Nashville, Tennessee — Music City and more

Music is — and has always been — a focal point of Nashville. From its start in the late 1700s when the earliest settlers celebrated with fiddle tunes and buck dancing after safely landing on the shores of the Cumberland River to today’s world-famous honky-tonks on Broadway that offer live music 365 days a year, it’s easy to understand why Nashville is known as the Music City.

The Schermerhorn Symphony Center, home to the Grammy award-winning Nashville Symphony, anchors the downtown end of the recently designated Music Mile, a symbolic stretch of roadway connecting the center with the music district of Music Row, the vibrant new entertainment venues on Demonbreun Street, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, the Music City Walk of Fame, and the Bridgestone Arena.

There is also the Ryman Auditorium, once dubbed the “Carnegie Hall of the South,” America’s longest-running radio show — the Grand Ole Opry — that has ignited the careers of hundreds of country stars, and United Record Pressing, North America’s largest volume producing vinyl record plant, which has pressed records for everyone from Miles Davis and the Beatles to Beyonce and Justin Timberlake.

While every aspect of the music world — writing, recording, and performing — percolates through the capital city on a daily basis, pleasant diversities of every type seem to abound in Nashville. Food aficionados will delight in offerings ranging from Southern fare to haute cuisine. Shopping mavens will delight in wares from national names and elite designers to local artisans.

History buffs might want to take in The Hermitage, home to President Andrew Jackson, or the Parthenon, the world’s only replica of the ancient Greek temple that was originally built for Tennessee’s Centennial Exposition in 1897.

For more of all there is to see and do in Nashville, look for future NGWA Groundwater Expo news and stories online and in print, or visit www.VisitMusicCity.com.
All photos courtesy of Nashville Convention & Visitors Bureau.