Now through the end of 2024
Birthplace of Country Music Museum
About the Exhibit
Explore Nashville's songwriting legacy through Ed Rode's captivating portraits of the storytellers who shaped its iconic sound. An uncommonly intimate storytelling retrospective, Songwriter Musician documents three decades of Nashville's stars, songwriters and session greats at decisive, unguarded moments in their careers.
The exhibit showcases more than 40 prints, including iconic and rarely-seen photos of legendary country music performers such as GRAMMY winners Dolly Parton, Bill Monroe, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, to contemporary artists including Taylor Swift, Keith Urban, Brad Paisley, Lainey Wilson and Jelly Roll, among many others.
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Discover the Art
Songwriters are the origin point for the music we hear on our radios and sound systems. Over his 30-year career documenting the country music, Ed forged partnerships, fostered friendships, and at times, was welcomed into their worlds as family. This special status allowed him to truly get to know, understand and dive deeper into the hearts of his subjects, often photographing them throughout their careers. Documenting both the renowned and lesser-known, this selection of aluminum prints in multiple sizes contains a wide range of songwriters photographed in places that inspired them the most: from humble homes to secluded hideaways to clifftop vistas.
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Hear the Stories
By scanning a special QR code, visitors immerse themselves in the stories behind the project as they explore the exhibit. Highlights include Dolly Parton’s unforgettable time-traveling moment, a dramatic cliffside encounter with Billy Joe Shaver and the wild moment when Steven Tyler jumped on the bar with Keith Urban at Tootsie's. These captivating stories, along with many others, bring the imagery to life and showcase the significance of this visual documentary, now presented as both a book and photo exhibition.
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Listen to the Music
Enjoy the Museum’s custom playlist featuring the songwriters and artists featured in the exhibit, adding a rich audio layer to the visual experience. From legendary hits to hidden gems, the music behind the portraits comes alive, enhancing the storytelling and deepening the connection between the artists and their timeless work.
Ed Rode
About the Photographer
A nationally recognized photographer based in Nashville, Ed Rode has spent most of his career, camera in hand, chasing meaningful moments in music history and making them permanent.
He isn’t only — or even primarily — a music photographer. Over the course of nearly four decades, Rode has captured sports legends, movie and TV stars, travel destinations, whiskey brands, and restaurant chains. But he moved to Nashville in 1990, just as country music's neo-traditionalist era was shifting into the shadow of arena fireworks, as legends were entering their golden years, and as Nashville itself was prepping for unparalleled change.
Growing up in the Midwest, Rode thought he might become a history teacher, relaying the narratives that emerged and lessons learned. But a high school photojournalism mentoring program showed him another way to hold onto history. A Master of Arts degree in Photo Communications from Ohio University helped fine-tune his skills.
And a fresh-from-grad-school job as a staff photographer for The Nashville Banner, the city’s afternoon daily, brought Rode to Music City to find and tell stories. In Nashville, Rode saw that history was unfolding all around him, and that meaningful moments were going undocumented. So for decades, he made sure to put himself — and his camera — where the moments were.
From that first newspaper post, Rode built a career and a reputation as a photographer with a storyteller’s eye and a historian’s instincts. His work has appeared in numerous national publications; in exhibits from the Nashville International Airport to the legendary Bluebird Cafe; and on album covers for artists including Willie Nelson, The Chicks and Peter Frampton.
Ultimately, Rode did become a teacher, too. Along with instructing, lecturing, and advising students at Vanderbilt University, O’More College of Design, Western Kentucky University, and Northwestern University, Rode works as a full-time instructor in the Journalism and Mass Communications Department at Murray State University, teaching young artists how to find their stories, focus their storyteller’s eye, and click.