Nashville

Top things to do in Nashville

1. 01

   Grand Ole Opry - the radio show the city grew around

   nightlife music culture arts 👍 Popular

   The longest-running radio programme in America, broadcast since 1925 and still built the old way: a variety bill of six or eight acts playing two or three songs each, with the announcer reading the sponsor's copy live between them. It plays most of the year at its own purpose-built house out east beside a vast glass-roofed resort hotel with a river running through the atrium, and comes back downtown to its old church home for part of the winter. Set into the stage is a circle of dark oak cut out of that older stage, so performers stand on the exact boards their heroes did.

2. 02

   Ryman Auditorium - the Mother Church of Country Music

   nightlife music history culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   A red brick tabernacle built in 1892 by a riverboat captain who got religion at a tent revival and decided the preacher deserved a roof. It held the Opry from 1943 to 1974, sat dark and nearly condemned for two decades, and reopened restored in the 1990s; the curved balcony, the stained glass and the church pews are still there, and so are acoustics that touring musicians rank with the best halls anywhere. Daytime tours let you stand on the stage and see the dressing rooms, but the right way to experience it is a ticket to whatever is playing that night, whether that is bluegrass, a comedian or a rock band.

3. 03

   Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum - the whole story in one building

   culture arts history 👍 Popular

   A serious museum in a building that is a set of visual puns: windows like piano keys, a roofline lifted from a 1950s Cadillac fin, a tower recalling the old radio mast. Inside is the arc from Appalachian string bands and the Bristol sessions through honky-tonk, the smoothed-out studio sound of the 1960s, outlaw country and the stadium era, told with instruments, handwritten lyric sheets, stage clothes stitched with rhinestones and one absurd gold-plated car. It ends in the Rotunda, a circular room of bronze plaques under the words of the hymn about the circle being unbroken, and it also runs the shuttle out to the surviving Music Row studio.

4. 04

   Lower Broadway - the honky-tonk strip on foot

   nightlife music food 👍 Popular

   Four blocks running down to the river where every bar has a stage in the window, no cover charge and a band working for the tip bucket from late morning to two in the morning. The two that matter historically are the purple one with the back door into the alley behind the Ryman, where Opry performers slipped across between sets, and the old boot shop turned honky-tonk that still books traditional country, western swing and a fried bologna sandwich. Around them stand multi-storey bars branded to famous singers, and a permanent weekend traffic of pedal taverns and party wagons; the Johnny Cash Museum sits a block off the strip on Third. Locals mostly drink elsewhere, in the East Nashville dives or on the old rock block near the university.

5. 05

   The Bluebird Cafe - songwriters in the round

   nightlife music culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   Ninety seats in a suburban strip mall south of town, and the single most Nashville room in Nashville. Four writers sit in a circle in the middle of the floor, pass the guitar around and play the songs they wrote that other people had hits with, telling you where each one came from; the audience is expected to be silent, and staff will shush a table that is not. Getting in is the hard part, since reservations open on a schedule and go in minutes, though the early show and the Monday open-mic style night are easier than the headline slots.

6. 06

   RCA Studio B and Music Row - the machine behind the records

   culture arts history

   Music Row is two unremarkable avenues of converted brick houses south-west of downtown, and it is where the publishers, licensing bodies and studios still sit. The one you can go inside is Studio B, opened in 1957, where Elvis Presley cut a couple of hundred songs and Dolly Parton, Roy Orbison and the Everly Brothers made theirs; the guides show you the coloured mood lights Presley demanded, the chip in the piano and the spot where he kicked the wall. Visits run as a shuttle tour from the downtown museum rather than as a walk-up, and the roundabout at the top of the Row is marked by a bronze of naked dancers that the city has never stopped arguing about.

7. 07

   Third Man Records - Jack White's storefront and the Blue Room

   nightlife music culture arts off beaten path

   A yellow and black shopfront south of downtown that is a record label, a shop, a pressing operation and a small venue in one, and the clearest evidence that this is not only a country town. There is a recording booth where you can cut your own voice straight to a disc in a couple of minutes, a room of oddities behind the counter, and a live space that can record a show direct to acetate while the band plays. The surrounding district of old warehouses has filled up with galleries, breweries and the city's football ground.

8. 08

   National Museum of African American Music - the roots under everything else

   culture arts history

   A downtown museum that traces more than fifty genres back to their sources, running spirituals and work songs forward through blues, jazz, gospel, R&B, rock and hip-hop, with a strong argument threaded through it that these are one continuous tradition rather than separate shelves. It leans hard on interactive galleries where you can sing in a virtual gospel choir or build a beat and take the recording away, which makes it good with teenagers, and it fills a real hole in a city that spent decades telling only half of its own music story.

