Jo Dee Messina's country roots, faith-filled future shine at Nashville's Ryman

Much like Jo Dee Messina's 35-year Nashville career, her sold-out Ryman Auditorium date on Saturday started as a novel trip astonished by sharing space with country's iconic folklore. It ended with a person — moreso than an artist — finally unveiling her best self on stage via the genre's characterization of the power of gospel music and the Holy Spirit's saving essence working through her art.

Yes, Messina's an artist whose success at present looks like Cole Swindell discovering the second chapter of his Nashville success via reinterpreting her work as Academy of Country Music Award-winning hit, "She Had Me At Heads Carolina." However, listening to her on the Ryman's stage accompanied by a piano and the choir from Gallatin's Three Oaks Church, belting a cover of Anne Wilson's "My Jesus" allowed for something seemingly unprecedented honest to shine from the 90s country favorite's spirit.

For some, that resulted in a standing ovation. For others, it caused them to wonder how an artist they felt like they knew from performances existed inside the faith-emboldened and radically overjoyed person they were bearing witness to onstage.

In order to understand what made Messina's evolutionary moment feel so stunning, it's crucial to characterize how, in retrospect, the evolution of mainstream country and Nashville's expectations that defined the era in which she became a Nashville star impacted her.

It frames both the joys of success that are recalled as Messina's bright cackle fills the air backstage at the Ryman Auditorium as she speaks with The Tennessean.

However, it also frames her near-disarmingly frank honesty, with which she also frames her life about her career.

No. 2 on the charts as country music redefines the meaning of No. 1

Messina's "Heads Carolina, Tails California" only hit No. 2 on Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart in 1996. Brooks & Dunn's cover of B. W. Stevenson's 1973 top-10 all-genre hit "My Maria" took five weeks to hit No. 1, while Messina's platinum-selling hit took three times as long to peak and chart under Brooks & Dunn.

That was famously the year that Garth Brooks — then having released 15 No. 1 singles and albums that eventually would sell over 90 million copies — sat in a building at Nashville's Fairgrounds for 23 hours signing autographs at the Country Music Association's (CMA) Fan Fair.

In Music City, expectations of stardom and what encompassed its pinnacle were shifting.

In the same year, plans to revitalize downtown Nashville, including an arena, a stadium, a symphony hall, and an enlarged country music hall of fame, from being a hodge-podge of dive bars, once-legendary country music spaces and assorted businesses of varying levels of reputation began to shape.

By 2001, Garth was four years removed from playing at New York City's Central Park for millions, while CMA's Fan Fair had moved four miles north to the banks of the Cumberland River at the venue now known as Nissan Stadium.

In a wild touch of fate familiar to numerous moments in Messina's bittersweetly successful career in 1999, Messina, like Brooks & Dunn three years prior, recorded her own 70s-era country cover, Dottie West's "A Lesson In Leavin.'"

Like "Heads Carolina, Tails California," the song only reached No. 2 on Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart. The reason? Lonestar's countrified pop/rock hit "Amazed" — released almost simultaneously with Messina's hit — achieved chart-topping status for eight weeks on the Billboard country chart, hit No. 1 on Billboard's all-genre Hot 100 and was number two on the Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks charts in 2000.

'No peace amid that craziness...'

"There was no peace amid that craziness," offers Messina in regards to discussing the first decade of her career.

Yes, she achieved five million albums sold and six No. 1 singles alongside the influential cosigns of performer Tim McGraw and producer Byron Gallimore. However, she also ended up $500,000 in debt, then eventually changed her management, took her publishing in-house, changed publicists, replaced much of her road crew (including her former fiancée Don Muzquiz) and entered rehab for alcoholism treatment.

Messina, who off-handedly calls herself "a career B artist," replaced achieving what success looked like in Nashville at the turn of the 21st century with a career that's seen her tour the world multiple times over, attracting fans that literally have seen every date on entire years of her concert tours, or drew them to fly from Athens, Greece to Nashville International Airport to watch Messina play country music's Mother Church.

However, even that wasn't enough to counterbalance the multiple shifts Messina's life endured.

"We all had these huge, fast-moving careers that, whenever they slowed down, I saw things that I believed were solid in my life — rather suddenly — not being so solid," she said. "Losing my identity made everything I thought I knew become foreign to me."

