Nashville Musical History Tour

20/10/2024

In August 1953, eight months after the death of former boss Hank Williams, steel guitar player Don Helms bought a house in South Nashville at 1979 Carloss Drive, on the corner of Carloss and Gatlin Drive. A few months later, he got some musical neighbors when Doyle and Teddy Wilburn moved in across the street at 1984 Carloss, along with their father Benjamin “B.E.” Wilburn, a disabled World War I veteran, and two older brothers, Lester and Leslie.

Doyle and Teddy had been touring with Webb Pierce, subsequently signing with Decca Records. A few weeks after they closed on the house on Carloss, Decca released “Sparkling Brown Eyes,” a duet with Pierce that would reach the Top 5 of the country charts.

Helms joined the Wilburn Brothers’ touring band, and in 1957, he and the Wilburns formed a publishing company, Sure-Fire Music.

“Back in 1957, Teddy and I were working road shows out of Nashville for $25 a day and couldn’t get a publisher to promote our records,” Doyle told “The Music Reporter” in 1963. “We were using our own money. We decided we had nothing to lose — so we formed Sure-Fire.”

In the same article, Teddy said they subsequently formed a booking agency for the same reason. “We were doing most of our own booking. We checked our records for 1959 and discovered that only eight of our dates for that year had been set up by bookers.” So in 1960, they started the Wil-Helm Agency.

“Teddy and Doyle fought constantly,” Johnny Bush wrote in his autobiography “Whisky River (Take My Mind): The True Story of Texas H***y-Tonk.” “Not only did [Helms] play steel guitar, he acted as referee.”

The companies the Wilburns and Helms created together began in a small office inside the Cumberland Lodge, across the street from the Tennessee State Capitol at the corner of Seventh Avenue North and Charlotte Road, on the same block as the old National Life Building, which housed WSM-AM’s first studios. That office was where, according to a 1973 issue of “Billboard,” a young Loretta Lynn came into their office in 1960 and offered to trade a copy of her Zero Records single “H***y Tonk Girl” and one of her photos for an autographed picture of the duo. The Wilburns played the record and were so impressed they ended up signing her to a management and publishing deal, eventually helping her get signed to Decca, too.

The Wil-Helm Agency, which eventually moved to 801 16th Avenue South, became one of the leading agencies in Nashville during the 1960s, representing Lynn, Jimmy Martin, Slim Whitman, Hank Locklin and many others.

Before 1957 was over, the Wilburns had bought a new house at 211 Mayfair Road in the Cherokee Park neighborhood near West End. They owned their Carloss house until 1961. Helms sold his in 1959.

17/10/2024

We had a great turnout at the Tennessee State Museum today! If you weren't able to attend but would like to see the presentation, click on the link in the museum's post.

03/10/2024

October is full of free events at the Museum! First up is a Lunch and Learn with Nashville Musical History Tour on October 17. The annual Haunted Museum Storytelling Festival is coming soon on October 19! 🎃 Then be sure to check out the Southern Festival of Books October 26 & 27. Learn more and share our upcoming offerings on the events page 🗓️: https://www.facebook.com/tnmuseum.org/events

03/10/2024

The house at 1100 13th Avenue South is long gone, but its musical legacy remains. For many years, the house at the corner of 13th and Tremont Street was home to William and Ovalla Hebb, a pair of blind musicians, and their family.

William was a well-known street singer in Nashville’s Belmont-Hillsboro-West End areas during the 1930s and 1940s. He played guitar and favored religious numbers like “I Want To Be More Like Jesus,” “You Can’t Do Wrong and Get By,” and “Don’t Drive Me From Your Door.” His sons provided a percussion section, playing tambourines, washboards and coffee pots.

In July 1938, the Hebbs added a new member to the family band. They named him Robert Alvin Von Hebb and called him Bobby.

