Country

“Them good ol’ boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye.”

In January 1972 — “a long, long time ago,” as Don McLean said in the opening salvo of “American Pie” — his eight-minute pop opus rose to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, where it remained for four weeks, lamenting “the day the music died.”

Just a few months later — also a long, long time ago — the Country Music Association inaugurated Fan Fair, an annual Nashville music event now named CMA Fest. The festival’s music definitely hasn’t died, though the pandemic forced a pause for two years. It will be presented for the 50th time June 8-11.

“American Pie” wasn’t intended as a prelude to CMA Fest, though in some ways, McLean foretold its emergence. At the festival, them good ol’ boys drink whiskey on Lower Broadway, or they sing about it onstage. The event features a reported 80,000 music fans moving “helter skelter in the summer swelter.” And McLean’s whole “American Pie” football scenario — “The players tried to take the field/The marching band refused to yield” — parallels CMA Fest, too: Its marquee performances are hosted in an NFL venue, Nissan Stadium.

2023’s Nissan lineups include Luke Combs, Eric Church, HARDY, Dan + Shay, Miranda Lambert, Luke Bryan and Ashley McBryde. There’s no Carrie Underwood this year — maybe the “Church Bells” all are broken? But the festival keeps bringing people back to Nashville in search of a good time.

Don McLean photographed in 1972.

David Redfern/Redferns

“One of my favorite lines [in “American Pie”] as relates to CMA Fest is ‘I can still remember when the music made me smile,’ ” CMA CEO Sarah Trahern says. “That’s what I always think about every year. I usually ask all of our young staff, ‘Tell me about an artist you saw for the first time,’ because one of the things I think we really value is the opportunity at the festival to have artists in all different stages of their career.”

That’s certainly true this year. The lineup includes current hitmakers Lainey Wilson, Jason Aldean, Jon Pardi and Jelly Roll. It has its share of heritage acts, including Reba McEntire, Tanya Tucker, Trisha Yearwood and Shenandoah. And it even features some new ones — for instance, Kidd G, Harper Grace, Avery Anna and Noah Thompson —who are so young that they were born after the last time the festival changed its location, in 2001.

CMA Fest launched at the Municipal Auditorium downtown in April 1972 and stayed there until 1982, when it moved to the Tennessee State Fairgrounds. It returned to Lower Broadway downtown in 2001, and McLean appeared that year with a performance of “American Pie” at the Riverfront Stage — appropriate, since it coincided with the festival’s move from the racetrack to the riverfront. Or, better put, from the “Chevy to the levee.”

It’s doubtful that anyone who heard “American Pie” in 1972 thought the song, or McLean, would have country connections. But it didn’t take long for them to build. Pop singer Perry Como recorded one of his songs, “And I Love You So,” in Nashville exactly one year after “American Pie” hit No. 1. Before the ’70s were over, McLean recorded Roy Orbison‘s “Crying” in Music City with The Jordanaires on backing vocals, and it brought him a country hit in 1981. McLean became close friends with producer-guitarist Chet Atkins (who, ironically, died June 30, 2001, just 17 days after McLean played CMA Fest). And “American Pie” had a huge influence on Garth Brooks, who said it “could quite possibly be the greatest song in music history” in a 2022 documentary, The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean’s “American Pie.”

“That song was about that undeniable chorus — you hear it once, and it’s stuck in your head forever,” says Charlie Worsham, who will play June 9 at CMA Fest’s The Cadillac Three & Friends concert at Ascend Amphitheater. “It was a story, and you kind of had to listen to the words to get the full value of the song. And it was a song that could be delivered with an acoustic guitar and a voice on the back of a truck.”

Since those are the kinds of songs that Brooks was frequently attracted to, his penchant for “American Pie” influenced the generations of country artists who have followed him. He has occasionally dipped into mortality in hits such as “If Tomorrow Never Comes,” “Papa Loved Mama” or the long version of “The Thunder Rolls,” and “American Pie” is famously built around the deaths of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and The Big Bopper in a plane crash.

