You’d be forgiven for assuming that the Music City moniker stems from Nashville being the home of country music, but the truth stretches back much farther – and to an unlikely source.
Immersive, audio-visual Attenborough at BBC Earth Experience, Melbourne
Immersive, audio-visual Attenborough at BBC Earth Experience, Melbourne
Nashville’s Fisk University was founded in 1866, with the vast majority of its 900 students coming from formerly enslaved families. In 1873, a group of a cappella singers set out on a tour to raise funds for their school.
While the Fisk Jubilee Singers initially sang Western classical music standards, their fame grew on the back of the stunning emotion and delivery of their Negro spirituals.
The group wowed audiences wherever they went, as writer and humorist Mark Twain noted when he saw them perform: “I do not know when anything has so moved me as did the Jubilee Singers.”
Following a performance at the White House for US president Ulysses S. Grant, the tour took them to Europe, where they sang in front of Britain’s Queen Victoria. She was so moved that she donated to their cause and wrote a letter saying that the Fisk Jubilee Singers must have come from “America’s music city”.
The nickname stuck and has been good to Nashville (the city’s National Museum of African American Music will acknowledge the debt next year, with the opening of a permanent Fisk Jubilee Singers exhibition).
Today, the city draws 15 million annual visitors, most in search of some sort of music, be it soul or jazz, rock or pop, blues or bluegrass, classical or hip hop.
At the heart of it all is Broadway, a buzzing strip of bars and restaurants where artists vie for your dollar by owning live-music venues: Kid Rock’s Big Honky Tonk; Alan Jackson’s Good Time Bar; Miranda Lambert’s Casa Rosa.
Jon Bon Jovi may soon be getting in on the act with his own opening (Bon Jovi’s 2007 song “I Love This Town” is about Nashville.)
Justin Timberlake’s The Twelve Thirty Club is named for the closing time of bars in the 19th century and is decidedly cooler than some of Broadway’s more earthy live-music venues.
Dozens of tables face the strip, customers sipping crafted cocktails while watching the street party evolve outside. Each of its three floors offers a different feel, from energetic honky tonk featuring live music to a sexy supper club in which red velvet furnishings surround a compact stage.
VIP table service (Dom Perignon at US$700 a bottle) ensures some serious partying on the rooftop, where you may just catch sight of the 10-Grammy Award-winning Mr Timberlake himself.
Elsewhere in Nashville, it’s not even two decades since a 14-year-old Taylor Swift was discovered while playing at the Bluebird Café – today she owns two vast penthouse condos in the city, as tour guides love to point out.
This July, Ed Sheeran played to a record-breaking crowd of 73,000 at the Nissan Stadium before he hit a local karaoke club, to the delight of those present.
Nashville is most famously linked with country music and nowhere is that more tangible than at the Grand Ole Opry, which hosts hundreds of events throughout the year but broadcasts every Saturday night’s line-up as a radio show that is America’s longest running, stretching back to 1925.
Inside the 4,400-seat theatre, some 16km southwest of downtown Nashville and surrounded by a vast car park, a red neon “On air” sign reminds the audience that this is a live show, as does a booth to the side of the stage from which a smooth-talking radio DJ introduces the acts as they come on.
Lasting around two and a half hours, shows tend to be a mix of live music from eight or more artists, onstage interviews with the musicians, occasionally comedy – and yes, even adverts, read out live by the DJ as equipment is changed in between sets.
Over the years, performers have included Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton and Elvis Presley. On my visit (tickets bought through opry.com), I witness an eclectic mix including Afie Jurvanen, a Finnish-Canadian country singer with a mellifluous voice, and octogenarian comedian and singer Gary Mule Deer.
The audience is a sea of denim, plaid and more than a few rhinestones, suggesting country music is very much alive and kicking.
The current venue has been the Opry’s home for almost half a century, but it once inhabited the Ryman Auditorium, another Nashville institution.
In the heart of downtown, this red-brick venue had previously been a tabernacle, a place of worship complete with stained-glass windows that morphed at the turn of the 20th century into a stage for theatre and live music.
