How Nashville Created the Universal Language of Country Music

Originally published in No Depression, September 2021.

If you’ve ever played American roots music, you’ve almost certainly encountered the Nashville number system. It is part of every jam, every lesson, and every fake book. It is the cipher that we use to pass on our aural folk traditions. It is so universal as to feel prehistoric — simply the natural foundation upon which old-time and bluegrass were built.

But in actuality it was a modern tool built to solve a modern problem: the need to keep up with advancing technology and the profit motives of the burgeoning Nashville music industry of the 1950s.