Yet still, as Messina's career slowed, she was impacted by even greater shocks. In 2013, her mother, Mary, underwent multiple open-heart surgeries for life-threatening heart problems. Four years later, Messina herself revealed she had been diagnosed with an unspecified cancer (from which she has announced a full recovery in 2022).

Her life has been as defined by heights as it has heartache.

Country's broad appeal counts Messina among its nation of converts

Messina arrived in Nashville simultaneously with the Class of 1989's Brooks, Alan Jackson, Clint Black, and Travis Tritt, achieving meteoric success and redefining country music's mainstream expectation by blending refined traditionalism and blue-collar approachable Southern rock swagger.

Messina is from Boston's Southwestern rural suburbs of Holliston, Massachusetts. In the 1980s, three low-frequency country music stations (two AM and one FM) in Providence, Rhode Island, provided the only country music available in the area.

Growing up near nature reserves while listening to faint traces of The Judds and Reba McEntire prepared Messina for what she could culturally expect in Nashville.

"Whether I was walking or riding my bike to the gas station I was working at as a 13-year-old (in 1983 when Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers had crossover success with "Islands In The Stream") or when I was 16 and Reba released, 'Whoever's In New England,' the heart of the genre is what attracted and hooked me."

Country's Nashville-driven mainstream industry doubling down on its appeal to a national marketplace shattered what Messina refers to as "bubbles" in eastern and western markets that hadn't seen country's 70s pop eras and 80s "urban cowboy" phases remain culturally relevant in farther-flung American locales.

Imagine Messina arriving not in the Nashville that felt and sounded like a fantastical blend of pop-enhanced traditionalism with an MTV-style sheen, but instead working as an accountant to pay the bills while performing in singing competitions at a bar that existed near where a statue of a pink elephant stands on Charlotte Pike in West Nashville.

Messina's journey to what she imagined country stardom could never quite arrive as it appeared to her on the radio.

A fully invested career finally yields a return on its work

"If I didn't ring the bell at No. 1, I just lashed out at everyone around me and kept on pushing," says Messina about what pushed her initial career rise.

In 1999, though, she had a major hit rest at No. 2. She was still the genre's most-played female star on country radio.

Because the genre continued to move the goalposts upon which peak acclaim was defined, her impressive achievements were never entirely fulfilling.

"Walking that road left carnage that's remained in my life," Messina said. "It's crazy that the same person (pursuing succession country music two decades ago) is the same person currently driving their teenage kids to school and hockey practice."

Listening to 2,500-plus people at The Ryman on Saturday night belting every ad-lib in 1998's "I'm Alright," or offering a prolonged standing ovation after a searing performance by she and her band of 2005's "My Give A Damn's Busted," makes Messina's complete shock and awe at how she's arrived at playing the Ryman as a headliner for the first time in 35 years seem strange.

However, it's in Messina, having yet another pause in her career's latest era, exhales after discussing her career's run of 90s-era country-defining hits.

"Man, that was a LOT of work, wasn't it," she said.

Faith, life and career finally positively converge

For the past decade, Messina's Christian faith-defined life has emerged as much or more important than maintaining expectations of career acclaim defined by country's mainstream industry.

She describes herself as "a sheep looking for a shepherd and Jesus Christ emerged in my life as a shepherd looking for sheep." For her, faith "authentically merged my heart with my compassion, desires, empathy and selflessness."

"Music now exists for me as not being a showcase of what I've lived, seen and learned," she continued.

"I already have hits that will last the bulk of my lifetime. Now, I'm looking at my relationship with Christ as what will allow other doors to open in my career and life. There were chapters of my life that appeared to be successful that were actually pretty crappy. Now I'm at a place where, because I have God first, it's reorganized how I can protect myself and my time in relationship to my career and (my existence)."

"My music has driven people to buy tickets to see me and purchase my album. But now, I want my music to fulfill my prayers so that it can touch people and fill them spiritually. My career and life have a time limit, but discovering, with the help of God and Jesus Christ, a safe place to recover your life from crashing and burning or feeling lost? That's eternal."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Jo Dee Messina's country roots, faith-filled future shine at Ryman