“Just writing a song about that shit — can you imagine?” asks Jaren Johnston, who founded The Cadillac Three with Neil Mason and Kelby Ray. “It’s like, ‘Hey, I got an idea, Neil.’ It’s me and Ashley Gorley and Neil, let’s say. ‘Man, you remember that [Lynyrd] Skynyrd crash? Dude. Let’s do that today for Tuesday. That’d be fun.’ It just doesn’t exist anymore.”

Of course, there’s the “pink carnation and a pickup truck” line in “American Pie” — that pickup truck is still big business in country music: “wait in the truck,” “Heart Like a Truck,” “Truck Bed,” “I Drive Your Truck,” “New Truck,” “Out of That Truck,” etcetera.

But not to be forgotten is McLean’s reference to the spirit world with “the three men I admire the most/The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost.” Many of the artists who were crucial to that first Fan Fair are gone, including Ernest Tubb, Tom T. Hall, Roy Acuff, Porter Wagoner, Skeeter Davisand Marty Robbins. Like the genre itself, the festival is built on those memories, which is why Johnston skipped it last year. His father, former Grand Ole Opry drummer Jerry Ray Johnston, frequently took him to Fan Fair in the ’80s and ’90s at the fairgrounds. When the senior Johnston died, it made the thought of playing CMA Fest an emotional trap.

“Everything’s a memory there when you get into that world of grief and loss,” Johnston says. “You kind of stop yourself from going places where you think something might be triggered, and Fan Fair — CMA Fest — is definitely one of those for me.”

His father’s death affected each member of The Cadillac Three, which is why the group is appearing at the festival this year in a different form, joined by boundary-pushing acts such as Boy Named Banjo, The Randy Rogers Band, Tenille Townes and Elvie Shane, plus some unannounced guests who will likely demonstrate the wide-reaching net of the genre.

“CMA should be the big tent,” says Trahern. “And in the big tent, there is space for mainstream country music, and there’s space for Americana and space for bluegrass. If you think about it, the Country Music Hall of Fame has Emmylou Harris, who identifies as an Americana artist as well as a country artist, and has Flatt & Scruggs and Bill Monroe, who identify [as bluegrass]. So I’m really excited about that Ascend show.”

Oddly enough, that “American Pie” reference to “the three men I admire the most” could translate in CMA Fest history to Merle Haggard, George Jones and Johnny Paycheck. The three traditional country singers performed a group show at the festival in 1997 — the only time they would do so. Given their checkered pasts, it could easily be considered sacrilege to place them next to a line about the Christian Trinity. Worsham disagrees.

“I would argue that George Jones and Merle Haggard and Johnny Paycheck are the perfect country music examples to hold up as a story of redemption, of grace, because they all walked through the fire, and they all had their come-to-Jesus moment,” he reasons. “For them to stand on that stage together, and at a later time in their journey, I feel like is very spiritually accurate to the point of Christianity. And because gospel music is one of the parents of country music, country music has always been found in that path from the bar to the church and back, and those guys blazed that trail quite literally.”

McLean’s American Pie album featured the stars and stripes imprinted on the singer’s thumb, creating a metaphor that’s particularly useful to country music in 2023. Critics continue to debate — thumbs up, thumbs down — what constitutes country, and this year’s festival arrives at a time when some Americans are having a difficult time giving a thumbs-up to democracy.

“Country music’s real message is Willie Nelson going, ‘Good morning, America. How are you?’ ” Worsham says. “You lock arms and sing along and literally reach to the person in the concert sitting next to you who canceled you out in the voting booth, point your beer cans together and sing along to that. That’s what we need so badly right now, and that’s what country music has to offer right now, like it always has.”

“American Pie” may have lamented the “day the music died,” but despite the song’s surprising similarities to modern country, CMA Fest’s 50th installment serves as a symbol for a genre that’s willing to ponder the grave without actually stepping into it.

“Country music was alive and well in 1972,” says Trahern. “And certainly it’s alive and well today in 2023.” 

Subscribe to Billboard Country Update, the industry’s must-have source for news, charts, analysis and features. Sign up for free delivery every weekend.