Eight days after Bobby was born, his 8-year-old sister Helen was playing hide-and-seek with neighborhood friends and decided to hide in a neighbor’s hen house. But the neighbor had boobytrapped the coop with what he called a “thief catcher,” and when Helen opened the door, she triggered a shotgun that had been aimed at the entrance. Fortunately, Helen suffered only minor buckshot wounds around her thighs. The Hebbs sued the neighbor and were awarded $500 in damages.

In April 1939, William Jr. and his 5-year-old brother Jerome were walking with a friend to a neighborhood store to buy a kite. Jerome — who was named after St. Louis Cardinals pitching great Jerome “Dizzy” Dean but was known in his family as the Mighty Great Jerome — darted into the street at the corner of Grand Avenue and Villa Place. He was struck by a truck headed south on Villa and killed.

Young Bobby reportedly made his stage debut on his third birthday at Nashville’s Bijou Theater (located within the footprint of Municipal Auditorium). His older brother Harold (also known as Hal) brought him out to tap dance as part of the “Jerry Jackson R***e of 1942” (even though it was 1941). Many years later, Hal was killed by an unruly customer at Club Baron on Jefferson Street in November 1963, Bobby would write what would become his most famous tune — “Sunny.”

02/10/2024

If you enjoy the stories I tell about the places where the legends of Nashville music happened, please join me on Thursday, October 17, at the Tennessee State Museum, where I'll share my favorite of those stories in person.

It'll be like the Nashville Musical History Tour come to life, as we go virtually all over Nashville without ever leaving the museum.

This free in-person event takes place at noon. More info and RSVP here:
https://tnmuseum.org/calendar-of-events/event/4438076

02/10/2024

In November 1963, Harold “Hal” Hebb, the older brother of “Sunny” singer Bobby Hebb, lived in apartment #10 at 2714 Jefferson Street with his wife, Miriam, and their three daughters. Like Bobby, who’d made a name for himself playing the spoons and touring with Roy Acuff, Harold was a musician. He was a member of The Marigolds, Johnny Bragg’s post-Prisonaires vocal group. Later, he played in DeFord Bailey’s backing band The Pirates, which performed at the Jolly Roger in Printers Alley in February 1963. He appeared at the Jolly Roger that June with Bubba Overton and a group called The Misfits.

Harold also worked a block up the street from his apartment as a manager at Club Baron, one of the centers of Jefferson Street nightlife at the time. On November 23, 1963, a customer named Donald Ridley entered the club. A bouncer told Ridley to remove his hat and when he wouldn’t, the bouncer chased him out of the club. Ridley waited outside Club Baron and when Harold came out later, Ridley stabbed him multiple times. Though Harold was mortally wounded, he got hold of the bouncer’s shotgun and took one shot at Ridley, killing him. Harold died early the next morning.

The stabbing took place one day after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. As younger brother Bobby worked through grief of both a personal and national nature, he wrote what would become his signature tune — “Sunny.”

“Everybody was feeling really negative at that time,” Bobby said in an interview many years later. “I think that we all needed a lift. … When ‘Sunny’ came into my mind, you’re not saying it’s going to be or it might be. Allow it to happen. Sunny – *yesterday* my life was filled with rain. And from a positive point of view, try to move forward.”

In 1966, Bobby’s record reached No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and No. 3 on its R&B singles chart. The song has since been recorded hundreds of times.

“I’m happy that the message was received,” Bobby said, “and happy that it was felt.”

01/10/2024

Here's a Nashville band I never knew about and wish I could have seen — DeFord Bailey and the Pirates, which featured Freddie North, a local R&B singer who'd released a single on Capitol Records the year before, and Harold Hebb, the older brother of Bobby Hebb.
The group played two nights at the Jolly Roger in Printers Alley in February 1963. That November, Harold Hebb, who was a manager at Club Baron on Jefferson, would be fatally stabbed that November in an altercation with a customer who refused to remove his hat. Bobby Hebb wrote "Sunny" shortly after his brother's death, which came one day after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
And I have no idea who "Long Tall Sally" was in this band, but I'd really like to know.

