By RAY WADDLE

An ancient speculation says music escaped the taint of human sin. Every song that melts the heart carries a sliver of original paradise. The yearning embedded in blues, country, bluegrass, jazz, soul, R&B, pop, reggae, gospel, symphonic, chamber, Americana and the rest stirs embers from Eden.

If so, then Music City is a staging ground for biblical metaphysics, a séance of dreamers seeking the blessedness that abounded before the Fall. All over town, songwriting, church memories, conscience, celebrity and bottom-line calculations converge and jostle. What does it all mean?

“God in Music City,” a Vanderbilt-sponsored series of events through April, wonders aloud: How does music shape the religious identity of Nashville? How does spiritual experience influence musical experience? Is music a religion in Nashville? (see www.Godinmusiccity.org.)

An accompanying CD hints at answers, presenting mostly Protestant and Catholic hymns and folk songs, by choirs or singer-songwriters. Various lyrics – from Sarah Masen, Julie Lee, Kate Campbell, Dave Perkins, Debbie and Greg Wolf and others – offer refreshment or surprise. The shadow of Scripture falls across all.

“We are soul soldiers marching through the world on the road to peace; we must cross over battlefields;

and we must rise above it all;

we must stand together till we fall;

then we ll ride across the river and rest under the shade of the trees,” sing Tom Kimmel and Danny Flowers.

Any “God in Music City” discussion must wrestle with a world of paradox, the great tensions between belief and society that shaped the music in the first place.

Paradox one: Music is the South’s great gift to the world – jazz, gospel and blues sprung from the moral catastrophe of slavery, prejudice, poverty and defeat. That such beauty was wrung from such violent suffering is a contradiction that only a world religion (Southern Christianity) or a great literature (Faulkner, Flannery and gang) has the stamina to absorb.

Paradox two: Though musical lyrics often reinforce official piety, they are also free to articulate unofficial doubts and dreads. That is one great function of a teeming music scene in a serious church town: it is a release valve against the relentless boosterism of institutionalized faith. Music grants permission to individuals to resolve, or at least admit, the contradictions of every moment on earth -- spirit vs. flesh, dreams vs. gravity, love of God vs. love of security.

America needs the music more than ever for facing its own economic, political contradictions. The big-selling O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack (2000) proved that. Its digest of the old regional sounds roused millions to memories of the land, ancestors, biblical touchstones.

When music denies the vast heartbreak, it produces a white-bread soundtrack. Nashville music soars when it delivers defiance or joy against contradictions of history, heaven and hell.