Nashville, Tennessee

• 1. Introduction

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  Nashville sits on the Cumberland River, a city that has worn more identities than almost any other in the American South. At the 2020 census its population stood at 689,447, making it the 20th-most populous city in the United States and the most populous in Tennessee. But raw numbers barely hint at what the place is. A fort built in 1779 on the site of an old French trading post grew into a Confederate capital, a Union garrison, a country music powerhouse, and one of the fastest-growing cities in the modern nation. How did a frontier outpost named for a Revolutionary War general become both the Protestant Vatican and the bachelorette party capital of America? How did a city that once enslaved its own public works labor force eventually elect its first female mayor, then watch her resign under felony charges? And what does it mean that 56% of Nashville's ground surface is covered in urban tree canopy, even as its neighborhoods are being declared unaffordable for nearly all Black and Hispanic families? Those questions run like a current beneath every chapter of Nashville's story.

• 2. Fort to Capital

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  In 1689, French-Canadian trader Martin Chartier set up a trading post on the Cumberland River at roughly the site where Nashville now stands. A second group of French traders under Charles Charleville arrived in 1714, establishing a settlement that came to be known as French Lick. By the 1740s that settlement had been largely abandoned. Thirty-five years later, in 1779, explorers James Robertson and John Donelson led a party of Overmountain Men back to the same site and built Fort Nashborough. The fort was named for either Abner Nash or his brother Francis Nash, a general of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. By 1800 the settlement held 345 residents, among them 136 enslaved African Americans and 14 free African Americans. Nashville was incorporated as a city in 1806, becoming the county seat of Davidson County. The permanence it lacked as a trading post came from geography. The Cumberland is a tributary of the Ohio River, and Nashville's position on it made the city a natural shipping hub. Rail connections reinforced that advantage across the 19th century. In 1843, the Tennessee state legislature named Nashville the permanent capital, ending an era when Knoxville, Kingston, and Murfreesboro had each served in the role. Iron production added a different kind of weight to the city's prosperity: Nashville led the entire South in iron output and was considered one of the wealthiest southern capitals for years. The cholera epidemic of 1849-1850 punctured that prosperity briefly, killing 311 people in 1849 and an estimated 316 to about 500 in 1850. It also took the life of former U.S. President James K. Polk.

• 3. War, Occupation, Violence

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  Before the Civil War, the city government of Nashville itself owned 24 enslaved people, a number that grew to 60 by the time the war began. Those individuals were put to work, in the city's own records, to build Nashville's first water system and maintain its streets. More than 3,200 enslaved African Americans lived in the city by 1860, alongside about 700 free Black residents who had formed small enclaves in northern Nashville. In February 1862, Nashville became the first Confederate state capital to fall to U.S. troops, and the Union Army occupied it through the end of the war. Enslaved people from across Middle Tennessee fled to contraband camps around military installations on the city's eastern, western, and southern edges. The Battle of Nashville, fought on the 15th and the 16th of December 1864, is described in the source as perhaps the most decisive tactical victory gained by either side in the entire war. Three years after the war ended, in 1868, Confederate veteran John W. Morton founded a Nashville chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Morton reportedly initiated General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who became the organization's Grand Wizard. The Klan's targets were freedmen voting, organizing, and the White allies who supported them, including northern schoolteachers and Freedman's Bureau officials. Two freedmen were lynched in Nashville by White mobs in 1872 and 1875. One of them, Jo Reed, was hanged from a bridge over the river but survived when the rope broke and he fell into the water; he escaped the city soon afterward. On the 30th of April 1892, Ephraim Grizzard was lynched in front of a white mob of 10,000 people in what journalist Ida B. Wells described as "A naked, bloody example of the blood-thirstiness of the nineteenth century civilization of the Athens of the South." His brother Henry had been lynched six days earlier, on the 24th of April, in nearby Goodlettsville. From 1877 to 1950, six lynchings of Black people were recorded in Davidson County.

• 4. Music City Born

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  Out of the wreckage of war and the violence of Reconstruction, Nashville's musical identity emerged from an unexpected source. By 1871, the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Fisk University had begun touring the United States and Europe, earning international acclaim for their performances of Negro spirituals. Their success provided vital funding for the university and, according to one account, led Queen Victoria to remark that "these young people must surely come from a musical city." That phrase would eventually echo through every nickname the city accumulated. In 1925, the Grand Ole Opry began broadcasting, and recording studios started arriving in the late 1940s to capture artists performing there. In 1950, WSM radio announcer David Cobb coined the name "Music City, U.S.A." in an ad-libbed on-air moment. The mid-1950s brought what became known as the Nashville Sound, characterized by smooth strings, sophisticated background vocals, and tempos associated with traditional pop rather than the rougher edges of earlier country. By 1960, Time magazine reported that Nashville had nosed out Hollywood as the nation's second-largest record-producing center, behind only New York City. Jefferson Street served as the parallel hub for jazz and blues musicians in the African American community, a role it sustained until the federal government split the neighborhood with the construction of Interstate 40 in the late 1960s. Artists including Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash came to Nashville to record during the 1960s, and the Nashville Sound gradually transformed into what was called Countrypolitan, reaching further into rock and pop. Since the 1960s, Nashville has been the second-largest music production center in the United States. Today the music industry carries an estimated $10 billion per year in total economic impact and contributes roughly 56,000 jobs to the Nashville area.