29/09/2024

A Mini Kris Kristofferson Tour:

Photo #1: 3525 Byron Avenue, the duplex where Kris and his first wife, Frances, lived when they first moved to town is still around. It's just across the street from Elmington Park.

Photo #2: The site of 3907 Brighton Road, one of Kristofferson's early Nashville residences. Mac Gayden says Kristofferson was living here when he wrote “Me and Bobby McGee," and Gayden was living in the other side, writing “Everlasting Love” with Buzz Cason. The site now serves as parking spaces for the tennis courts at Montgomery Bell Academy.

Photo #3: Starstruck Entertainment at 40 Music Square West. Kristofferson once lived within the footprint of the Starstruck complex, in an apartment in a condemned building he once described as having dirt floors on the second story. Some of Kristofferson’s early classics — “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” for instance — were written here or in close proximity.

Photo #4: 34 Music Square East. The former site of Columbia Records and the Quonset Hut studio, where Kristofferson swept floors.

Photo #5: Southern Ground Studio at 114 17th Ave. S. In 1968, Monument Records head Fred Foster left his studio from Seventh Avenue North and opened a new one in the turn-of-the-century Addison Avenue Cumberland Presbyterian Church building at 114 17th Ave. S. Kris Kristofferson cut many of his early classics at this studio, and Sammi Smith cut her classic version of Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night" here.

Photo #6: 47 Music Square East, once known as 901 16th Ave. S. The site of the former Tally Ho Tavern, where Kristofferson briefly worked as a bartender. He references the bar in “The Silver Tongued Devil and I." He's also said to have written part of “Sunday Morning Coming Down” on the steps outside.

28/09/2024

Melba Montgomery and her husband, Jack Solomon, purchased the house at 8449 Merrymount Drive in October 1975, the year after Melba had her first and only No. 1 country single with the Harlan Howard-penned recitation “No Charge.” The Solomons bought the three-bedroom, 3,000-square-foot brick house and purchased a tract of adjoining land, giving them about 26 acres on the bank of the Harpeth River, just off Newsom Station Road in Bellevue.

The older sister of songwriter-musician Earl “Peanutt” Montgomery, Melba moved to Nashville after winning a talent contest sponsored by Pet Milk, then toured with Roy Acuff from 1958 to 1962, living at Acuff’s house for a while.

She signed with United Artists Records in 1962, soon getting paired with George Jones, with whom she recorded several hit duets, beginning with 1963’s “We Must Have Been Out of Our Minds,” which she wrote. Though she was most famously one of Jones’ duet partners, she also charted singles recorded with Gene Pitney (“Baby Ain’t That Fine”) and Charlie Louvin (“Baby, You’ve Got What I Takes,” “A Man Likes Things Like That”).

“The first time I met George Jones he probably wouldn’t remember,” Melba told Jones biographer Dolly Carlisle in an interview at this house. “I was working with Roy Acuff at the time on the Grand Ole Opry house, and the artists would go over to Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge across the street afterwards. The first time I saw George was in Tootsie’s back room. He was so ripped, he wouldn’t have remembered anything. It was so funny. He said something real cute, but he wouldn’t remember today.”

Jones was notably smitten with Montgomery (“There wasn’t anything going on like that between George and me,” she insisted to Dolly Carlisle), though Montgomery began dating Solomon. Jones and Montgomery charted seven singles together, including the Top 20 hits “Let’s Invite Them Over” and “What’s in Our Heart.” But those ended after Montgomery married Solomon in 1968.

“When Melba broke the news to their small circle of friends that she planned to marry Jack Solomon, a member of George’s band, George did not take the news lightly,” Bob Allen wrote in “George Jones: The Life and Times of a H***y Tonk Legend.” “In fact, he was incensed. For weeks after that, when they performed together, he would whine and beg Melba, right on stage, in front of the audience, not to go through with her wedding plans. He even talked to her brother [Peanutt] about it, and got [Peanutt] so worked up that he threatened to whip Jack’s ass if he took Melba away from George. But eventually, after Jack and Melba were married in 1968, they all became friends once again.”

