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Nashville, Tennessee Like most reporters, I searched for a lead long before I would write a word. I planned to craft mine around the tune that played in my head as I walked in the door for the first time at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Whatever song it may be. No surprise that Will The Circle Be Unbroken emerged as my cerebral soundtrack. The Hall's latest book collaboration borrows the title. Johnny Cash sang the song on the Ryman stage before the old floor was torn up. I've sung it myself on stage a hundred times. And from my homework before I came, I knew those words were inscribed on the Hall's rotunda walls. But as I entered the hall, I had this epiphany: The title is a question, an interrogative, and a mandate. Who will preserve and protect the circle of America's story in song? Who will take on the daunting and humbling responsibility to capture, catalogue, and defend that living and lyrical language? I now stood within the boundaries of that answer – the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.  The Country Music Hall of Fame keeps the promise to keep the circle unbroken. Within those confines the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum obeys and elevates its sole commandment: Honor Thy Music. Country music is as old as a single Appalachian voice and as new as tomorrow's digital technology. The stage might be a quiet back porch or a raucous sold-out sports stadium. The instrument may be 200-year-old wood and hair from a horse's tail or electronics infused with megawatts. But whenever, wherever, or on whatever, country music will always be a place where, as Willie Nelson says, "people tell their life stories." Straight. No varnish. Country music is indeed a place, not just melodies and lyrics. And the place is America. And much of the best of America is sometimes better understood when seen through the eyes of foreigners. I met several my first afternoon at the Country Music Hall of Fame. An octogenarian French-speaking couple from northern New Brunswick, Canada saved their pensions for ten years for the big trip to Nashville. In the end they spent 12 days in the car and two in the hall of fame – and were never happier. I strolled with them for quite some time, and as they went from exhibit to exhibit, the scrapbook of their own lives turned its pages. Two men from Ireland – whom I met on St. Patrick's Day at the Hall – had accents so thick I could barely understand them. But their knowledge of American country music was encyclopedic. Each took great pleasure fact-checking the text on the exhibits. They found no errors. According to Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, who now at 60 is producing country recordings – when not making their own music, the Beatles listened to almost nothing else but American country. The Country Music Hall of Fame may be one of only 750 accredited museums in the nation, but it is the sole unofficial, de facto university with a curriculum dedicated to American history, poetry, economics, music and culture. And one that never sounded so good. "Everything we do is educational. We have school programs, instructional programs, family programs; the exhibition space is just the jumping off point for so much more," says museum director Kyle Young. "This is blue-collar music, born out of our history." And notes Young, the music did not simply document history as a singing usher with a guitar, but helped propel the course of the nation.
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