If you’ve been to more than one country concert you’ve probably heard more than one ‘when I moved to Nashville’ story, reliving the rites of passage it seems so many radio charting artists have gone through. We’ve heard about driving across the interstate to Tennessee with a dream, persevering through years of struggle to ‘make it’, and the song that finally changed their life – written while sleeping in the car, waiting tables, or just about to drive back to their small hometown.
Country singer-songwriter Gabe Lee has no such story (though he did work as a bartentender). He is the rarest of things to find in Nashville; someone who grew up there.
Gabe’s Nashville Roots
“There’s a sense between locals of ‘get off my lawn’” he jokes about attitudes to the constant influx of newcomers. But, back in serious mode, Gabe explains the difference that being from Nasvhille makes to his career as. “I’m lucky” he says. “I mean, I have my family’s from there. My parents still live there, I have a community outside of the music business that I can, not escape to, but depend on. A lot of musicians move to Nashville and it’s music 24/7, shows every day, songwriting all the time. Sometimes it’s just nice to go home and, for me, that’s not very far.”
Right now, though, he’s very far from home, in the middle of England. So I’ve managed to grab an unofficial 10-minute slot with Gabe after his captivating folky set at Leicestershire’s Americana festival The Long Road (2023). To hear each other over the sound of the next, rowdier act starting up, we are sheltering between the back of a food truck and a fence. “Let me out of the to the truck… please untie my hands!” he teases as a fan spots us and waits for their chance to nab the man of the moment. It’s an unglamourous location for what turns out to be a refreshingly open conversation about music, race and the real Nashville.
The Local’s Nashville
I’ve only been to Nashville once, as a true tourist on a 2015 country music pilgrimage, so now I’m picturing Gabe as a toddler lost amid a sea of rhinestone boots down Broadway. But Gabe’s Nashville isn’t the town of country star’s bars and bachelorette parties.
“Nashville’s completely different than the town that I grew up in. I mean these days it even looks completely different and the energy has racked up exponentially. But the fact that folks move to Nashville with a guitar and a few hundred bucks and they’re in their checking account, it’s so telling of the fact that the dream of music city is still extremely alive because folks would not be taking that gamble if they didn’t think that there was an opportunity of potential of success and I love that. So I welcome the change, I welcome the growth.”
Beyond its shiny new mega-honkytonks, some of Gabe’s old Nashville favourites can still be found. “A lot of great dive bars, and songwriter rooms are being replaced by hotels and whatnot, but I will say Bobby’s Idle Hour is still around. It’s been around forever [though the bar moved was forced to move by a block in 2019] and it’s where a lot of the legendary 90s country songs were written and discovered. Go check it out and put a dollar bill on the wall.”
Just like that favourite Music Row bar, Gabe’s own sound seems to belong to a Nashville of old. What he does best, he tells me, is “that sort of John Prine finger picking; telling a story through the song.” It’s exemplified in the songs he thinks make the best introduction to his music: Eveline and Drink The River, while the close-to-home Rusty proves even people from Nashville want to escape their hometown when they’re young.
Gabe in the UK
Gabe, whose parents are Taiwanese, has been invited to the UK as part of the Rissi Palmer’s Color Me Country stage, an extension of her enlightening radio programme of the same name, which showcases country artists of colour. “Rissi has created such a great environment for me to be on a platform and she was like, ‘hey, we have a festival here in in the countryside of UK, why don’t you come out and hang with us?’ And it was an immediate ‘yes!’… thankfully I’m lucky, I’ve had great support system from where I’ve come up and never felt that I was unincluded… As an Asian American male in America my community has taken me in and loved on me and supported me… So I just hope to bring something different but good.”
For a British listener it can be perplexing that there might need to be separate platforms to highlight Gabe and the artists he’s sharing the Long Road stage with. They are varied but invariably talented. But there are challenges that come with country and Americana being so linked to the southern states.
“Everyone thinks of the American South as being predominantly white and ‘country bumpkin’ and all those things,” Gabe says. “[But] if you do your research and you think about the roots of country music and gospel music and bluegrass, you find that there is inclusion in its history and its roots. So for folks to be territorial about a genre, it’s just silly.”
Now, thanks to platforms like Rissi’s, Gabe is being “asked by folks to be in the conversation more and more.” Then, surprisingly, he bats some of the responsibility over to me (a black British country fan) and you (fellow non-American fans) to be part of the solution.
Missions for fellow fans
“I think folks have to be more proactive as country listeners if you’re if you’re not the stereotypical country music listener. Maybe you’re in the Caribbean, right? Maybe you’re in Japan where nobody thinks there’s a country music community. You be proactive about it. Introduce folks to the music, like you would anything else that you fall in love with… You never know where it’ll end up.”
OK, mission accepted, this is me passing it on: it’s July 2024, country music is for everyone and, crucially, the brilliant (and bonafide Nashvillian) Gabe Lee is back in the UK touring right now.
CJ, BritsinBoots
Brits in Boots 
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