Nashville

Nashville began in 1779, when a party of settlers led by James Robertson and John Donelson reached the salt lick known as French Lick on the Cumberland River and built Fort Nashborough, named after the Revolutionary War general Francis Nash. About a fifth of those first settlers were of African descent, enslaved and free. The town prospered on the iron business, and in 1843 it became the permanent capital of Tennessee.

In February 1862 Nashville became the first Confederate state capital to fall to Union troops, who ringed it with forts such as Fort Negley; the Confederate attempt to retake it at the Battle of Nashville in December 1864 ended in a decisive Union victory. After the war the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Fisk University carried spirituals around the world, and the city's universities earned it the name Athens of the South, celebrated by the replica Parthenon built for the 1897 Centennial Exposition.

The Grand Ole Opry went on air in 1925, studios followed in the late 1940s, and in 1950 a radio announcer coined the name Music City. Students staged the Nashville sit-ins at downtown lunch counters in 1960. Since the 1990s the city has boomed, gaining professional football and ice hockey teams and passing Memphis as Tennessee's largest city. It has also faced the floods of May 2010, a tornado in March 2020, a vehicle bombing on Second Avenue on Christmas Day 2020, and a shooting at the Covenant School in March 2023 that killed three children and three staff.

Music defines the city. The Grand Ole Opry, the world's longest-running live radio show, still broadcasts several nights a week, and the Ryman Auditorium, its home for three decades, is known as the Mother Church of Country Music. Music Row holds the offices of many record labels and of the gospel and Contemporary Christian music industries, and songwriters gather at small venues such as the Bluebird Café to play their songs "in the round". Lower Broadway's honky-tonks keep live music going all day.

The music is wider than country. The Fisk Jubilee Singers brought spirituals to world audiences in the 19th century, historically Black Jefferson Street had its own music scene, and the National Museum of African American Music now tells that story; jazz has revived through local radio and the Nashville Jazz Workshop. In the early 20th century Vanderbilt was home to the Fugitives and the Agrarians, two influential groups of Southern writers.

The city is also home to the largest Kurdish community in the United States. Sport draws big crowds: the Tennessee Titans play American football, the Predators ice hockey and Nashville SC football.

Nashville had 689,447 people at the 2020 census, estimated at about 721,000 in 2025, and the metropolitan area has more than two million people. The city and Davidson County share one metropolitan government covering more than 500 square miles, from downtown towers to farmland.

Healthcare is the biggest industry: more than 300 healthcare companies are based here, among them HCA, the world's largest private hospital operator. The music industry is estimated to be worth about $10 billion a year to the area, and banking, publishing, the car industry and technology — including a large new Oracle campus — add to the mix. Vanderbilt, Belmont, Fisk, Tennessee State and other universities make the city a student town as well.

Fast growth has brought pressure. The median home price in North Nashville rose from about $100,000 in 2010 to about $530,000 in 2020, and by 2020 almost all neighbourhoods were unaffordable for Black and Hispanic families on median incomes. Traffic is a constant complaint, and in 2024 voters approved a dedicated transport tax after rejecting an earlier transit plan in 2018.

Hot chicken is Nashville's signature: fried chicken coated in fiery cayenne. Prince's Hot Chicken Shack, started in 1945 by James Thornton Prince, is credited with making it famous, and it is now served across the city. Hot fish is a close cousin.

The meat-and-three is the everyday Southern lunch: a choice of one meat and three vegetable sides from a counter, with cornbread, greens and pie such as chess pie. Arnold's Country Kitchen has been called the most prominent. Barbecue is everywhere, and biscuits with fruit preserves, country ham and red-eye gravy are the speciality of the Loveless Cafe on the road out to the Natchez Trace.

The Goo Goo Cluster, a Southern candy bar, has been made in Nashville since 1912. Alongside the new restaurants, hot chicken, hot fish, barbecue and the meat-and-three remain the most popular kinds of local cooking, served everywhere from roadside shacks to downtown food halls. The Gulch, Germantown and East Nashville have many restaurants and bars.