Can anyone still make it as a country singer in Nashville?
In June 2016, Tiffany Gassette looked for a place to park her RV. She ended up in Lyles, Tennessee, an hour from Nashville. For the next six months, she and her three-year-old daughter, Calliope – named after the Greek muse of epic poetry and heroic song – lived off a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. For 20 miles, there was nothing but a Walmart.
Tiffany had never lived in an RV before. When winter came, the temperature dropped. The regulator on her propane tank froze. The space heaters blew out her breakers. One day, after she dropped Calliope off at daycare, she went into Nashville to busk. When she got home, her dog couldn’t see her. The cold weather had triggered her acute glaucoma. It was the loneliest, saddest time of her life. “What right do I have to be here with this child?” she asked herself. “This is no life.”
Before she parked her RV in Lyles, Tiffany was a middle-school teacher in Randolph, Massachusetts. A single mother, she moved to Nashville to pursue a career in music,like so many before her. Nashville is where Dolly Parton moved the day after her graduation in 1964. It’s where Johnny Cash moved into an apartment with Waylon Jennings a couple of years later. It’s where Taylor Swift decided to move when she was just 10 years old.
Every year, hundreds of artists make the same decision. Their struggle speaks to the question that has started to haunt Nashville: is it still possible for musicians to make it in the City of Music?
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Tiffany and Calliope now live in a duplex in North Nashville. Their RV, which was their home for three years, is parked in the backyard. While their neighborhood is just a 15-minute drive from the famous Broadway Street, it still has a bad reputation. “There was this one woman on Facebook Marketplace,” Tiffany told me as we sat in her music room, “who was supposed to pick up a chair. When I told her my address, she was like, ‘Never mind, I don’t want to get shot.’”
After she drops Calliope off at school, Tiffany drives for Lyft. When her car’s air conditioning broke this summer, it was too expensive to fix.
She had to drive in the morning before it got hot in the afternoon. She didn’t want bad reviews. “Lyft is a hard gig to do full-time. It’s exhausting, and it just ruins your vehicle,” she told me as Calliope chased their three-legged cat around.
But Lyft’s flexible schedule allows Tiffany to be a mom and the flexibility she needs to write, perform and record