Nashville - If you're a country music fan, there's nothing like the Grand Ole Opry.

When the fiddlers start to play and the square dancers take to the stage at the Grand OIle Opry Theater, you just want to stand up and shout.

For history buffs, country music's rich story-including the early years in the Twenties - is there for all to see in all its glory as Nashville's Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

From gaily-decorated guitars to Elvis Presley's gold plated Cadillac, the giant museum houses over one million historical items.

At the museum, I was struck by this quotation from singer Hank Williams about the special role of country songwriters, who are, after all, the real ket to the singer's success."A song ain't nothin in the world," Williams said, "but a story just wrote with music to it."

More to the point, you begin to appreciate the role of country songwriters at the crowded little Bluebird Cafe, where both seasoned and aspiring songwriters perform their own stories "wrote with music". And if you're lucky, you might even hear a song waiting to be born.

A songwriter who sometimes appears at the Bluebird is Billy Kirsch- but his background, I discovered, is anything but "country".

Calling himself "Nashville's Jewish Cowboy," Kirsch has written hit songs for some of America's top country singers and groups--Kenny Rodgers, Wynonna Judd, Steve Wariner, and Alabama, to name a few--but he says it was the synagogue melodies he heard growing up in New York that fed the roots of his musical background.

"My son had his bar-mitzva in Nashville last August," Kirsch recalled, "and one of the guests was a friend of mine who is a very successful country songwriter. At the reception, he came up to me and said, Now I know where you get all those deep emotional melodies for the country songs,"

"i hadn't thought of it consciously, but when he said that, I thought, there's something there as far as the melodic value of...the traditional prayers..."

Soon ater moving to Nashville with his family, Kirsch had his first song recorded by Kenny Rogers.

He remembers calling his family in New York and telling them, "you'll never believe this, but Kenny Rogers is heading into a recording studio with one of my songs."

The song, called "when You Are Loving Me," was never a hit, but it did put Kirsch on the map musically with the country sound.

"Is it Over Yet" and "Come Some Rainy Day," both recorded by Wynonna Judd have become standards, while "Stay Gone" launched launched country singer Jimmy Wayne's career as a Top 5 single.