16th Avenue: The True Story of Nashville's Murder on Music Row Hardcover – September 24, 2025

In 1989, a young man named Kevin Hughes was murdered as he and another man walked to their car outside Evergreen Records on Music Row in the heart of Nashville's music district. As he lay dying in the street, a young aspiring singer named Aubrey Hill comforted him. Aubrey hill would soon be known to the world as Faith Hill and become an international superstar. Kevin Hughes was a chart manager for Cash Box Magazine, and it was rumored that he was about to go to the press about corruption and payola occurring at Cash Box. Entertainers and corrupt promoters were paying money for chart positions. Thirteen years after the murder, Tony D'Antonio, the man who hired Kevin Hughes, was convicted of his murder and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2014. But was he the actual murderer? Was he paid for committing the crime by one of Nashville's most corrupt promoters? Two weeks after the murder, a young man by the name of Garth Brooks released his first single. The book juxtaposes those two events, with the murder of Kevin Hughes representing the end of old Nashville, the somewhat seedy city with a music industry that suffered from greed, vice, and corruption; and the rise of Garth Brooks, which represented the new Nashville, the development of Lower Broadway, and the rise of corporate country music to become America's top genre of music. The book leaves open the possibility that the wrong man was convicted of the crime and provides a bit of a bombshell at the end about a particular piece of important evidence. Read more