Growing up in an Anglo-Indian family of musicians, influenced by country music, Sheridan Brass, 33, remembers hearing pretty much nothing else. He’d wake up to the songs of Kenny Rogers playing in the living room, as his parents hummed away. Having led a peripatetic life as a child—he was born in Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, and moved between the hills of Ooty, Kodaikanal, Yercaud and Coonoor, before settling in Bengaluru—country music, in a way, remained a constant. Yet, at some point, drawn towards the force that was hip-hop, he “swore not to listen to country again”. But, it would only be a matter of time, somewhere in his late teens, when Brass would find himself crooning in clubs in Bengaluru, singing with his trademark cowboy hat and beard, looking no less a country singer himself.

Brass is now egging his 8,000-odd fans on Facebook—most of whom started listening to him during the pandemic-induced lockdown—to crowd-fund his dream to head to Nashville, Tennessee in America, which he describes as the “mecca of music”. “I have been dreaming of going to Nashville since I was 18. It’s a huge part of why I do, what I do,” says Brass in a telephonic chat. “Many people think that Nashville is only known for country music, but it offers a solid base for musicians across genres. That’s where all the talent is. I feel that I need to be there, in that pond, to grow as an artiste. In India, because country music is not so popular, there’s no real benchmark that has been set, or someone I could compete with or look up to, as a musician,” he feels. At Nashville, he has a six-month plan of recording some of the original pieces he has written and composed, and putting it together in an album, which he will then promote and market in the American city. The end goal, he says, is to become “the first Indian to be inducted as a member of the Grand Ole Opry”. The Opry is a weekly American country music stage concert in Nashville, first founded in 1925, as a one-hour radio “barn dance”. The Opry today showcases a mix of famous singers and contemporary chart-toppers performing country, bluegrass, Americana, folk, and gospel music.