By Peter Cooper • THE TENNESSEAN • May 8, 2009
For decades music lovers have been watching PBS' Austin City Limits, a show that has successfully and indelibly linked Texas' capital city with the heroes of American roots music.
On Saturday, Nashville Public Television is set to unveil a new show called Legends and Lyrics, a program intended to spotlight Nashville's place as a songwriting center. Already airing on some PBS stations, by June the show will be in a majority of American households.
"I moved here from Louisiana in 1977, and I played Southern rock," said director and executive producer Will Mitchell. "When I got to town, I realized that I was in the middle of the song-poet center of the planet. And I thought, 'How come this isn't on national television?' And I never let it go."
Thirty-two years and more than $2 million later, it's on national TV. The first episode airs at 10 p.m. on WNPT and features Country Music Hall of Famers Kris Kristofferson and Randy Owen and revered singer-songwriter Patty Griffin. The episode was filmed downtown at the Grand Masonic Lodge.
"It's an in-the-round format, which we see in Nashville all the time but which is really new to people in 95 percent of the country," Mitchell said. "We incorporated (as Song-Writers In The Round) in 1994 and have been moving ahead with it since then. We didn't spare any expense in making it look good and sound 0Agood."
First efforts at getting the show on the air were halting. Mitchell filmed some shows in 2001 and was unsuccessful in getting any networks interested in airing those shows. He tweaked the format, began filming again and approached American Public Television, the prime source of programming for the nation's public TV affiliates.
"They told us they send out the shows to stations in three waves, and they said if the first wave gets 25 percent of stations signing on, you're doing great. Ours went about 70 percent in the first wave, and APT is predicting it'll run for 10 years."
Each Legends and Lyrics show features several writers, talking about and performing their songs. There's also a history segment, an interview with a legendary writer (this week's is Ray Stevens), a performance from an up-and-comer (Jonathan Singleton in this first episode) and a "Tips of the Week" segment aimed at aspiring writers.
Some shows will be shot in other locales, but Nashville will remain the home base for the program.
"We may travel a bit here and there, and we may put on some Legends and Lyrics Live tours," Mitchell said. "But this is the hub, the center for song-poetry, and we want to make that clear and promote the hometown for a long time to come."
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