Preservation Efforts for Exit/In Parallel Country Music’s
Over the last couple of weeks there’s been a big fight in Nashville over the fate of the iconic venue called the Exit/In. Opened in 1971, and named for the fact that the entrance was in the back, it’s one of those venues that’s housed so many memories and iconic moments, they’re almost too numerous to list.
One time Waylon Jennings played a show in the small venue when he was one of the biggest things in country, and guests included Jessi Colter, Dickey Betts, and Johnny Cash. Imagine being in the audience for that. Tyler Childers played a 3-night residency there in 2018 right as his career was exploding, and people who could score a ticket still rave about the experience. Sting can be seen in an Exit/In shirt on the cover of a Police album. Comedy is also a part of the venue’s legacy, and it was one of Steve Martin’s favorite places to perform.
Though the 500-capacity venue near Nashville’s Parthenon started out as mostly a listening room and catered to a lot of country artists, by the 80’s it had morphed into a rock club, and one of the anchors of an area now affectionately referred to as “The Rock Block,” even if country and Americana acts still regularly play shows there.
The fight to preserve the Exit/In is a worthy one, and the concerns raised when it was revealed on April 2nd that the property was under contract with developer AJ Capital were valid. A Go Fund Me drive launched by the current business owners Chris and Telisha Cobb to try and buy the property outright (the building is leased) has now raised well over $220,000, and public pressure forced AJ Capital to promise not to bulldoze the property. But after previous threats to the building over the years, the only way the current business owners feel they can be assured the iconic venue won’t be threatened again moving forward is by owning the property outright.
The current fight for the Exit/In is a good illustration of a point I often try to make about country music. Many people in the Nashville community and beyond find it appalling that the forces of Capitalism and progress would dare endanger such and important cultural institution like the Exit/In, but for some reason don’t see the same parallel when it comes to the effort to preserve the cultural markers, history, and traditions inherent in country music that face similar threats.
When it comes the country and roots music specifically compared to other genres, this point is important to underscore. Unlike other genres of music outside the roots realm, country music has always been about preserving and paying forward the musical history of America’s agrarian and rural people. It’s their story set to song. When Ralph Peer set up shop in Bristol, Virginia in 1927 to record The Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers and the others of country music’s “big bang,” they weren’t performing the contemporary music of the day, the were playing the music of their ancestors, and were looking to shepherd it forward to a new generation.
Country music was nostalgia from the start. That’s why much of it was originally referred to as old-time. That was also the inspiration for Bill Monroe and the formation of bluegrass—to pay forward the fiddle tune tradition of Kentucky, just like Roy Acuff had done with the mountain music of Appalachia.
All the different origination points and influences of country music comprise musical dialects that must be practiced, preserved, and played to remain vital. This goes for all roots music, including regional folk and blues styles, Cajun and Zydeco, certain versions of jazz and boogie-woogie, and now even rock & roll as it is quickly becoming endangered as well. Just like the Exit/In, if we’re not careful, these musical institutions will soon disappear if people do not stand up to make sure they remain protected and preserved.
Yes it’s also true that if country music is going to continue to survive as a commercial enterprise, then it must evolve and change at least to some extent. This most certainly is not an argument for country music to always sound exactly the same as it always has—though this is the common stereotype assigned to the argument. It’s important for today’s creators to innovate and contribute their own new traditions to country music’s legacy.
But with country music specifically, those efforts to offer up new expressions should still remain tethered to the roots of the music, and inferred by their influences and teachings. In roots music, you can’t grow if you rip your roots out of the ground, and you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. That’s just the nature of the music.
The reason there’s an effort to raze The Exit/In and other iconic music venues in Nashville, Austin, and other locations across the country—especially in the face of a year of lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic—is because the places constitute an inefficient use of resources and real estate. But the idea is as soon as you bulldoze something such as the Exit/In, you remove the reason there’s such an appeal to so many to move and develop Nashville in the first place.
