NEW YORK — As the Bronx middle schoolers harmonized in their auditorium and plucked out basic chords on ukuleles and guitars, in walked their music instructor, Liz Rose – a Grammy-award winning country songwriter from Nashville.

Rose has penned tracks for some of the biggest names in the business, including Taylor Swift. But on this recent fall day, she helped 19 students write an original tune called “Everybody’s Perfect.”

“Y’all are awesome,” Rose said as she approached the stage. “Y’all made me cry.”

Country music and New York City don’t go hand in glove; the city has only one country radio station, which came on the air two years ago after a 17-year drought. Nonetheless, Music City musicians are partnering with a nonprofit that is providing music education in New York City schools to help boost it as a core subject.

The students at Pelham Gardens Middle School in the Bronx are among 500 students in 15 schools around the city to participate; they receive 10 lessons on how to write lyrics, and one class in each school has a videoconference session with a musician in Nashville.

The Nashville-New York connection is made through the Country Music Association Foundation, which began in 2006 to help fund music education programs in Nashville and is branching out across the country.

In recent years, it has donated to the New Yorkbased nonprofit Education Through Music, which helps provide music education to all students in 50 low-income elementary and middle schools in all five city boroughs. It also works with Words & Music, based out of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, which provides a curriculum for both music and language arts teachers to develop language skills through the art of songwriting.