Music Row is the historic heart of the American country music industry — a compact grid of streets running along 16th and 17th Avenues South in Nashville, just south-west of downtown. Almost every major country record label has had offices here at some point, and much of the music you associate with Nashville was written in the low-rise bungalows and publishing houses that line these streets. The RCA Studio B on Music Square West — where Elvis, Dolly Parton, Roy Orbison, the Everly Brothers and hundreds of others recorded — is now run as a museum and can be toured from the Country Music Hall of Fame downtown.
You reach Music Row from downtown down Demonbreun Street; you will know you've arrived when you pass Musica, Alan LeQuire's 40-foot bronze of nine dancing, naked figures that the city commissioned in 2003 as a front door to the neighbourhood. ("A reminder," one local writer quipped, "how you can lose your shirt and your pants in the country music business.") Don't expect to see famous faces wandering the sidewalks — the songwriting and business actually happens behind closed doors — but the history is everywhere, and the short walk from the Musica roundabout down to the Belmont University campus takes you past the Word Records building, the old Curb Records and SESAC headquarters, and the brick facades of studios and publishing houses that have shaped American music for sixty years.