The same logic goes for country music. Sure, taking the wrecking ball to country’s traditions to replace them with shiny new pop and hip-hop sounds might result in more revenue per square inch. But at what cost and cultural impact in the long-term? Instead of having a cool building brimming with history, you have just another cookie cutter development that you can find anywhere else in the country. Making country songs indistinguishable from pop and hip-hop songs renders the same gentrifying result.
Not every old building is worth preserving, just like every country music tradition may not be worth holding on to. Some of the racially problematic history of country music should be abandoned, though not necessarily scrubbed entirely from the consciousness, lest it repeat itself.
But no different than a historically significant building, business, or a piece of memorabilia sitting in a museum that enjoys virtual consensus behind protecting it from the reach of the profiteers, the sounds and modes of country music mean so much more to American culture than just the maximal amount of revenue they may be able to be generated from them. It’s who we are, and without them, life is just a series of strip malls.
April 15, 2021 @ 10:12 am
“…named for the fact that the entrance was in the back…”
I was going to make a joke about that, but it would be too funny, and no one would be able to handle the extreme funniness of it. So to avoid any side splitting injuries, I won’t because it would be inappropriate… at least… that’s what she said.
April 15, 2021 @ 3:22 pm
C’mon tell us! We promise we’ll laugh…
April 15, 2021 @ 10:32 am
Oh man, I have such a bone to pick with everything you said about how country has always been about nostalgia.
There is endless historical evidence that we only think that because of the decisions made by the early recording industry, and the early folklore collectors, to only collect music that was nostalgic and which these northern folklorists and record company executives thought was “appropriately” rural/backwards/nostalgic.
We don’t have recordings, but many many many people said that Robert Johnson knew all of the pop songs of the day but only got recorded for his blues, that virtually everybody all over the South played everything they could get their ears on, and it’s only been forced into “nostalgic country music” by the decisions of Northern collectors.
In fact, many of these nostalgic songs were actually old pop written by Tin Pan Alley New York songwriters To begin with, many of whom had never seen a farm in their entire lives.
This whole process is pretty well documented in a few country music histories:
I believe Bill C Malone talks about it in Sing Me Back Home or Country Music USA
The book Segregating Sound, one of the best country music histories I’ve read, goes into a huge amount of detail about this process.
April 15, 2021 @ 11:50 am
Stellar, You are generalizing what the article says. It is a good overview on the history of country and its roots. This is a quote from the article: “Yes it’s also true that if country music is going to continue to survive as a commercial enterprise, then it must evolve and change at least to some extent. This most certainly is not an argument for country music to always sound exactly the same as it always has—though this is the common stereotype assigned to the argument.”
Not saying anything you referred to is incorrect but I don’t think it conflicts with the tone of the article. Maybe I am not completely understanding your beef.
April 15, 2021 @ 11:58 am
I’m mostly talking about the part where he says that old-time country music was always nostalgic. That’s kind of true only of the parts of it that got commercially recorded, but there was a huge Northern-led stereotyping that made it that way.
The impression I get from the history (and from later folklore recording efforts that happened much later in the century) is that Southern music in the early 20th century was just as modern as music everywhere else, but there was HUGE commercial pressure during the rise of the early country music industry (and before that folklore collecting by academics) which was designed to show it as backwards looking, nostalgic, and unsuited to the modern world.
April 15, 2021 @ 11:57 am
If you’re interested in the Tin Pan Alley influence on country western music, check out the 3 disc set called Protobilly. It’s pretty interesting, they put the TPA versions side by side with hillbilly versions.
April 15, 2021 @ 11:59 am
Ooh, thanks! I didn’t know about that.
April 15, 2021 @ 12:02 pm
A few things:
First off, country music has always been nostalgia, meaning singing about yesteryear, and often, performing songs that are many years older than the present. That’s what The Carter Family did. That’s what Bill Monroe and Roy Acuff did. That’s what Hank Williams did with many of his most iconic songs. And no effort at revisionist history changes that fact.
