🇺🇸 United States · The South / Southeast
Nashville is the world capital of country music and the capital of the state of Tennessee. Known as 'Music City', it beats to the rhythm of live music: in its streets, its bars (honky-tonks) and its venues, music plays at all hours, and the great legends of country and other genres have passed through its recording industry. But Nashville is much more: a vibrant, booming city with good food, history, universities and even a full-size replica of the Greek Parthenon.
The heart of the fun is downtown, around Broadway, an avenue packed with honky-tonks playing live country music from morning until the small hours, neon signs and bustle. Nearby are temples of the genre such as the Country Music Hall of Fame, the historic Ryman auditorium and, a little farther out, the legendary Grand Ole Opry, the longest-running live country music show in the country. Add to that neighborhoods with personality, the Cumberland River and a food scene famous for hot chicken.
This guide covers the essentials of Nashville with a practical eye: the musical buzz of Broadway, the great country museums and venues, the Grand Ole Opry, the surprising Parthenon, the local food and how to get around. Whether you love music, going out at night or getting to know the culture of the American South, Nashville is a city you experience with its own soundtrack.
Nashville was founded in 1779 as Fort Nashborough, on the banks of the Cumberland River, and soon became an important trading center and river port. The capital of Tennessee since 1843, it was a scene of the Civil War. In the 20th century it turned into the epicenter of country music: the Grand Ole Opry radio show, which began broadcasting in 1925, and the development of 'Music Row' cemented it as 'Music City'. Today it is one of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The cradle of American music: Cherokee land and the land of Sequoyah, of the Memphis blues and the Nashville country, of Elvis and Graceland, of Davy Crockett's frontier and of the Appalachians and the Great Smoky Mountains.
Read the history of Tennessee →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Nashville was founded in 1779 by a group of settlers led by James Robertson and John Donelson, who established a fortified settlement on the banks of the Cumberland River, on the frontier of what was then the American West. The site was named Fort Nashborough, in honor of General Francis Nash, a hero of the American Revolution. A few years later, the name was simplified to Nashville.
The location beside the Cumberland River proved strategic: it turned Nashville into an important point of trade and river transport, with boats connecting the region to the Ohio and Mississippi river systems. The city grew as the mercantile and agricultural center of the fertile Middle Tennessee basin. In 1796, Tennessee became a state of the Union, and Nashville steadily gained political weight until it was designated the permanent state capital in 1843.
During the first half of the 19th century, Nashville prospered and earned a certain cultural and educational reputation, which would later win it the nickname 'the Athens of the South'. Institutions, universities and imposing buildings were built, such as the state Capitol. But, like the whole region, its economy and its society were marked by slavery, and the city would soon be dragged into the conflict that divided the country.
Tennessee joined the Confederacy during the Civil War, but Nashville fell early into Union hands: in 1862 it was occupied by federal forces, becoming the first Confederate state capital to be captured. Because of its strategic position and its value as a supply and transport hub, Nashville was heavily fortified and remained under Union control for the rest of the war.
In December 1864 the Battle of Nashville was fought on its outskirts, one of the decisive clashes of the western theater, in which General Hood's Confederate army suffered a crushing defeat that practically wiped it out as a fighting force. After the war and the abolition of slavery, Nashville began its recovery and, like other southern cities, embraced the ideal of the 'New South', oriented toward industry, commerce and education.
In the following decades, the city strengthened its educational and cultural profile —with the founding of universities such as Vanderbilt and of historically Black institutions such as Fisk University, whose celebrated choir, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, spread the spirituals around the world. As a sign of that cultural calling, in 1897 Nashville held the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, for which it built the famous replica of the Parthenon, a symbol of its nickname 'Athens of the South'.
The chapter that defined Nashville's modern identity began in 1925, when a local radio station started broadcasting a live music program that would soon be called the 'Grand Ole Opry'. That country music show —then called 'hillbilly'— became enormously popular across the South and the Midwest over the airwaves, and turned Nashville into the undisputed center of the genre. For decades, the Opry was broadcast from the Ryman Auditorium, today revered as 'the mother church of country music'.
Around the radio and the Opry a whole industry flourished. From the middle of the 20th century on, record labels, recording studios, publishers and musicians concentrated in an area that came to be known as 'Music Row'. Countless hits were recorded there and the distinctive 'Nashville sound' was forged. The city drew artists from all over the country looking to make it in country music, and it definitively earned the nickname 'Music City'. In time, its music industry diversified into rock, pop, gospel and other genres as well.
During the second half of the 20th century, Nashville was also an important stage of the civil rights movement, with notable non-violent student sit-ins and protests in the early 1960s. In recent decades, the city has seen explosive growth, becoming one of the fastest-expanding urban areas in the United States, a magnet for tourism, food and, of course, live music. Today, the neon signs and honky-tonks of Broadway, the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Grand Ole Opry keep alive the musical pulse that makes Nashville a one-of-a-kind destination.
Beyond music, Nashville holds a central place in the history of the civil rights movement. In early 1960, Black students from universities such as Fisk, Tennessee State and the American Baptist College —trained in the principles of non-violence by the Reverend James Lawson— began a series of sit-ins at the segregated lunch counters downtown. Despite arrests and assaults, they kept up exemplary discipline, and in May 1960 they made Nashville one of the first major southern cities to begin desegregating its public lunch counters.
Out of that movement came figures who would be key on a national scale, such as John Lewis, a future congressman and historic civil rights leader, and Diane Nash. The Nashville campaigns became a model of non-violent protest that influenced the rest of the country, including the Freedom Rides of 1961. That legacy is remembered today in places such as the Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library and the Witness Walls, beside the Capitol.
Since the late 20th century, and above all in the 21st, Nashville has seen explosive growth. The diversification of its economy —with health care (it is home to major companies in the sector), education, tourism and, of course, music— turned it into one of the fastest-expanding metropolitan areas in the United States, a phenomenon known as the 'it city'. The boom brought new skyscrapers, an intense restaurant and bar scene, bachelor and bachelorette parties and a constant flow of visitors to the honky-tonks of Broadway. That dizzying growth also raises challenges of housing, traffic and preserving the city's identity, but it has established Nashville as one of the most popular urban destinations in the country, where history, civil rights and music coexist with a bustling modernity.