Wrought-iron staircases lead visitors up to the cavernous auditorium, which retains the feel of a church – albeit one with live music as its religion.
Steep rows of wooden pews give every audience member a clear view and, as country singer Emmylou Harris once said, “The sound is better than Carnegie Hall – and the connection with the audience.”
The roster of artists who have performed at the Ryman is staggering. Anna Pavlova, Enrico Caruso, W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Nat King Cole, Etta James and Mae West in the earlier years. B.B. King, James Brown, Bruce Springsteen and Jimi Hendrix followed.
Bob Dylan recorded Blonde on Blonde (1966) and Neil Young his seminal Harvest (1972) in Nashville and both played the Ryman many times, and recently Harry Styles, Coldplay, Kings of Leon (who are from Nashville) – and yes, Taylor Swift – have trod its historic boards.
Guides are available but even a self-guided tour of the Ryman could take a couple of hours, as you soak up the 130 years of musical history on display: a souvenir programme from 1951 shows a remarkable trinity of Sarah Vaughan, Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington on the same bill; dozens of guitars and other instruments that were played, and jumpsuits and leather jackets once worn, just yards from where you stand.
Most visitors seize the chance to have a photo taken on stage, while some brave souls record their own songs in the Ryman’s Air Castle Studio, perhaps dreaming of one day making it as big as the artist who resonates in the city more than any other.
It’s not for nothing that Nashville is sometimes known as Cashville.
The singer-songwriter was already a household name when, in 1969, he launched The Johnny Cash Show.
The ABC television variety programme was recorded at the Ryman and even though it ran for only 58 episodes, it also featured an astonishing line-up of musical greats, from Louis Armstrong to Joni Mitchell, Tammy Wynette to Roy Orbison.
The show cemented Cash’s connection with Nashville, which he called home from 1968 until his death, in 2003, and his image and legacy loom large across the city. In the lobby at The Omni, my elegant downtown hotel, a cabinet displays a pair of Cash’s boots and the wooden mould that made them.
But for hero worship, nowhere can rival The Johnny Cash Museum, standing just off Broadway and difficult to miss thanks to the crowds waiting outside to get in, the life-size cut-outs of Cash next to which you can place your face for a photo and Johnny Cash’s Bar & BBQ right next door, which serves up all manner of deep-fried treats until 1am.
In case there was still any doubt as to where you are, the low-rise red-brick building is crowned with the words “The Johnny Cash Museum” in huge white capital letters.
In the decade since opening, the museum has amassed the world’s largest collection of Cash memorabilia, says vice-president of marketing Angela Daeger, who has what is possibly America’s coolest office, filled with the singer’s own furniture and decorated with his guitars, platinum discs and photos, which hang on walls and stand on cabinets.
“The museum collection was built up by Bill Miller, a close personal friend of Johnny, so 90 per cent comes from Bill’s personal collection and other pieces from Johnny’s friends and family,” says Daeger.
“People come from every country and we especially see a lot of Germans, as he was stationed there [1951-54] when in the forces and played a number of concerts.
“He’s my hero and his story of sin and redemption is amazing. People love his authenticity; he was truly larger than life.”
Cash is buried in Hendersonville, a 25-minute Uber ride from downtown Nashville. His grave is another must-visit for devotees, his epitaph and signature aptly hewn into black stone for the star known as The Man in Black.
It’s a relatively humble plot for such an iconic figure, his tomb next to that of his wife, June Carter Cash, who had died just four months before her husband.
I ask a fan paying his respects whether it’s possible to visit the house in which Johnny and June lived, a circular, mostly wooden structure on the banks of Old Hickory Lake.
He looks at me with incredulity: “No – it burnt down.”
A hell-raiser Cash may have been, but he had nothing to do with this particular “ring of fire”. The property was bought after his death by Barry Gibb, of Bee Gees fame, and while in the final stages of renovation, in 2007, a spark triggered a blaze, and it burned, burned, burned.