Music City Walk of Fame inducts Bobby Bare, Dierks Bentley, Keb' Mo' and Connie Smith

A damp, chilly, overcast afternoon could not dampen the spirits of the overflow crowd that gathered directly across from downtown Nashville's Country Music Hall of Fame for the 2022 class of the Music City Walk of Fame's induction ceremony.

Seven decades of notable Nashville history were feted as Bobby Bare, Dierks Bentley, Keb' Mo' and Connie Smith were immortalized forever. Their names are now embedded in concrete alongside those in attendance, including legendary rock and country music fashion designer Manuel Cuevas, mandolin-playing bluegrass icon Ricky Lee Skaggs and Christian pop superstar Amy Grant.

An inaugural 2006 induction ceremony saw the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, Reba McEntire, Ronnie Milsap, Roy Orbison and Kenneth D. Schermerhorn of the Nashville Symphony get their stars embedded in the walkway at Music City Walk of Fame Park. In the nearly two decades that have followed, the Music City Walk of Fame has recognized almost 100 creatives for significant contributions to preserving Nashville's musical heritage and contributing to the world through song.

Upon being introduced by the ceremony's emcee, WSM Radio announcer Bill Cody, country music legend — and fellow Music City Walk of Fame member — Marty Stuart noted that his wife, Smith, was the "heart and soul of country music." 

"Not until she gets to heaven" would she understand "how many lives she [had] touched," he added.

Smith added to The Tennessean: "I'm so blessed. My career never feels like work. I am just someone who loves to sing."

2019 Music City Walk of Fame inductee Clint Black inducted blues icon Keb' Mo' and highlighted how he and his music "brings out the best in human nature." Mo' is notably a transplant to Nashville from Los Angeles (he relocated with his wife in 2010), but in his comments he noted that he felt personally and professionally refreshed by the move, that it was like starting his life "all over again."

As for Bobby Bare, the 87-year-old singer-songwriter, like Keb' Mo', relocated from Los Angeles to Nashville. Only for Bare, it was in the midst of crossing over from rock to country in the early 1960s as a Chet Atkins-signed artist to RCA Records.

In a conversation with The Tennessean, Bare — who would later host the songwriter showcase program, Bobby Bare and Friends on The Nashville Network — highlighted how his early days in Nashville with Atkins foretold much of Nashville and country music's evolution.

"When people like Chet Atkins and I arrived here in the early 1960s, the music industry here was very small," he said. "Now, Nashville keeps growing wider and wider as a community of singers and songwriters. Chet promised me that some of the (countrypolitan) records we cut back then would cause country music to lose some of its traditional identity, but we'd gain so much more." 

Lastly, Stuart returned to the podium to induct current-era, chart-topping hitmaker Dierks Bentley, an artist for whom he has a deep affinity.

"Once I met him and shook his hand, I knew he belonged here," he stated, recalling their first in-person meeting.

Emcee Cody added that Bentley's recent work in Nashville as a rising community pillar has included playing for nearly three hours during the city's nationally-broadcast 2022 New Year's Eve festivities — numerous acts canceled due to COVID-19 protocol issues.

In his remarks, Bentley noted a sense of joy reminiscing about how Nashville's musical community met the standard to which he held the genre as a fan of it in his youth in Phoenix, Arizona. 

"Country music served as a portal into another world for me," Bentley said. "So, when I moved to Nashville at 19, started playing at the Station Inn, and discovered that people like Keith Whitley, Ricky Lee Skaggs and Marty Stuart were all bluegrass-inspired artists too, it helped me find my footing."