In his 1996 autobiography, “I Lived to Tell It All,” Jones confessed to having always had a soft spot for Montgomery. “The last time I talked to her I told her that someday soon she and I were going to record again,” he wrote. “I meant it.”

That recording session never happened.

Melba had only one more Top 40 single after moving into the Merrymount Drive house – a cover of “Angel of the Morning” that reached No. 22 on Billboard’s country singles chart in 1978.

Montgomery and Solomon were married for 46 years and spent nearly 40 in this house. Solomon died in 2014, and Montgomery sold the property four years later.

02/09/2024

Bet y'all had forgotten Tennessee Ernie Ford had a place downtown back in the 1970s, where Varallo's is now.

07/08/2024

In 1960, there was no such thing as Music Row.

Some of the early building blocks, such as a pair of recording studios, were already in place on 16th and 17th Avenues South, but the idea of that neighborhood being the center of the city's music industry wouldn't really lock into place for a couple more years, after Ray Charles released "Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music" and focused the attention of pop and R&B singers on the city's song catalogs.

The idea that Nashville should have a centralized location for the industry, however, was definitely around. In November 1960, city leaders presented a rendering of a five-story Music City U.S.A. Building that could house recording studios and other offices for related businesses. The drawing was created by Marr & Holman, a local architectural firm that had also designed Municipal Auditorium, a project that had broken ground that summer.

"We need this building," Starday Records president Don Pierce, who had just opened a studio in Dickerson Road that May, said in The Tennessean at the time. "New York has Tin Pan Alley, Los Angeles has Pico Boulevard and Nashville should also have a central location for its music. This could be the first step in an entire new era of Nashville's musical development."

The project never got past the talking stages, but proposed locations included Capitol Hill (near Municipal Auditorium), Berry Field (near the airport), East Nashville, and two locations on Hillsboro Road.

(Photos from The Tennessean)

06/08/2024

About 40 years after Bobby Hebb wrote his classic hit “Sunny” in his Harlem apartment, the Nashville native returned to his hometown. He bought this 1,800-square-foot brick home at 3041 Chateau Valley Drive, north of downtown.

“What I like about this house is that it’s not too big,” Hebb told Nashville reporter Tim Ghianni in 2004. “Everything I need is here. That’s not to say it’s got everything I want, just everything I need.”

In a conversation Ghianni recounts in his 2023 book, “Pilgrims, Pickers and H***y-Tonk Heroes,” Hebb said he didn’t need much yard, and the modest house sits on less than a fifth of an acre. “I have someone cut it for me, anyway," the singer said. "But I also didn’t need to have a really big house. I needed to have room for my things but not so much room that I needed to spend a lot of time cleaning it. I needed to spend my time on the music.”

Hebb spent the last six years of his life on Chateau Valley Drive, passing away on August 3, 2010, at age 72 after being diagnosed with lung cancer. His daughter, Kitoto, inherited the house and sold it in 2017.

26/07/2024

Just shy of seven years before Tigirlily Gold released their Monument Records debut album “Blonde,” sisters Kendra and Kristen Slaubaugh moved from North Dakota to Tennessee to attend college.

They’d been accepted at Belmont University in Nashville and Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. They registered at both schools, not settling on Belmont until weeks before the semester started because it was actually located in Nashville.

“We didn’t even stay on campus,” Krista says. “We didn’t want to be on campus because it was a very expensive school, and housing is very expensive.”

Instead, they rented a ground-floor apartment in nearby Brentwood at 103 Plum Nelly Circle. “None of us had looked at this apartment before we moved in,” Kendra says. Kendra’s boyfriend (now husband) Jared Olson had spotted it online. “Of course, our parents were worried sick that we weren’t going to be safe, and Brentwood was a fairly safe option, so we booked it.”

