Monday, March 9, 2026Good morning! 
Jewly Hight
I’m Jewly Hight, Senior Music Writer for Nashville Public Radio, returning to your inbox for the first time this year with my Key Changes column. Please consider this an invitation to join me as I flip through my reporter’s notebook every two weeks—on air, online and in social media videos—and share with you how I’m making sense of what’s happening in the rapidly changing music landscape.
Now, let’s get on with the latest edition of Key Changes…
My first experience with getting music onto the radio probably taught me the wrong lesson. As a college sophomore and the drummer for a queer Christian riot grrrl band (a story for another day), I was merely along for the ride as our lead singer entered our no-budget demo in an alt-rock contest on the local WAY-FM station.
Our prize for winning? A daytime slot on their festival, which meant we’d be sharing the bill with some big names.
In my years covering music in Nashville since, I’ve learned that the relationship between radio and localized scenes is far more complicated, and I’m unpacking facets of it that seldom receive attention in this edition of Key Changes.
WHAT TO KNOW
Rashad tha Poet performs at a Nashville Public Radio event celebrating R&B music. Photo: Emily April Allen
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 had a lot to do with that, since it enabled corporations to buy up smaller, local stations and consolidate their programming. From then on, radio stations’ attentiveness to the music bubbling up nearby, which lent their playlists distinct regional identities, got flattened into a national focus.
You probably already know Nashville’s the radio capital for country music. The movers and shakers of that format have convened here annually for well over half a century. In fact, the next edition of Country Radio Seminar is a little over a week a away. That’s what gets the most attention, but it’s not the whole story.
Contemporary Christian radio and hip-hop and R&B radio each have their own Nashville presence, and comparing them side by side, like I’ve done in research that I presented at a recent scholarly symposium, is telling. It’s the difference between close proximity to centralized infrastructure and the lack of it.
Both Christian music and R&B have long histories in Nashville, but their paths to prominence have great diverged. I’ve got to wonder what could’ve been if Nashville didn’t abandon its R&B prospects.
Before there even was a commercial recording industry, religious publishing companies built a business printing and distributing Southern gospel songbooks. So they were very well-equipped to start contemporary Christian record labels that took off in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s.
When rhythm & blues was first blowing up in the late ‘40s, people from all over began tuning in to Nashville station WLAC at night to hear it. And that station spurred the growth of local record labels and a record store that drew talent from the primarily Black Jefferson Street live music scene.
But by the early ‘70s, the construction of Interstate 40 had decimated Jefferson Street, WLAC had flipped to another format and years would pass before another major R&B station, 92Q, arrived. A hip-hop station, iHeart-owned 101.1 The Beat, joined it in the early 2000s.
Around that same time, primarily white contemporary Christan music (CCM) radio was blowing up and turning pop-rock-style worship songs into massive hits. And the leading networks were moving their flagship stations to middle Tennessee. The biggest one, Educational Media Foundation, brought its headquarters in 2024.
At this point, even Christian artists who aren’t even based in Nashville make trips for the sake of strengthening relationships with the most influential network in their format. In other words, the CCM scene in your backyard is well-positioned to get its music to the world.
That’s not the case for the artists working to build hip-hop and R&B careers in Nashville, whose ambitions and barriers we chronicled in the “Making Noise” podcast. It’s hard for them to get on the most popular commercial hip-hop station in town, The Beat. Despite the fact that it has Nashville-based, on-air personalities who are thoroughly invested in their community, its schedule is populated with syndicated shows and its playlists are, to a large degree, programmed elsewhere, in cities recognized as major hip-hop hubs.
Watch for my next Key Changes, where I’ll take on a different music topic.
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Who keeps our streets and roadways clean? For roughly 40 years, a volunteer effort has been a major part of the war on litter. Plus, the local news for March 9, 2026 and Health Q takes on HSAs.
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MORE TO KNOW
In 1979, the Iranian Revolution replaced the pro-
Rents around Nashville are down somewhat, but not as much as many renters would like. An online real estate portal says rents in the Nashville area, including Franklin and Murfreesboro, were down 4.5% in January compared to a year earlier. The median asking rent stood at $1,471 dollars. The decline is part of a broader trend of rents sliding in recent years, following a spike in 2021. According to Apartment List which publishes monthly rental reports, more than half of all renters in Nashville in 2024, were considered “cost-burdened” households – meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing. [Tennesseean]
Tennessee Senate Majority leader Jack Johnson sold his stock in Tesla recently to avoid any conflict of interest regarding legislation involving the Boring Company. The company is digging underground tunnels where it plans to drive people in Teslas from downtown Nashville to the airport. Elon Musk owns Boring and is Tesla’s largest shareholder. A bill before lawmakers would give complete authority over Boring’s Nashville tunnels to the state instead of the city. There have been concerns that Metro Nashville’s government would be less friendly to the project. Johnson says he has no financial interest in the Boring Company but opted to dump the stock because he supports the tunnel project. He sold 50 shares of Tesla stock at around 400 dollars a share. [Tennessee Lookout]
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