Music City?

Boot-$cootin' Yee-Ha!

We are in the middle of the huge wealth machine for the local business community: the CMA Music Festival. The amount of money this event brings in is so big that even the most catastrophic flood in the history of the city was not allowed to delay its 2010 opening less than a month later. And in fact that year's event and the revenues it generated were promoted in many ways as resources the city used to recover.

In spite of the wealth that CMA has produced since the flood, other music venues seem to be on life support. But can we be known as "Music City" rather than just "[Country] Music City" with these recent mishaps?

• Bank of America foreclosed on the widely acclaimed Schermerhorn Symphony Center, striking many as beat down of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, which has not received adequate financial support (for a city of this size) in recent years. Nashville's upper crust lusts over the old Downtown thermal site for a publicly-funded amphitheater locale for outdoor symphony performances. But the embarrassing realities at hand have gone national even as the Mayor submits his latest capital budget. Symphonic music in Nashville is on the ropes, but does Music City care? 
• The business community and Mayor's Office responded anemically to the international scope of the National Folk Festival, which arranges 3 year stints in host cities. September 2011 was the event's first year in Music City; it became the last year of the festival. What a wasted opportunity to have been able to host the 75th anniversary folk festival this year. Instead, Nashville will be known as "The City Where the Folk Festival Died".
• The long-delayed building of the National Museum of African American Music has set adrift from its logical home on Jefferson Street, the nerve center of African American musical history in Nashville, to the prospect of a nebulous co-existence in the old Nashville Convention Center with the House of Blues. Will a narrow, commercialized focus on African American music in a Downtown oriented towards the country industry bring any more money or audiences in? Or will it just be backwatered and forgotten if it does ever materialize?

A different kind of treasure.

Museums, special events, and symphony halls are often more trusts supported by the community without regard to whether they shake the money maker or not. They provide living milestones for remembering where we have come from and touchstones for expressing values (sometimes more profoundly than money). I fear that Metro politics is so entwined with the power of money that our leaders let cultural icons die or rust away when the latter do not maximize the dollars. There is a place in cities for large-scale events that draw obscene amounts of bling (like CMA). But there is wealth to go around and to certify that less popular, but no less important musical traditions have mediums in a place that lays claim to the title, "Music City".

CMA Music Festival relies on volunteers, but what about the jobs?

It is noble to volunteer time and energy to projects that serve the Nashville community. Many professional musicians donate their performances at the CMA Music Fest so that proceeds can be donated to Metro Nashville Public Schools music programs. That is a good thing. According to the Country Music Association website, the volunteer hours donated also flip into more money donated to MNPS "Keep the Music Playing" project, which began in 2006.

WPLN reports that at 2012 CMA Music Fest (41st Fan Fair), more volunteers than ever are being used instead of paid staff:

More than sixty-thousand country music fans are expected to jam downtown Nashville each of the next four days for the CMA Music Festival. Hundreds of volunteers will be helping with crowd control and manning information booths.

For the past three years, the Country Music Association has reduced its paid staff at the festival and shifted some responsibilities to volunteers.

CMA recruits the free labor by offering two free tickets to Sunday night’s finale.

The nobility of volunteer actions should not trump critical questions concerning how volunteers are being used. And I have a couple of questions, which I have not been able to find answers for yet, because I have not located CMA's financials either on Charity Navigator or Giving Matters.

First of all is there a one-to-one match between each volunteer and the actual salary a staff member might be paid to perform the same work? If there is not a direct match, then volunteers should be told that not all of their "donation" will be going to school music programs, but to help CMA's cash flow.

Second, I recall past reports on the economic impact of CMA Fests (economic impact reports are not always the most objective tools, by the way) that claimed that they generated local jobs for many Nashvillians. If increasing numbers of volunteers are being used to reduce the paid staff, that suggests to me that the local labor force is not deriving the promised benefits. There is nobility in volunteering and there is nobility in working for wages.

In my opinion, CMA cannot both claim to provide a remarkable number of jobs for people who need jobs and rely on increasing numbers of volunteers while reducing staff without losing some credibility. Even the nobility of voluntarism cannot stand in for unrealized promises of employment.

2010 Nashville flood: we are Nashville, so let's keep community before commodity

By focusing on music festivals and tourism before the Cumberland River has given Nashville its neighborhoods back, NewsChannel5 is not just putting the cart before the horse. The local CBS affiliate is putting commerce ahead of the human scope of this tragedy. They are ignoring the recovery that must happen at structural and infrastructural levels before we can begin to talk about the luxuries of money-saturated parties for out-of-town guests. They are taking their eye off the ball.

The receding flood waters are going to give up more dead Middle Tennesseans in the next few days and weeks. Before we party we need to mourn and bury our dead. We've got a bulging population of homeless families whose houses and lives are underwater now. We're faced with the prospect of growing numbers of Nashvillians suffering injuries and illnesses from this catastrophic floods. Before we party we need to heal the sick and ease the suffering. Is the local health delivery system prepared to do that? I was hearing of oxygen shortages at hospitals during the floods. Can we square away our hospitals and clinics before we crank up the tunes?

Streets and roads have been washed away. Buildings and other structures that have not been destroyed or irreparably harmed by flood waters will need to be repaired and renovated. The industrial areas on both banks of the Cumberland released petroleum and toxic chemicals into the water and the soil and we will are going to have to clean that all up to protect Nashvillians as well as tourists. Before we can join in a festival to celebrate and support the music industry, we have to be able to play safely in and enjoy our own nontoxic neighborhoods again.

Only one of three water treatment plants is operating. Water reserves are at half capacity while people still water their grass. (There may be some justice in that those with the most grass to water in the suburbs will lose water before urban residents if reserves go down). We don't know how or to what length taxed Metro services may function. Once the waters clear, how are we going to clean up the tons of debris and still assure regular garbage pick up? We do not know the degree to which clean-up is going to sap the Metro budget. We also must consider the transportation needs of many more people who lost vehicles.

And how will a vigorous bid for tourism tax our law enforcement services? If initial reports are correct, the Central Police Precinct almost went down to floodwaters itself. The CMA Festival occurs in the Central Precinct. I'm sure officers are working longer shifts through this. Is the music industry going to demand even more of our cops for the June festival?

I hear stories that in the early stages of the Downtown floods, some building owners thoughtlessly rushed to pump out basements and subterranean garages without stopping to think that those flood waters would end up in someone else's garage or down the storm sewers only to be pushed back out into the streets by the Cumberland River. Asking Nashville to hurry and prepare for CMA when the river hasn't returned to it's banks, when people are still being plucked from flooded homesteads, when we have not addressed the human cost (let alone the economic cost) is just as shortsighted and premature as pumping your flood into everyone's flood.

In fact, the demand is callous. We would not expect an employer to demand employees who have been flooded and injured by historic storms to return to work mere days after a tragedy. Why should we accept attempts by local tourism industry leaders to go on TV and leverage Downtown and Greater Nashville back to the task of preparing for the CMA Festival? By airing this story so soon on the heels of disaster, Brent Frazier and NewsChannel5 are enabling an arbitrary and capricious mission to move us away from the sense of community engendered by shared tragedy and toward the commodities of an industry that does not yet have firm footing.

This story is nothing but putting commodity before community at the worse possible time. Just when the community is beginning to pull together to overcome this disaster, we do not need this distraction so early. There will be a time for tourist-scale celebrations that fill industry coffers, but I will be shocked if that time is June. Let tourism protect its financial interests, but let Nashvillians aspire toward a more common, more human interest. If "We are Nashville," the "We" should include everyone affected by the storm's aftermath. All of us need help, but some more than others.