There has most certainly been an effort recently by individuals who want to portray country music as a white supremacist institution to say that Ralph Peer, the Lomax Family, and other preservationists that went exclusively out of their way to capture and preserve the early songs and modes of black performers along with white ones were overt racists looking to segregate American music. I would agree the marketers of their recordings saw it as more advantageous to market white music to white markets, and black music to black markets, and that resulted in a natural segregation. But if Ralph Peer was a white supremacist, he would have never made the effort to record black roots musicians at all. It’s a ludicrous, and opportunistic assertion that takes advantage of the fact that many of the people with these hypotheses have never actually read a country music history book, especially Bill C. Malone who did great work setting the African American influence into country music from the very beginning, despite the lie told by many that the black influence in country was scrubbed from history books, again, facilitated by the fact that they’ve never read them.
This whole “country music is nostalgic for the Confederacy and Jim Crow segregation” is so overblown. Sure, maybe that was the case in 1927. But don’t pin that on country music in 2021, just because you want to remake it in your own image to be a bullhorn for your political ideologies.
April 15, 2021 @ 12:05 pm
I actually wasn’t talking about black people at all, other than the title of that one history of old time music that I mentioned, which mentions segregation.
I sing Appalachian ballads so I have a pretty good idea of what the early folklore collectors were up to because all of us pay attention to that in great detail.
I had a more detailed reply to this I got lost in posting, let me see if I can remember what I had to say.
April 15, 2021 @ 12:06 pm
In case you’re wondering what I really have a beef with is all of the nostalgic dead mother and the little cabin back at home kind of Carter family stuff that was very Victorian once you know the Tin Pan Alley origins of it.
April 15, 2021 @ 2:26 pm
Totally understand. Just been seeing a lot of that revisionist history lately in a fairly aggressive effort to paint country music as being spun solely from white supremacy with little or no nuance to the discussion, so I wanted to address it.
April 15, 2021 @ 8:58 pm
Have to disagree with this, as so many black entertainers have had broad white crossover appeal. Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, The Supremes, just to name three. And we can’t forget the success Ray Charles had in country.
April 15, 2021 @ 10:45 am
Correct me if I am wrong but I always thought of it as a bluegrass venue. Is that true?
April 15, 2021 @ 12:37 pm
The last show I saw there was Rakim (of Eric B and Rakim fame) so I’d say not. Plus there have been artists like Neil Young, Chuck Berry, and even Post Malone who have performed there.
Also, here’s a neat bit of trivia: On the back of The Police’s album Zenyatta Mondatta, you can see a picture of Sting wearing an Exit/In t-shirt.
April 15, 2021 @ 10:46 am
Sorry, confused it with the Station Inn.
April 15, 2021 @ 3:40 pm
How was that ‘countrypolitan’ schmuck about nostalgia?
Did Patsy Cline ever sing a (musically) nostalgic song?
Even Dolly Parton had to wait until she was famous to be able to sing the songs that she was nostalgic for.
Sorry, I really dislike that era in country music and think it should be replaced by the cowboy singers like Chris LeDoux who were genuinely singing nostalgic/preservation songs. With a shout out to Colter wall (and Corb Lund) for keeping that alive nowadays.
April 15, 2021 @ 3:49 pm
Oh, but in regards to the article, I totally support saving small live venues with atmosphere.
April 16, 2021 @ 3:19 pm
“might result in more revenue per square inch”
That’s what hits me the hardest about this article… Why does every single that exists in America have to be maximized for profit, and by extension, maximized to empty our pocketbooks? I’m not even that old and i can rant about the many resturaunts/bars/venues that got bulldozed for a shinier, pricer version of what used to be there.
Covid has expedited this too. There used to be a great dive bar in the “cool” (read: overly expensive for no reason other than they can) part of town that shut down and got scooped up by some big developer. They had local bands, $2 cans of Tecate (all day), and gross bathrooms. Now the next time you go there it’s gonna be $17 craft cocktails and $10 IPAs.
R.I.P Bar Pink and long live dirty, old things! We like them that way!! It’s called character. You can’t buy it or build it, but unfortunately not enough people care about it.
April 20, 2021 @ 2:42 pm
That’s sad to know that neither the flood or the tornado could take that building down…but the almighty dollar just might!