The machine behind the music
Nashville is the only city in the world where the dominant industry is the creation of three-minute songs. This sounds like hyperbole until you spend a day in Music Row — the cluster of recording studios, publishing houses, and music business offices south of downtown — and realize that what's happening there is genuinely industrial in scale. On any given Tuesday morning, hundreds of professional songwriters are sitting across from each other in small rooms, trying to write a hit. Most of them will never have one. A few will write the song that defines someone's entire decade. That's the bet they're all making.
The system that makes this possible is called co-writing, and Nashville invented it. Country music writers almost always work in pairs or trios, combining different strengths — the person with the hook, the person with the lyric, the person who knows what works on radio — into a process that is collaborative and professional and nothing like the romantic idea of the lone artist scribbling in a garret. The most successful Nashville songwriters are, in a real sense, craftspeople: they show up every day, they have appointments, they produce. The best of them are also artists of a very high order, but they don't let that slow them down.
Where country music came from
Country music did not begin in Nashville. It began in the mountains and hollows of Appalachia, in the Scottish and Irish ballads that settlers carried to the American frontier and slowly transformed by mixing with blues and gospel and whatever else was in earshot. The music was rural, regional, and largely ignored by the American cultural establishment until the 1920s, when recording technology made it possible to sell it at scale.
The Grand Ole Opry — which started in 1925 as a radio barn dance broadcast from a Nashville insurance company's building — was the instrument of the transformation. The show ran on WSM, a clear-channel 50,000-watt station whose signal reached the entire eastern half of the country on clear nights, and every Saturday it beamed this music into living rooms in Memphis and Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Artists came to Nashville because the Opry was there. Labels followed the artists. Studios followed the labels. By the 1950s the city had accidentally become the capital of a genre that would eventually outsell every other kind of American music.
Walk into the Ryman on any non-show day and the pew backs are still there, the original church pews that audiences sat in for thirty years of Saturday night radio. The building was a tabernacle built in 1892 by a riverboat captain named Thomas Ryman who had a religious conversion at a revival meeting and spent the rest of his life funding the evangelist who converted him. It became a performance venue almost by accident, and then it became the Mother Church of Country Music, and then it fell into disuse when the Opry moved to a suburban complex in 1974, and then it was saved, renovated, and is now one of the finest performance venues in the country. The arc of its history tells you a great deal about Nashville's relationship with its own past.
The sound that made the city
In the late 1950s, Nashville producers developed what became known as the Nashville Sound — a deliberate softening of country music's rougher edges, replacing fiddles and steel guitars with string sections and background vocals, designed to compete with pop music for mainstream airplay. Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley were the architects. Their critics called it the countrypolitan sound and didn't mean it as a compliment. What they built was a recording approach so commercially successful that it kept Nashville relevant for a generation and nearly killed the authentic soul of the music at the same time.
The counterreaction — the Outlaw movement of the 1970s, centered on Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson — was a direct response to the Nashville Sound's smoothness. Jennings and Nelson made records in Texas, on their own terms, with their own bands, and proved that country music didn't need to be polished to sell. The tension between the commercial machine and the authentic tradition has been the central drama of Nashville music ever since, and you can hear both sides of it on Lower Broadway on any given night.
Lower Broadway: honest about what it is
Lower Broadway is the honky-tonk strip that runs from Fifth Avenue down to the Cumberland River, and it is one of the more aggressively commercial entertainment districts in America. The bars are enormous, multi-story affairs with live music on multiple floors running from morning to close, seven days a week. The music is played by musicians who make their living from tips because the bars pay essentially nothing, which means the players are uniformly excellent — you can't survive on bad tips — and are also grinding through ten-hour shifts of crowd-pleasing covers.
Don't be snobbish about it. The honky-tonks of the 1940s and 50s were also commercial entertainment catering to a mass audience, and the music played in them was sometimes magnificent. Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, at 422 Broadway, has been running since 1960 and the back door of the Ryman — across the alley — was how Opry performers slipped out for a drink between sets. Kris Kristofferson used to clean Tootsie's in exchange for the chance to play there. Roger Miller and Willie Nelson drank at the bar. That history is real even if the current clientele is largely bachelorette parties.
The other Nashville
The city most visitors see — Lower Broadway, the Opry, the country music museums — is a relatively small slice of a metropolitan area of two million people that is also a significant healthcare hub, a major university town (Vanderbilt, Belmont, Fisk, Tennessee State), and one of the fastest-growing cities in America. The Nashville that locals actually live in exists largely in the neighborhoods east of downtown: East Nashville, Germantown, Five Points, the Gulch.
East Nashville was working-class and slightly rough for most of the twentieth century, and then musicians started moving there because the rents were cheap and the houses were big, and then the neighborhood became interesting, and then it became desirable, and now it's expensive. The tornado that cut through it in March 2020 — killing people and leveling buildings on the night of the presidential primary — accelerated the process by creating insurance money and cleared lots that developers moved quickly to fill. The neighborhood that emerged is denser, newer in places, and still the most genuinely interesting part of the city for restaurants and bars and music that isn't on Lower Broadway.
Fisk sits in North Nashville, in a neighborhood that was once the center of Black Nashville and is now partially cleared by urban renewal and surrounded by a highway interchange. The Jubilee Hall, the first permanent building erected in the South for the education of Black Americans, is a National Historic Landmark. The Fisk Jubilee Singers — the a cappella ensemble that saved the university from bankruptcy by touring the world in 1871 — still perform. Their sound, rooted in the spirituals of enslaved people, traveled to Europe and influenced gospel music globally. Nashville's music history doesn't start on Lower Broadway.
What the boom has done
Nashville has been in a growth surge since roughly 2010 that has fundamentally changed the city's physical character. The skyline is unrecognizable from fifteen years ago: dozens of high-rise towers have gone up in and around downtown, the population has grown by hundreds of thousands, and the construction cranes have become a permanent feature of the view in every direction. This has brought money and amenities and also the usual costs: displacement, traffic, rising rents, a loss of the specific texture that made the city interesting to the people who moved there in the first place.
The music industry has been both driver and victim of this. Nashville is now an expensive city, which means young musicians can't afford to move there and spend years developing in the way that earlier generations did. The publishing deal and the development contract and the slow accumulation of craft — the path that made Nashville writers — is harder to sustain when the cost of living is approaching that of larger cities. The machine keeps running, but the inputs have changed.
The thing to carry with you
Here is what's worth understanding before you arrive: Nashville built itself on the idea that a song is a currency — that if you write the right three minutes, you can change your life and the lives of everyone in the room when the song comes on the radio. The entire city is organized around the pursuit of that moment. The honky-tonks exist so writers can hear what works on a live audience. The publishers exist to match writers with artists. The labels exist to find the song that nobody knew they needed until they heard it.
That idea is still alive here, even under all the bachelor parties and the tourist bars and the stadium construction. You can hear it in the Ryman on a Tuesday night when a songwriter plays an unrecorded song that makes the room go quiet. You can hear it in the writers' rounds at the Bluebird Cafe, where the person who wrote the hit you know sits with a guitar and tells you what the song was actually about before anyone else got to it. You can hear it in the honky-tonks at midnight when the band shifts into something original and the crowd — full of people who came for the covers — leans in.
Nashville is a city that believes in the power of a song to the point of organizing its entire economy around that belief. Once you know that, the place stops being a theme park and starts being something stranger and more interesting: an experiment in whether art can anchor a city.