‘MUSIC CITY’ NEVER MEANT JUST COUNTRY MUSIC.

NASHVILLE’S SOUL is a documentary feature that explores the forgotten history of Nashville, Tennessee as a capital of Black culture.

In the north of the city, the community around Jefferson Street thrived in the first half of the 20th century. A ‘Mecca for Black music’, it played host to luminaries like Etta James, Little Richard , Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin - the list goes on. The Fisk Jubilee Singers brought the Negro Spiritual to prestige; WLAC was the first radio station to broadcast Black music to wide audiences; Noble Blackwell’s Night Train put Black music on TV for the first time; Bobby Hebb wrote Sunny and James Brown recorded Sex Machine.

It was here that a young James Marshall Hendrix, freshly discharged from the US army, learned the craft of Rhythm & Blues guitar from a cohort of America’s best Black musicians, setting him on the path to becoming Jimi and conquering the international rock scene.

Jefferson Street also hosted three prestigious historically-Black universities, generating Civil Rights heavyweights like John Lewis and Diane Nash. As leaders of the Nashville Student Movement, they organised marches and sit-ins that led to Nashville becoming the first major city in the Jim Crow South to desegregate.

But it was not to last. The Federal Government built the Interstate-40 Highway in the late 1960s, and it took a path right through the centre of the Jefferson Street neighborhood, bulldozing countless homes, clubs, schools, churches and businesses. It caused economic devastation from which the community has never fully recovered.

Marcus Shute Jr is a practicing attorney and a native Nashvillean. His last name was given to his ancestors by the man who owned them, and they have resided in Nashville since the Civil War. In Nashville’s Soul, Marcus explores the past of his city as a family history, speaking to some who survive to remember Black Nashville at its height from contemporaries of Jimi Hendrix like Frank Howard and Jimmy Church to his grandmother Elizabeth Shute, a doctor of chemistry whose family home was bulldozed to make way for I-40. For many of our interviewees, this was their last chance to tell their stories. It’s incumbent upon Marcus to preserve the stories of his city for his own children.

The past and present connect in Nashville’s Soul to create the story of a lost world, proud and full of music, of soldiers who shed their blood to build a country that’s always resented them for it, of a people whose struggles today mirror those of their grandparents, and of a complex exploration of American identity.

Harry Penrhyn Jones

Director / Writer / Producer, Nashville’s Soul