20th Season: A Perfect Marriage of Music and Hockey

When Carrie Underwood belted out the national anthem before the Predators' first home playoff game last season, it served as another shining illustration of the ties between country music and the hometown hockey team.
That kind of scene would be repeated again and again throughout the 2017 postseason, whether it was the string of entertainers performing the anthem at Bridgestone Arena or the slew of singers who performed free outdoor concerts.
The marriage of hockey and country music has long been a happy one in Music City.

So who should get credit for setting the two up?
Take a trip back in time to discover the answer to that question, returning to 1997, when the Predators were first granted the rights to an expansion NHL team.
The organization had to find a way to sell hockey tickets to a Middle Tennessee marketplace that - for the most part - hadn't grown up with the sport.
"We were trying to sell people something they didn't know they wanted, and trying to describe something that we couldn't show," said Jack Diller, the team's first president. "We didn't really want to show them preseason hockey because exhibition hockey is not really that exciting."

So at least one advertising tactic made perfect sense in Music City: Get Nashville's country-music stars to sell the game to music lovers.
It turned out the Predators had an ace up their sleeve in the person of Barry Trotz, the team's first coach.
In the mid-1990s, Trotz was coaching the Portland (Maine) Pirates of the American Hockey League. He met Garth Brooks during one of Brooks's concerts stops in Portland, and the two ended up as participants in a pick-up hockey game that went on until about 3 a.m.
It wasn't long afterward that Trotz began use his contacts at other cities around the AHL, helping Brooks - a longtime hockey fan - get ice time during his concert stops.
When Trotz was named the Predators' head coach in 1997, Brooks was eager to repay the favor to his friend.
So began a proliferation of eye-catching billboards that popped up around Nashville before the first season. The ads featured smiling country-music talents like Brooks, Amy Grant, Martina McBride and Lorrie Morgan - among others - with their front teeth blacked out in hockey style, flanked by the question "Got Tickets?"
"There's no question [the ads] helped us connect," Diller said. "With the exception of some folks who were making automobiles in Spring Hill [Tennessee] - the ones who'd been run out of Detroit - most people just didn't know a heck of a lot about hockey. So to have Tim McGraw or Faith Hill or different folks talking about hockey and attaching themselves to it, that helped a whole lot."

The memorable billboards were some of the first tangible signs of a mutual embrace between the Predators and country music, one that only deepened during the first season.
The Predators and Music City's musicians just seemed to take to one another, with a number of the city's singers - such as Barbara Mandrell, as well as Gill and Grant - buying season tickets.
"I found the music industry was very parallel to hockey players," said Tom Fitzgerald, the Predators' first captain. "We're very humble, our upbringings were what they were, and we never forgot where we came from. We were similar-type people, just down to earth."
Fast forward again to 2017, when the parade of nationally known anthem singers drew almost as much attention as the hockey games themselves.

Luke Bryan sang the anthem prior to Game 4 against Chicago, followed by this lengthy list of top-notch talent over the Predators' remaining nine playoff contests: Little Big Town; Vince Gill, with daughters Jenny and Corinna; Lady Antebellum; Keith Urban; Kelly Clarkson; Trisha Yearwood; Martina McBride; Dierks Bentley; and Faith Hill.
The fact that the Preds withheld the name of the anthem singer right up until the moment he/she was announced allowed fans to spend hours debating which star would be up next.
Predators President & CEO Sean Henry said the idea of keeping the anthem singer a secret - or at least trying to do so in this day and age of social media - actually got its start a few years earlier, prior to a playoff contest.
"We used to announce who the singer would be a day or two out, with the idea it would sell tickets faster," Henry said. "But during one playoff run, we had someone cancel on us. So when the media was asking who was going to sing the anthem, we just said, 'Well, you'll just have to come and see.' Vince Gill's daughter, Jenny, wound up singing, so it turned out really well."

There were plenty of intriguing angles about all the singers, but it was hard to beat that of Underwood, who, of course, is married to former Predators Captain Mike Fisher.
Underwood wore a Fisher jersey for the performance, and painted her fingernails and toenails in Preds colors to boot. The Predators won the crucial game 3-2 in overtime, giving them a 3-0 lead in the first-round series against Chicago.
"I would like to see her do it every game, to be honest," Fisher said with a smile afterward. "She's 1-0-0."