For Once The Musicians Behind The Stars Became The Main Event
By 1991 Mark O’Connor had played on so many Nashville records that his fiddle was everywhere even when his name was not
The musicians who normally disappeared when the name of the singer went on the cover had an album with enough room for people to learn theirs
Country music was entering one of its biggest commercial eras as Garth Brooks was exploding and Vince Gill was breaking through and a new generation of singers was filling radio
But behind many of those records sat another cast of musicians whose names rarely reached the audience
O’Connor knew that world from the inside because by his twenties he had become one of the most in demand players in Nashville and moved between fiddle and guitar and mandolin sessions while working beside musicians such as Jerry Douglas and Brent Mason and Paul Franklin and Eddie Bayers and Matt Rollings and Roy Huskey Jr.
They were the people producers called when a record needed a particular feel or a certain lick or a part that had to be right before the clock ran out
More Than Fifty Players Built One Musical Community
In 1991 O’Connor decided those players deserved more than another line of small print credits and gathered more than fifty Nashville musicians for The New Nashville Cats and deliberately built the album around the instrumental side of the recording scene
Bluegrass sat beside western swing and country sat beside jazz and rockabilly
On Restless even Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs and Steve Wariner stepped in not to dominate the record but to become part of the larger musical community O’Connor was documenting
The title carried its own piece of history because The Nashville Cats had already become shorthand for the frighteningly good studio players of the city after the Lovin’ Spoonful celebrated them in the 1960s
The version by O’Connor was effectively saying another generation had arrived and these were the hands now shaping the records America was hearing
The Industry Finally Put Their Names In Lights
The industry noticed and at the 1991 CMA Awards O’Connor was named Musician of the Year while Mark O’Connor and The New Nashville Cats won Vocal Event of the Year
The album later earned the Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance and Restless won Best Country Collaboration with Vocals
Those trophies mattered for a reason larger than one fiddler because country music history is usually remembered through voices and the singer and the song and the star standing beneath the spotlight
The New Nashville Cats preserved something easier to lose because it captured the sound of the room behind them
The boom had faces but it also had hands
More than fifty players and one city and one generation left a reminder that country music does not happen only at the microphone