The apartment complex, which sits on a hill just across the Davidson County line, off Old Hickory Boulevard, gave the sisters easy interstate access and about a 15-minute drive to Belmont.

They weren’t the first future country act to think this way. Brad Paisley had lived in a subdivision just down the hill about 20 years before when he’d attended Belmont. In fact, if you removed the trees from behind their apartment, then Kendra and Krista would’ve been able to see Brad’s old place from their back windows.

What happened on the sisters’ first full day in town could be seen as an omen — a good one, considering that Kendra and Krista eventually signed the Monument; released a pair of Top 40 country singles, “Shoot Tequila” and “I Tried a Ring On”; and now have released “Blonde”: There was a total solar eclipse.

“Everybody in Nashville was freaking out about the eclipse,” Kendra says, “and I was like, ‘The eclipse? What is happening?’” They hadn’t known anything about it, because their hometown of Hazen, North Dakota, wasn’t in the path at all.

So they did what any two sisters in a new town would do: They put on their swimsuits — pink for Kendra, green for Krista — and went to their new pool.

“Somehow we got glasses,” Krista says, “and we sat at the pool of the apartment complex and watched it happen.”

09/04/2024

I visited the old house a few times when Johnny Cash was alive, but I’d never been to the Cash Cabin, where he recorded much of the American Recordings series, until today. John Carter Cash, Johnny and June’s son, still does great work out there in Hendersonville, Tennessee, and I was excited to get to hear some of it. And take a few pictures while i was there.

14/11/2023

Rayna James’ house is on the auction block. The house at 1358 Page Road — used as the exterior for the home of Connie Britton’s character on ABC/CMT’s “Nashville” — will sell via a no-reserve auction on Friday, Nov. 17.

The property, which once listed for $22.5 million, has been leased by Adele and Ed Sheeran and has hosted performances by Sheryl Crow, Keith Urban, Paul Simon, and others. Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler filmed his 2016 Super Bowl commercial for Skittles in the great hall, a central gathering space with soaring cathedral ceilings, stone-clad archways, and antique wood flooring.

“Many homes are promoted as ‘great for entertaining’ or ‘fit for a celebrity,’ though this property has actually proven itself in both categories,” Platinum Luxury Auctions founder and President Trayor Lesnock said in a release.

According to the release, the property is situated on six private and wooded acres in Forest Hills. The 2,700-acre Percy Warner Park sits just across the street.

Custom built by its previous owners, the home sits at the end of a privately gated and gently winding drive, and greets visitors with a circular courtyard and large porte-cochère. Its Georgian architecture combines a stately exterior of brick and stone with warm, spacious interiors that are elegant but comfortable. Three living levels total nearly 20,000 square feet, with six bedrooms, eight full and two half-baths.

Notable amenities include a gourmet kitchen, fitness room, gentlemen’s study, primary suite with breakfast/bar nook, wine cellar with +3,000-bottle storage and adjacent tasting area, a commercial-grade catering kitchen, billiards room, and an oversized screened patio with fireplace lounge and exposed beam ceilings. A guest apartment located above the three-car garage offers a shared living and dining area, kitchen, one bedroom, and one full bath. There is also a “cottage barn” with two stalls, a tack room, and an office and upper-level loft.

Outdoor living areas include a large pool and spa with decorative fountains and waterfalls. Just off the pool is a large cabana with another fireplace lounge. The greenspace surrounding the home is gently graded, making the grounds ideal for outdoor entertaining and fair-weather events.

The property is available for previews by daily appointment through November 16. The no-reserve auction is being managed by Platinum Luxury Auctions in concert with listing brokers French King Fine Properties and Fridrich & Clark Realty Company in Nashville.

24/10/2023

On Oct. 22, Bob McDill was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. But some 50 years before, when McDill was an aspiring songwriter recently relocated to Nashville, he rented this house at 3413 Springbrook Drive, just off Woodmont Boulevard.