9. 09

   Civil Rights Room, Nashville Public Library - where the sit-ins are remembered

   history culture arts

   A quiet room upstairs in the main library, built around a circular table shaped like a lunch counter with the students' ten rules of conduct etched into it, ringed by photographs of the 1960 sit-ins and the workshops in nonviolence that trained the people who led them. Nashville's students were the most disciplined in the movement, and after a civil rights lawyer's house was bombed they marched in silence to the courthouse steps and asked the mayor directly whether segregation was right; downtown counters began serving Black customers within weeks. A sculptural wall outside the courthouse carries the same story in cast panels.

10. 10

    Fisk University - Jubilee Hall and the Stieglitz pictures

    history culture arts

    Founded in 1866 for freed people and, within five years, so broke that a student choir went on tour singing spirituals to keep it open; they raised enough abroad to build Jubilee Hall, the first permanent building in the South put up for the education of Black students, which still stands with a floor-to-ceiling portrait of the singers inside. W.E.B. Du Bois took his first degree here. The campus gallery holds the collection of photographs and modern paintings that Georgia O'Keeffe gave the university from Alfred Stieglitz's estate, now shared on a rotation with a museum in Arkansas, so check which half is in town.

11. 11

    The Parthenon - a full-scale Athens replica in Centennial Park

    culture arts history scenic

    Built as a plaster exhibition hall for the 1897 exposition marking a century of Tennessee statehood, kept because the city liked it, and rebuilt in concrete to last. It is the only full-scale replica of the Athenian temple anywhere, correct down to the entasis of the columns, and inside stands a gilded Athena nearly thirteen metres tall, completed in 1990 and gilded a decade later, holding a life-size winged Nike in her palm. The basement galleries hold an American art collection, and the park around it is the city's best lawn for an afternoon.

12. 12

    Hot chicken - the city's own cayenne-fried invention

    food

    Fried chicken with a cayenne paste worked into the hot crust, served on white bread with pickles on top, and hot here means genuinely painful at the upper settings rather than decorative. The origin story belongs to one family's shack, where a scorned girlfriend supposedly over-peppered a philandering man's breakfast and he liked it; that family still sells it, alongside a smokier fish-and-chicken version from another long-running counter and a modern chain whose queues run down the pavement. Order a step below where your pride tells you to, and take the bread seriously, because it does the work.

13. 13

    Meat-and-three - the lunch counter institution

    food

    The city's everyday format: pick a meat, pick three vegetables from a steam table where macaroni cheese counts as a vegetable, and take the cornbread. It is the food of the old cafeterias and lunch rooms rather than of restaurants, cash-and-carry-a-tray in atmosphere, and it is where you eat catfish, meatloaf, turnip greens cooked with pork, fried okra and banana pudding. A Black-owned counter that has been running since the 1950s and a family-style house in Germantown where the dishes are passed around a shared table are the two easiest introductions.

14. 14

    Tennessee State Capitol and the Bicentennial Mall - the hill above downtown

    history culture arts

    A Greek revival capitol finished in 1859 by an architect who died during construction and is entombed inside its own north wall, sitting on the highest ground in the middle of the city with President James K. Polk buried on the lawn. Free tours run on weekdays through the chambers and the library. Below the hill, a state park laid out for the state's bicentennial gives you the whole of Tennessee in one walk: a granite map of all ninety-five counties underfoot, a wall of the state's rivers, a timeline of its history and a carillon of bells, with the old farmers market shed alongside for lunch.

15. 15

    Cheekwood - a Georgian mansion and gardens built on coffee money

    culture arts nature wildlife scenic

    A limestone country house on the western edge of the city, paid for by the family fortune behind a famous coffee brand and given to the public as an art museum and botanical garden. There is a formal boxwood garden and a Japanese garden, a mile-long woodland sculpture trail through the hardwoods, and a house full of American art and decorative arts with the original panelling intact. It leans hard on seasonal displays, so the grounds turn over from a hundred thousand tulips in spring to chrysanthemums and pumpkins in autumn to a light installation over the winter.

16. 16

    Radnor Lake State Natural Area - the quiet water south of town

    nature wildlife scenic off beaten path

    A lake the railway dammed in 1914 to water its steam engines, now a strictly protected natural area twenty minutes from downtown where swimming, boating, picnicking and even jogging on the main trail are banned so the wildlife is left alone. What you get instead is otters, barred owls, herons, wintering waterfowl and deer that barely look up, on a flat lakeside path anyone can walk plus steeper ridge trails behind it. Go early on a weekday; the car parks fill and there is nowhere else to leave a car.

17. 17

    Bridgestone Arena - hockey on Broadway, and the stadium across the river

    nightlife music culture arts

    The ice hockey arena sits directly on the honky-tonk strip, which produces the strangest crowd noise in North American sport: a full house that has been in the bars since lunchtime, a house band, and a tradition of throwing a catfish onto the ice. It doubles as the city's big concert and awards room. The football stadium stands across the Cumberland, reachable on foot over the long pedestrian bridge from the end of Broadway, and the football club plays in a purpose-built ground south of downtown, so a match of some kind is easy to fold into a weekend.

Getting to & around Nashville

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