Though the Country Music Association's official schedule lists Nashville's signature music event as running from June 8-11, anyone along Lower Broadway on Wednesday afternoon saw thousands of country fans and heard dozens of country songs. A brief downtown parade led into a more than five-hour, multi-artist concert in the Gaylord Entertainment Center's courtyard, and fans watched country duo Big & Rich and self-proclaimed "hick-hop" rapper Cowboy Troy deliver a genre-melding set. The whole thing seemed for all the world like… well, like the CMA Music Festival was going on.

The CMA Music Festival actually begins today.