He'd begin to make a name for himself while living at this house, scoring his first country success in 1973 with Johnny Russell's recording of "Catfish John." McDill set up a writing room next to the garage behind the house (you can see the entrance in one of the photos).

During the medallion ceremony, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum CEO Kyle Young talked about one of the songs McDill wrote in that room. Noting that Don Williams was a big fan of McDill’s work — he’d release more than a dozen of McDill’s songs as singles — Young told a story about Allen Reynolds walking in on Williams singing a song in the tape room of Cowboy Jack Clements’ JNI Records.

“Who wrote that?” Reynolds asked.

“Oh, McDill wrote that song,” said Williams.

“I haven't heard that before.”

“Oh, you know McDill. He wasn't sure if anybody would like it.”

“That song, says Allen Reynolds, was the first time Jack Clement really took notice of Bob McDill,” Young said. “He liked the song so much. He wrote a mini-review of it on a legal pad.”

That mini-review read, “Amanda — exactly as good as Shakespeare. Review by Jack H. Clement.”

“Amanda” would be the B-side of Williams’ “Come Early Morning,” another McDill composition, in 1973, and a chart-topper for Waylon Jennings in 1979.

(Side note: My parents rented McDill the Springbrook house. He wrote “Amanda” at one of my childhood homes.)

31/08/2023

Ray Stevens bought the house on 6.38 acres at 4412 Chickering Lane in 2016. According to the Redfin listing, it has five bedrooms, six and a half baths, a saltwater pool, and an outdoor kitchen, as well as a one-bedroom guesthouse.

A country music star recently listed his 6.38-acre Belle Meade property for $8.2 million. Take a look inside:

23/08/2023

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/justin-timberlake-lists-127-acre-nashville-area-property-for-dollar10-million

The Tennessee native’s country estate features horse trails and sprawling pastures

10/07/2023

There aren’t many reliable details about the life of Tennessee native Cecil Gant, but the blues and R&B singer did live the last year or so of his life in Nashville. Gant’s best known for 1944’s pioneering R&B ballad “I Wonder,” which came while he was stationed in California during World War II, hence his billing as “Pvt. Cecil Gant.” He recorded for as many as a dozen labels, including Nashville’s Bullet Records, for which he charted in the late 1940s with “Another Day, Another Dollar” and “I’m a Good Man but a Poor Man.”

Gant moved to Nashville around 1950, and he and his wife, Alma, lived in the upstairs apartment here at 724 26th Ave. N. He seems to have been finding his place in Nashville’s music community in the weeks before his death, having signed with Decca Records and recording sessions with local musicians that included A-team guitarist Grady Martin. He appeared occasionally on WSM-AM’s “Sunday Down South” program and made his local television debut on WSM-TV’s Tuesday night “Southern Shindig” program in January 1951.

On January 30, he appeared on a four-hour, multi-artist March of Dimes benefit broadcast on WMAK-AM (1300). Called “Honor Roll of Mercy,” the broadcast also featured Red Foley, Eddy Arnold, Ernest Tubb, Carl Smith, the Carter Family, Owen Bradley, Chet Atkins, and others. Highlights of the show, according to local newspaper coverage, included Tennessee Gov. Gordon Browning's performance of “Tennessee Waltz” and future Nashville Mayor Beverly Briley and June Carter joining voices for a popular novelty number called “The Thing.”

Five days after that broadcast, Gant fell ill at his home and was taken to Hubbard Hospital, where he died later that day, reportedly of pneumonia. He was two weeks shy of his 38th birthday.

29/06/2023

Learn about some of my favorite spots in Nashville in this video from the CMA Country Music Association! youtu.be/P3YVHNLbuog

04/06/2023

Three years ago, the buildings of the old Rainbow Tourist Court at 1901-1903 Dickerson Pike had seen better days, but they were still habitable. The buildings still stand, but just barely. Most of the roofs are gone as if struck by a tornado or marginally interested demolition equipment. Slabs of construction detritus lie piled in the parking lot. The walls may not come down in the near future, but clearly, nobody will be signing long-term leases on these apartments any time soon.

