I recently stumbled upon a new podcast called Murder on Music Row from journalist Keith Sharon from Nashville’s The Tennessean newspaper. Every episode begins—more or less—with a nod to the song “Murder on Music Row” (written by Larry Cordle and Larry Shell). Over eight episodes, Sharon investigates the terrible March 1989 murder of Kevin Hughes. The journalist’s narration is by turns touching and funny, and he’s gathered a number of interviews with people involved and or adjacent to the murder and subsequent investigation, along with investigative recordings from police files. It’s a rich and heartbreaking story done really well. And well worth a listen. (I finished it in just three days after discovering it.)

In March 1989, I remember being sad at the loss of a young, promising life and at the blemish his murder put on the dazzle of Music Row, a place that still has a hook in my heart, even though it’s vastly changed. I was in the last few months of my life in Nashville that March. Leesa and I had rediscovered each other the previous fall, and in July 1989, my brother Jerry came to Music City and helped me move back home to the western North Carolina mountains so that I could help prepare for a beautiful September 2nd wedding.

But the memory of the murder stayed with me. The story as it plays out in the podcast is certainly worthy of a novel or a true crime book. Whenever I thought of the event, I thought of writing about it but never did so. What I did write, however, was a brief fictionalization of the event and used it to set the tone for Streets of Nashville, coming from Madville Publishing on April 15. I hope that my adaptation of it works as I want it to and that it isn’t disrespectful to the Hughes family.

The podcast made me nostalgic for those Nashville days in the 1980s. You might have read my first novel, Gabriel’s Songbook, published by Pisgah Press in 2017, which fictionalizes my own Nashville experiences through most of the 1980s. I often say that the novel is autobiography in its bones and fiction in its flesh and blood. A number of details in Murder on Music Row jolted me so that a number of connections surfaced.

Here’s an excerpted image from an email I sent to Keith Sharon when I was about halfway through the series:

As I listened, I began to wonder how close I came to being caught up in the dangerous scams operating on the underbelly of Music Row. I never lost any money paying for radio plays or record promotion for “Fiesta” (1983), my only released record (a 45 rpm, for any who remember those). But I’ve never been sure how closely my producer/publisher Earl Richards swerved in that direction, and I’m still torn as to whether or not my five years under his direction was good or bad for me, legit or illegit.

So, the forty-two years mentioned in the title of this post? I know that March 9, 2025, will be the thirty-sixth anniversary of Kevin Hughes’s horrible death. My math isn’t that bad. No, the forty-two years takes me back to 1983, when the 45 of “Fiesta” was released to radio and retail. Listening to Keith Sharon’s podcast, as I said, made me nostalgic, and I went to my scrapbook for those Nashville years. Here are some photos from that mid-to-late spring of 1983.

The memo below is from a couple of years later, 1985, when Kin Vassy called from California to say Kenny Rogers was interested in my song “Real Love.” Nothing ever came of that interest, but it was an exciting possibility for a while!

Heady days for a young man from Walnut, NC