote in a way that no one had ever heard before. Or you thought you’d heard it, but it was the first time you heard it. Kris has a real respect for the language, a student of poetry and a poet himself.”
Kristofferson’s unscheduled debut at the Newport Folk Festival in 1969 heralded the coming of his recording career. “Suddenly, I was a performer,” says Kris. “It amazes me that I wasn’t more amazed at the time. But that’s the way my life was going. I fell out of grace with the helicopter company, and all of a sudden great things were happening. Ray Price got my ‘For the Good Times.’ We had a studio full of musicians [at his session]! Violins and everything! Nobody had ever paid that much attention to anything of mine before.”
In 1970, Fred Foster released Kris’s eponymously titled debut album. Produced with session musicians outside A-list circles, it communicated eclecticism and spontaneity: talking blues appeared next to tender ballads next to unhinged jams. His vocals, though unspectacular, recalled the purring swagger of Jim Morrison and the hijinks of Roger Miller while the arrangements tapped the jug-band styling of the Mamas and the Papas and the Bob Dylan of Highway 61 Revisited. On top of everything, the songwriter’s wordplay sparkled, like on “Duvalier’s Dream,” which spun repartee between the words “woman” and “man” and to great effect repeatedly invoked the idea of believing:
It’s hard to keep believing when you know you’ve been deceived / To face a lie and dare to try again / But there’s nothing like a woman with a spell of make-believe / To make a new believer of a man.
“Kristofferson is a superb album,” cheered Rolling Stone. “Kris shows plenty of versatility—from a rousing gospel chant, ‘Blame It on the Rolling Stones’ . . . to tender mellow things like ‘Casey’s Last Ride’ and ‘For the Good Times’ to rockin’ country stuff like ‘Best of All Possible Worlds.’ His lyrics are always right; he can be bitter, cynical when he has to be, then turn around and be poetically pretty without being saccharine.”
The album hit the streets in June 1970, coinciding with an exciting engagement at the Troubadour nightclub in Los Angeles, where he would open for Linda Ronstadt. A staffer on The Johnny Cash Show—on which Kris had appeared in April—knew folks who booked the chic spot and had sent them the Cash protégé’s music on audiotape. Kris hastily mined the Combine world for a band: Donnie Fritts on organ, Dennis Linde on guitar, and Billy Swan on bass. “One day Kris came in the office at Combine, stomping and saying, ‘Somebody backed out of playing guitar at the Troubadour,’” says Swan. “I was the only one in the office and I knew that Dennis Linde was going and playing bass, so I said, ‘Kris, look, I’ll play bass. It’s only the top four strings of a guitar. We’ll get Dennis to play guitar.’ And he said, ‘Great.’”
Kristofferson onstage.
Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment
The fabled West Hollywood club showcased the cream of California’s country-rock pioneers as well as singer-songwriter travelers from the East Coast. In addition to Ronstadt, artists like the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young, and James Taylor basked in the acclaim of Troubadour gigs. “That was the place to go in L.A. at the time,” says Donnie Fritts.
After a few nights, says Fritts, t
he crowds swarmed to Kris. “The lines were around the building, just trying to get in to see Kris. And Kris was the opening act, you know! But all these movie people were there. Word got around fast that there was somebody very special there in town. People wanted to be a part of it one way or another.” Barbra Streisand showed up after reading an ecstatic review of Kristofferson’s performance, but the newcomer wasn’t around to greet her. “I had been out with [Dennis] Hopper the night before,” confessed Kristofferson in 1997, “and I fell asleep in the parking lot. When I woke, it was dark, and I was supposed to be onstage.” Streisand returned two nights later and she found him where he was supposed to be. By the second week, according to Billy Swan, Ronstadt opened for Kristofferson.
The Troubadour vibrations opened the doors to more club dates in cities around the country and made a place for Kris on bills with country rockers on the West Coast. In California, Kris also met Janis Joplin, with whom he had a brief affair before shoving off with the band—which by now included former Lovin’ Spoonful guitarist Zal Yanovsky—to play the Isle of Wight festival and the Bitter End in New York. Kris also played Carnegie Hall to rapturous reviews and collected the Country Music Association’s Song of the Year award for “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” A New York Times Magazine feature story in December 1970 proclaimed that Kris was the “New Nashville Sound.”
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