In earlier days, the Rainbow was a place where country musicians who needed a cheap place to live could stay. Cowboy Copas, for instance, lived here when he joined the Grand Ole Opry and before his first big hit, 1946’s “Filipino Baby,” took off.

Boudleaux and Felice Bryant stayed here during their early Nashville days, too. They stayed here during an early trip through town because the owner agreed to take a post-dated check against royalties coming to them for “Little” Jimmy Dickens’ recording of “Country Boy.” They moved here in 1950 when they relocated to Nashville. “Such an environment allowed Boudleaux and Felice to find easy camaraderie among their fellow musicians, sharing potluck suppers and occasional drinks at the café and ballroom on the premises,” wrote Bobbie and Bill Malone in their book ‘Nashville’s Songwriting Sweethearts: The Boudleaux and Felice Bryant Story.’ According to a Polk’s City Directory, bluegrass great Lester Flatt stayed at the Rainbow for a while around 1954.

“The rustic and restless nature of the Rainbow Trailer Court indicated that Nashville, for all its pretensions to the contrary, housed a hardworking, hard-scrabble, and growing country music community with slender means — but big dreams,” the Malones wrote elsewhere in their book. “Like the Bryants, most of these music-making folks hoped to gain a more permanent foothold elsewhere in the city. To the bewilderment of the established cultural elites, these same hillbillies, in fact, were putting their city on the map.”

Note: Two photos in this sequence come from August 2020, the rest from June 2023.

03/06/2023

When Jim Reeves and wife Mary bought the corner house at 110 Arta Drive in May 1956, Jim had been recording for RCA Records for a year, charting one single, "Yonder Comes a Sucker." He had joined the Grand Ole Opry in October 1955, and he would release his first RCA album, "Singing Down the Lane" about a month after buying the place.

Jim and Mary lived on the corner of Arta and Westchester Drive for two years, during which time Reeves' topped the country charts with the song "Four Walls." The Reeves sold the house in December 1958 after moving a few blocks away to 400 Westchester that June.

01/06/2023

Two days before the release of his latest album, Jelly Roll told a capacity crowd at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, “We ended up making the whole album about my childhood church.” That church, pictured on the album cover, is Whitsett Chapel Baptist Church at 1351 Pleasant Hill Road, just off Bell Road. It’s been in the same location near where Donelson turns into Antioch for more than a century.

As the singer and rapper began hitting radio with songs like “Son of a Sinner” and “NEED A FAVOR” — and writing others called “Church,” Hung Over in the Church Pew,” and “Dancing With the Devil” — he realized he was telling his life story, one that traced back to that red-brick church on a hill.

“I don't want to get spiritual here, but I just felt like God was telling me, ‘You need to write this album; this is clear what you need to do,’” he told the Ryman audience.

Initially, he planned to simply call the album “Church,” but producer Zach Crowell suggested naming it “Whitsitt Chapel,” after the congregation Jelly Roll had attended as a teenager. “I said, ‘Well, hell, they might sue me,’” Jelly Roll replied.

That’s not at all what happened, though. “Turns out, Whitsitt Chapel Baptist Church is still there; it’s still doing great,” Jelly Roll said. “They love that I called the album ‘Whitsitt Chapel.’ I simply had to go back and meet the pastor and some of the deacons. It’s been incredible.”

Jelly Roll, born Jason DeFord, recently returned to the church as part of a cover story for Billboard magazine. “I got baptized in here some 20 years ago and have since done nothing but go to prison, treat a bunch of people wrong, make a lot of mistakes in life, turn it around, [then] go on to be a f–king multimillionaire and help as many people as I possibly can,” he told the publication’s Melinda Newman. “It’s the f–king wildest story ever to me — maybe because I’m the one f–king in the middle of it — but that sh-t’s crazy.”