With the country music film Crazy Heart opening here this weekend and the hot money on its star Jeff Bridges winning an Oscar for his role as a washed-up singer, JONATHAN FUTRELL polishes his rhinestones and moseys on down to Tennessee's 'Music City'

GOOSEBUMPS  pop up when you least expect them. Like shooting the breeze on the third floor of Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Just 10 years old and shaped like a piano keyboard, it is already the soul of the city. OK, so there is Elvis’s gold Cadillac with an old-fashioned television in the back; a pair of Carl Perkins’s blue suede shoes; and one of Dolly Parton’s wigs that’s as tall as me. Artefacts, interactive displays and music at every step.

Just when I think I’ve seen it all, however, I come upon Kris Kristofferson’s original handwritten manuscript for Help Me Make It Through The Night, recorded by a raft of singers and made into an international hit by Gladys Knight.

Believe me, goosebumps don't get any bigger. This is the best museum I have ever visited and when it is time to go, it has me feeling the way I did the first time I said adiós to New York; I don't want to leave.

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Minutes later, however, the tour bus drops me off outside Studio B where Dolly Parton, Waylon Jennings and the Everly Brothers recorded a string of hits. From the outside, it's an uninspiring single-storey building but here producers Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley created the smooth "Nashville Sound", stripping away the fiddles and banjo. The recording equipment is unchanged since it closed in 1977, including a beaten-up Steinway grand piano and clunky reel-to-reel tape machines. It's where Elvis recorded Guitar Man and Crying In The Chapel. Time for more goosebumps.

Anyone who understands the impact the American South has had on music should come to Nashville. It's like finding someone with the ultimate record collection and all the stories, clothes, legends and stuff that go with it. From my 25th-floor room at the Renaissance Nashville Hotel (modern, efficient, affordable but a bit bland) I can see how the heart of Nashville is cut off from the rest of the city by the Cumberland River and a network of freeways and railway sidings.

The long, low horn of freight trains heading to Kentucky offers a mellow comfort in the dead of night.

Below are the neon lights of Broadway and the honky-tonk bars open until the early hours, places like Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, where Willie Nelson got his first break, Layla's Bluegrass Inn, and Robert's.

Admission is free and house bands knock out country classics. These are exactly the sorts of places where Jeff Bridges's character Bad Blake earns a crust at the start of his role in Crazy Heart. I can see the white, spherical Sommet Center, where Eric Clapton is playing later this month.

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Across the street is Gruhn Guitars, the shop where Slow Hand has bought 50 guitars over the years.

FOR ALL the neckerchiefs and Western glam, Nashville is a university town with thriving young Americana music, theatre and vintage clothes scenes appealing to a new generation of incoming residents. Nicole Kidman and her country-singing husband Keith Urban have a house here with their 18-month-old daughter Sunday Rose.

Karen Elson, Jack White's (the White Stripes) supermodel wife, runs Venus & Mars, a vintage clothing store over on Belmont Boulevard; and at Grimey's, a great new and "pre-loved" (that's used to you and me) music store on 8th Avenue, two of my personal country/bluegrass favourites, Gillian Welch and guitarist Dave Rawlings (his latest is my album of the year), do impromptu shows for a lucky lunch crowd.

A growing number of New Yorkers are relocating to sleepy East Nashville. There's music at 3 Crow Bar, once popular with the Kings of Leon, and a Sunday brunch of eggs and grits at Margot Café Bar. Or visit Hillsboro Village, where Fido is the centre of all life, a sprawling restaurant with mix-and-match wooden furniture and dudes in cowboy gear bent over laptops while forking blueberry pancakes. Nearby, and also in tune with the new Nashville, is the fabulous Hutton Hotel, the place for visiting musicians: modern, very cool and colourful in that Fifties way with big lampshades and G-Plan style furniture.

These new areas are a few miles from Downtown, making a rental car essential.
Sat-nav is also a must; without it I'd still be on the Interstate halfway to Memphis. For a day out of the city, I set it for Lynchburg (population 360), and the Jack Daniel's whiskey distillery. The 90-minute drive along the Shelby Turnpike takes me through limestone valleys with silver sycamores.

The distillery resembles something out of the old frontier, all shacks and tubby old boys in dungarees. The free tour, led by a man called Goose the size of moose, is a heady mix of history and the aroma of sugar maple fired for charcoal in the filtering process.

I LUNCH around the corner at Miss Mary Bobo's. This is a former boarding house turned restaurant behind a white picket fence. In ornate Victorian rooms, Southern belles of a certain age serve fried chicken, meatloaf, okra, candied apples, rice, beans and biscuits, and ladles of Tennessee charm.

The Grand Ole Opry, a symbol of Nashville "Music City" and the oldest still-running radio show in the USA, has moved from its traditional venue to a new one adjacent to the Opry Mills shopping mall, a modern auditorium with a stage resembling a barn.

It's a live show with more bootlace ties than you can shake a lasso at and live product endorsements between songs. It's actually a bit cheesy. I prefer Bluebird Café, a mile or two beyond Fido, a cramped venue in a shopping mall where musicians come to jam. It only costs £8 and the musicians are so close you can smell their aftershave.

On this night it's regulars Fred Knobloch, who's written for Ray Charles; Thom Schuyler, who boasts the Judds; and Tony Arata, who's penned for Garth Brooks (who has sold more records in the US than the Beatles). Three singer/songwriters and Jelly Roll Johnson on the "Mississippi saxophone" (a harmonica), at the top of their game. Now that's Nashville, and a whole lot more goosebumps.

GETTING THERE:

North American Travel Service (0131 225 4155/ www.northamericantravelservice.co.uk) offers four nights' room only at the Renaissance Nashville Hotel from £953pp (two sharing), including return flights from Heathrow, Birmingham or Manchester with Continental Airlines and car hire including sat-nav.

Miss Mary Bobo's Boarding House Restaurant (dialling from UK: 001 931 759 7394), Jack Daniel's distillery (931 759 4221/ www.jackdaniels.com).

The Bluebird Café: www.bluebirdcafe.com

Nashville Tourism: www.visitmusiccity.com