• 5. Civil Rights and Consolidation

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  On the 13th of February 1960, the Nashville sit-ins began at lunch counters in downtown Nashville. The students who organized them through the Nashville Student Movement and Nashville Christian Leadership Council had been preparing for two months under the guidance of activists and nonviolent teachers James Lawson and Myles Horton. Tennessee still had formal racial segregation of public facilities at that time, covering lunch counters, department store fitting rooms, hotels, and restaurants. On the 19th of April 1960, segregationists bombed the house of Z. Alexander Looby, an African American attorney and city council member. Protesters marched to city hall the following day, and Mayor Ben West said he supported desegregating lunch counters. The sit-ins ended successfully in May. The same Z. Alexander Looby had been elected to the city council in 1951 alongside Robert E. Lillard, after a new city charter replaced at-large voting with single-member districts. At-large voting had effectively prevented the minority population from electing representatives of their choosing; the shift to single-member districts meant some districts had Black majorities for the first time. School desegregation followed a different path. A lawsuit by the family of Robert Kelley in 1956 and a parallel case by Reverend Henry Maxwell produced what courts called the "Nashville Plan," desegregating one grade per year beginning in 1957. By 1966, the Metro Council abandoned the gradual approach and desegregated the entire school system at once. City and county government merged in 1963, creating a metropolitan government with a 40-member council: 35 members elected from single-member districts and five elected at-large. That structure remains in place today. On the 8th of April 1967, a riot broke out on the campuses of Fisk University and Tennessee State University after Stokely Carmichael spoke about Black Power at Vanderbilt University.

• 6. Boom, Growth, and Fracture

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  In 1995, the Houston Oilers agreed to move to Nashville, and the team debuted in the city in 1998 at Vanderbilt Stadium. Nissan Stadium opened in the summer of 1999, and the team changed its name to the Tennessee Titans. That same season they reached Super Bowl XXXIV, losing to the St. Louis Rams, 23-16, on the game's final play. Nashville was awarded a National Hockey League expansion team in 1997; the Nashville Predators joined the league in the 1998-99 season and in 2017 reached the Stanley Cup Final for the first time, falling to the Pittsburgh Penguins four games to two. Between May 1 and 7, 2010, a series of floods described as thousand-year events submerged much of Nashville. Eleven people died in the Nashville area, and damages were estimated at over $2 billion. Structures damaged included the Grand Ole Opry House, the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center, the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, and Nissan Stadium. Nashville elected its first female mayor, Megan Barry, on the 25th of September 2015. She resigned on the 6th of March 2018 after felony charges related to the misuse of public funds. David Briley, who had been Vice Mayor, won the subsequent special election with just over 54% of the vote. In the decade from 2010 to 2020, the metro Nashville area added 343,319 residents. The median home price in North Nashville rose from $100,710 in 2010 to $532,121 in 2020. By 2020-99% of Nashville's neighborhoods were considered unaffordable for Black and Hispanic families earning median incomes, and four census tracts in the city had shifted from majority Black to majority non-Black. On the 25th of December 2020, a vehicle exploded on Second Avenue, killing the perpetrator and injuring eight others. On the 27th of March 2023, a gunman killed three children and three staff at the Covenant School before being fatally shot by police.

• 7. A City of Many Names

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  Nashville has accumulated nicknames the way rivers accumulate silt, each layer reflecting a different era or constituency. The city is home to more than 700 churches, several seminaries, and the headquarters of multiple Protestant denominations including the United Methodist Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the National Baptist Convention USA. It is also the seat of the Gideons International and the home of Thomas Nelson, which the source describes as the world's largest producer of Bibles. That density of religious infrastructure earned Nashville the label "the Protestant Vatican" and "the Buckle of the Bible Belt." The 24 post-secondary educational institutions within the city, combined with the full-scale Parthenon replica that has stood in Centennial Park since 1897, produced the older moniker "Athens of the South." That same phrase was turned on its head by journalist Ida B. Wells when she used it to condemn the 1892 lynching of Ephraim Grizzard. At the same time, Nashville is home to the largest Kurdish community in the United States, estimated at approximately 15,000 people. The city's Kurdish population, Vietnamese, Laotian, Mexican, Arab, and Somali communities all reflect a foreign-born population that more than tripled between 1990 and 2000, growing from 12,662 to 39,596 residents. Nashville native Young Buck released a rap album called Straight Outta Cashville that popularized "Cashville" among a new generation. The nickname "Smashville," now closely associated with the Predators hockey team, was coined by a local fan named Frank Glinski during a conversation with the team's then-vice president of marketing. In 2030, Nashville is scheduled to host Super Bowl LXIV at the New Nissan Stadium, the first Super Bowl in the city's history.