We couldn’t possibly feel more conspicuous, driving through the Gulch in a fiery red coupe. The Gulch is the new name that Nashville’s city planners have given to an area east of downtown formerly known as “the wrong side of the tracks.” Some decommissioned warehouses are being converted into condos and office space; others are home to sketchy-looking businesses and probably squatters. The streets are empty save for a few other cars, none of them worth stealing. A passing train fills our ears with white noise. We aren’t just lost; we’re lost in a brand new BMW 330 in a bad neighbourhood at nightfall. In the movies, these scenes never end well.

We unknowingly drive past the Station Inn, the live bluegrass music venue we’ve been looking for, three times before noticing it – an old grey stone box with boarded-up windows that my wife, Lynn, thought was an auto-body shop. The inside, so tiny that bands need no electric amplification, seems lit solely by neon beer signs. The floors are made of worn plywood. No two chairs or tables match, as if they’d gradually been destroyed and replaced one by one over a series of bar brawls. Pairs of old bus seats line the far wall facing the tiny stage. “I got them from Earl Scruggs,” owner J.T. Gray says, referring to the legendary banjo player. “They’re from his tour bus.”

The sparse Sunday crowd in jeans and ball caps spots the out-of-towners right away. I clomp across to the bar in my brand new cowboy boots, which are now making me feel conspicuous. Amid the glitz of Nashville’s downtown tourist district (where I bought them), a pair of boots is enough to make any tourist fit in; here I have “urban hoser” stamped on my forehead.

Yet I am an authentic pilgrim, and the Station Inn is a pilgrimage site. For 30 years, it has been Nashville’s top venue for bluegrass music, the acoustic combination of mandolin, fiddle and banjo that is evocative of the American South and that was, for decades, reviled as corn-pone cacophony. In the 1950s, Nashville’s recording industry began to distance itself from its true country roots, and by the 1970s, the twang of the banjo was relegated to the cornfield kitsch of Hee Haw.

America is now in the midst of a bluegrass music revival. The George Clooney film O Brother, Where Art Thou? kick-started the trend in 2000, making “Man of Constant Sorrow” a mainstream hit. In 2002, Billboard created a bluegrass chart, a nod to the music’s renewed popularity and growing influence. To quote Timbaland, the hip hop producer behind acts like Missy Elliott: “The best music right now is the old bluegrass stuff. The lyrics in that stuff are incredible. And the damn melodies?” I guess he likes them. Lynn and I do too. When we hired a bluegrass band to play our Toronto wedding two years ago, friends found the idea puzzling, but it worked just as we’d hoped: The light, airy sounds of fiddle and mandolin made a stuffy oak-panelled private club warm and welcoming.

Those sounds work the same magic at the Station Inn, smoothing away the room’s rough edges. Sunday night is jam night, and the owner J.T., a crack bass player, anchors the jam himself. “This club was started by musicians,” he explains, “and was meant to be a place where musicians could come to play. We’ve always had jams on Sunday.” The musicians sit in the round, each instrument taking its turn for a solo – a bluegrass orthodoxy but one that makes the music democratic. Between solos, the fellow at the next table leans over to chat about how good the pickers are. On jam night inside the Station Inn, Nashville disappears. You’d swear you were on someone’s country porch.

Can’t you feel those hills around you
Can’t you feel a touch of home
Don’t you wish you’d never gone
There are some things memories can’t bring home

– “Hills of Home,” Hazel Dickens