HISTORY OF NSAI on NSAI

NSAI Founding Member Marijohn Wilkin, past NSAI
President Chuck Cannon, and other Founding Members
at NSAI's 35th Anniversary.

As songwriters know, sometimes the best ideas appear during lunch, and that was the case more than 40 years ago with songwriters Eddie Miller, Buddy Mize and Bill Brock. In 1967, over lunch at Ireland's Restaurant in Nashville, the three came up with a great idea: a songwriters association.

That kernel of an idea, planted and nurtured four decades ago, took root and has since grown into the 4,500+ member Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI), which today promotes awareness of songwriters' cultural contributions (through events such as Tin Pan South Songwriters Festival), champions the legal rights of professional songwriters and helps develop the abilities of aspiring songwriters.

But such growth and prosperity didn't occur overnight. Back in the late ‘60s, Nashville's songwriting community consisted of only a few dozen writers who received little credit for their achievements and whose royalty compensation was small, largely because of an antiquated copyright law. Additionally, outside of the performing rights societies ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, songwriter recognition was virtually non-existent.

Then, one November day in 1967, Miller (a 1975 inductee into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and founding member of the Academy of Country Music in California) encouraged fellow songwriters Mize and Brock to begin an association for writers in Nashville. Mize and Brock loved the idea, and all three set out to make it happen.

Within a month, Eddie, Buddy and Bill were conducting the group's first organizational meeting at the Old Professional's Club on Music Row. The meeting attracted some 40 songwriters, including Liz & Casey Anderson ("The Fugitive"), Felice & Boudleaux Bryant ("Wake Up Little Susie"), Kris Kristofferson ("Me And Bobby McGee") and Marijohn Wilkin ("One Day At A Time"). Those 40 -- more than half the songwriters in town at that time -- became the founding membership of NSAI and began spending countless hours around Marijohn’s kitchen table brainstorming, discussing and refining ideas.

Within a year, the Nashville Songwriters Association was chartered by the state of Tennessee as a not-for-profit trade association, and from that moment, NSAI would go on to make a difference for all songwriters by helping to revise antiquated copyright laws and to establish new intellectual property protection in the digital age, by establishing a network of over 90 songwriter workshops to provide local instruction at home and abroad, and by conducting more than a half dozen educational conferences and awards shows each year.

And though based in Nashville, NSAI represents all musical genres and includes songwriters from across the United States and overseas. NSAI provides a haven for both proven and undiscovered writers -- to get a cup of coffee, to make a phone call or just to receive a word of advice or consolation. To quote NSAI’s motto: "IT ALL BEGINS WITH A SONG" -- and, sometimes, it all begins over lunch.