Besides writing hits, these nominees helped remake their industry

The Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame has announced a portion of its 56^th round of nominees. That list always includes hit-making heavyweights, but this group is particularly notable, thanks not only to the quality of their catalogs, but the profound and reshaping influence they’ve had their industry.

The Hall of Fame named nominees in two of its five categories: Contemporary Songwriters and Contemporary Songwriter/Artists. The thing is that the professional trajectories of some of this year’s candidates have helped redefine the relationship between the specialties of writing and performing in Nashville this century.

As I once observed in a trend piece for Vulture, “Throughout most of country’s existence as a commercial genre, creative labor, and profit derived from it, has been divvied up in a way that’s treated singing and songwriting as separate professions.” There have certainly been high-profile exceptions — Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn and Alan Jackson among them — but by and large, country recording artists traditionally relied on outside material that was penned by Music Row songsmiths and pitched around town by publishing companies’ song pluggers.

Though he’s categorized purely as a songwriter, Shawn Camp started off the 1990s with his own record deal and ended the decade supplying other artists with No. 1s, including Garth Brooks’ “Two Piña Coladas” and Brooks & Dunn’s “How Long Gone.” By the 2000s, he’d established his reputation for coming up with durable, chart-topping classics, though his vocal abilities also found a home in the bluegrass supergroup Earls of Leicester.

Chris Stapleton, on the other hand, is in the writer-artist category on the strength of the gravitas and grit he’s consistently balanced in his music since his 2015 blockbuster album “Traveller.” But he worked up to that by first writing for other singers, as well as the original lineup of The SteelDrivers. That bluegrass group served as an early introduction to his show-stopping, full-throated vocal attack.

Then there are Miranda Lambert and Taylor Swift, both nominated as writer-artists.

Each began carving out their careers in the mid-2000s with a singer-songwriter mentality, as opposed to a taste for hooks that would suit any number of acts. And it was partially thanks to the personalized touch they gave their songs that writer-artists have been the Nashville norm since. It’s nearly a given now that record labels will sign acts that have a hand in writing their material.