“Nashville Cats” was written by John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful as a tribute to Nashville’s session musicians. By Sebastian’s account, the idea came after the band came back to their hotel from a show in Nashville and he and guitarist Zal Yanovsky watched an unknown guitarist with a Telecaster and a poor amp, no stage under him, play a set at the hotel bar. He wrote the song some weeks later at his home in East Quogue, New York.
The words are a string of tall claims in exact numbers: how many guitar pickers and guitar cases Nashville has, how many mothers whose sons are all pickers, how a thirteen-year-old narrator heard new-sounding records on television that blew him away, and how the record man told him that Nashville records don’t sell up North. The refrain praises the Nashville players for playing both cleanly and wildly, and says they have been at it since they were babies. Bassist Steve Boone later said it was the band’s first conscious effort to make a country song. The recording uses a pedal steel guitar left over from an earlier session, which Sebastian learned to play in the forty-five minutes before the band began recording.
Kama Sutra issued the Lovin’ Spoonful’s version on the album Hums of the Lovin’ Spoonful and as a single in late 1966, with “Full Measure” on the other side. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 on 17 December 1966 and peaked at number eight.
Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys recorded it at Columbia Studio in Nashville on 1 February 1967, with Johnny Johnson and Grady Martin on guitars, Buck Graves on dobro, Roy Huskey Jr. on bass, Charlie McCoy on harmonica and Murrey Harman Jr. on drums. Columbia issued it that month as a single (4-44040) with “Roust-a-bout,” and it reached number 54 on Billboard’s country singles chart. The Del McCoury Band recorded it for their album The Family, released in February 1999, with Jerry Douglas on dobro.
