Hi, I'm Anna Marie Cox and welcome to With Friends Like These.

If you've been listening to this show any time in the past year, you know I've moved

back to Texas.

Texas is home for me.

I spent most of my childhood here, my parents are from here.

And my childhood had a country music soundtrack, the outlaw country of the 70s and 80s.

It was just what everyone around me listened to.

My parents took me to my first concert at five, and it was a Willie Nelson concert.

I think I loved country music as a kid and I still love country music because it tells

stories and it tells stories in a way that even a kid understands.

I mean, lots of kinds of music tell stories, but in country music, they're just right there.

Long black veil, Folsom Prison Blues.

And one of my favorite songs of all time, Pansho and Lefty.

Those are just out and out stories with like a beginning, middle, and end in the song.

But today we're talking about country music in a particular context.

This whole month has featured musicians exploring how music influences relationships, not

the relationships of the people listening to the music or the relationships necessarily

described in the music, but the relationships of the people making the music.

In the last show, we talked to Kathy Valentine about her time with the Go Go's.

Their rise, their fall, their breakup, and reunion.

And today we're talking to rising artist Sierra Ray about Nashville.

Not the city, really, but what people who play country music mean when they say Nashville.

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