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Peter Cooper On Music: Clement and Scruggs’ house jams hosted many legends

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A jam session outside Cowboy Jack Clement's house includes Ketch Secor and Gill Landry of Old Crow Medicine Show. (photo: Peter Cooper)

A jam session outside Cowboy Jack Clement's house includes Ketch Secor and Gill Landry of Old Crow Medicine Show. (photo: Peter Cooper)

Want to buy one of Nashville’s greatest music venues?

You can do it right now. But it’s going to take some dough: These places — there are two for sale — are formidable.

They’ve been the scenes of some of the most amazing performances in the history of American popular music.

My personal favorite musical events took place under these roofs, one at 3405 Belmont Blvd., the other at 4121 Franklin Pike. I’ve heard Waylon Jennings, John Hartford, Tom T. Hall, Emmylou Harris, Old Crow Medicine Show, Mac Wiseman, Josh Graves, Vince Gill, Alison Krauss, Charley Pride, Kitty Wells, Marty Stuart, Jerry Douglas, Travis Tritt, Tim O’Brien, Marshall Chapman and dozens more sing and play at one or both of these addresses.

And there was never a set list or a ticket charge. Or a ticket, for that matter.

See, musical Nashville is special, in large part because so many world-class musicians live within an easy drive of each other. And musicians are special.

They like what they do for a living, to the point that they’ll do it for pleasure. Plumbers don’t gather on Sundays to plumb for fun. Accountants don’t have number-crunching parties. But in Nashville, for many years, musicians gathered at the Belmont Boulevard home of famed producer Cowboy Jack Clement and at the Franklin Pike home of bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs and his wife, Louise, to laugh and smile and eat and play music.

These gatherings were joyful and casual, which is a good thing: Had they carried a whiff of formality, they would have been of terrifying weight. We’re talking about the greatest of the great, in unique conjunctions, playing together. Spouses, children and friends were invited, but the goal wasn’t to entertain the nonmusicians in attendance. There really wasn’t any goal at all. Just being together was mission accomplished.

The athletic equivalent might be the 1992 U.S. Olympic “Dream Team” scrimmages, where Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley and other future Hall of Famers went up against each other away from television cameras. But even that was competition. These Nashville gatherings were fellowship, not gamesmanship.

As for a rock ’n’ roll equivalent, there’s probably not one.

There’s a good documentary called “Festival Express” about a train tour that featured The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Band and others. But even there, performers were being paid to be on that train. Levon Helm’s “Midnight Ramble” shows at his Woodstock, N.Y., home were joyful confluences, but tickets were sold and the musicians were (rightly) interested in pleasing an audience.

So, imagine Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards, non-dead Jimi Hendrix, Bonnie Raitt, Bob Dylan, non-dead Buddy Holly, non-dead James Brown, Linda Ronstadt, Little Richard and a bunch of others, all gathered at Chuck Berry’s house to eat jalapeño cornbread and jam on “Johnny B. Goode,” “Back in Black” and “Born to Run.” That’s kind of what this was like.

Part of city’s culture

Nashville has a tradition of this sort of thing.

Johnny and June Carter Cash used to host “guitar pulls” at their Hendersonville home, where Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury, Joni Mitchell, George Hamilton IV, Gordon Lightfoot and many other writers came for music and hospitality.

John Hartford’s home on the banks of the Cumberland was home to epic New Year’s jams, and it may be that other groundbreaking musicians opened their homes for such sessions. (I’m told that musicians don’t always invite journalists to their big shindigs, though that’s difficult to believe.)

So what can we do about all this?

Well, I just got an email about someone’s rich uncle who died in Nigeria: Apparently, this guy needs my account information so that the uncle’s millions can be deposited in my name. If all that works out, I’m going to buy late Country Music Hall of Famer Cowboy Jack’s house — which has an upstairs recording studio built by the great Mark Howard — and revive it as a creative center, using Cowboy Jack’s motto as a mission statement: “We’re in the fun business. If we’re not having fun, we’re not doing our job.” All I need is a little more than $1.28 million.

You, dear reader, may purchase the Scruggs home, which in the past was also owned by the late fellow Country Music Hall of Famers — and former spouses — George Jones and Tammy Wynette.

Listed at $3.5 million, it is a gorgeous, rambling estate with room enough to invite dozens of musicians over to convene and collaborate. There’s a big iron gate out front, and I used to get giddy just watching from my driver’s seat when the thing opened: Driving through that gate was like passing through the turnstile on opening day of baseball season.

I’m counting hard on that rich Nigerian uncle money coming through, but if the real estate stuff doesn’t work out for us, maybe we can open our own homes.

Maybe we can visit each other in person, rather than just checking in through social media. Maybe bring-your-own-booze becomes bring-your-own-instrument (though it’s not an either/or: Instrument cases have lots of booze-hiding compartments).

Maybe we turn our houses into Nashville’s greatest music venues, just for the fun of it. Just because we can. Just because we’re Nashville, and our houses sound better than the houses in Wichita. We’re in the fun business, and it’s time to get to work.

Reach Peter Cooper at 615-259-8220 or on Twitter @TNMusicNews.


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