Nashville Audio Tour

Highlights

• 
  The Parthenon

  Athens has the original, but the Parthenon in front of you is Nashville's full-scale concrete replica, the only such reproduction in the world. The original was built for the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition as a symbol of Nashville's aspirations to cultural prestige, the physical embodiment of the city's self-bestowed nickname: Athens of the South.

• 
  Ryman Auditorium

  Your guide today is the building itself: country music people call the Ryman Auditorium the Mother Church, and not entirely as a metaphor. Thomas Ryman, a Nashville riverboat captain and saloon owner, built this tabernacle in 1892 after attending a revival led by evangelist Samuel Jones and experiencing a conversion so complete that he funded a permanent home for Jones to preach in.

• 
  Bridgestone Arena

  Your view opens onto Bridgestone Arena, the 20,000-seat venue that has anchored downtown Nashville's entertainment revival since it opened in 1996. The arena was built as part of a deliberate strategy to bring major sports and concert events back to the urban core at a time when Nashville's downtown was still emerging from decades of decline.

• 
  Fisk University

  Welcome to the campus of Fisk University, one of the oldest and most historically significant HBCUs in the United States. Fisk was founded in 1866 by the American Missionary Association on land that had been a Union Army encampment, to provide education to the formerly enslaved people of Nashville.

• 
  Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park

  Nineteen acres of outdoor museum surround this plaza: Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park, opened in 1996 to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Tennessee's statehood. The park tells state history through landscape rather than museum walls.

All 40 stops

• Lower Broadway (Downtown)

  Notice the neon signs and open garage doors spilling fiddle music onto Lower Broadway, the densest live-music strip on earth.

• Ryman Auditorium (Downtown)

  Your guide today is the building itself: country music people call the Ryman Auditorium the Mother Church, and not entirely as a metaphor.

• Honky Tonk Highway (Downtown)

  Lower Broadway is the neon corridor Nashville's visitors bureau calls the Honky Tonk Highway, and you are walking right through it.

• Tootsie's Orchid Lounge (Downtown)

  Your next stop is Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, arguably Nashville's most legendary honky-tonk bar.

• Printer's Alley (Downtown)

  Between Third and Fourth Avenues, this narrow passage is Printer's Alley, Nashville's underground entertainment district from the 1940s through the 1970s.

• Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (SoBro)

  Ahead on Fourth Avenue rises the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, the most comprehensive institution dedicated to preserving and interpreting the history of…

• Johnny Cash Museum (SoBro)

  Your next stop holds the world's most comprehensive collection of Cash artifacts and memorabilia: the Johnny Cash Museum, a private institution that opened in 2013.

• Hatch Show Print (SoBro)

  Since 1879, Hatch Show Print has run a letterpress shop in continuous operation, making it one of the oldest working letterpress shops in the United…

• Bridgestone Arena (Downtown)

  Your view opens onto Bridgestone Arena, the 20,000-seat venue that has anchored downtown Nashville's entertainment revival since it opened in 1996.

• Tennessee State Capitol (Capitol Hill)

  Crowning the hill above you is the Tennessee State Capitol, a Greek Revival limestone building completed in 1859 by Philadelphia architect William Strickland, who died…

• Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park (Capitol Hill / North Nashville)

  Nineteen acres of outdoor museum surround this plaza: Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park, opened in 1996 to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Tennessee's statehood.

• Tennessee State Museum (Capitol Hill)

  Beside Bicentennial Mall, the Tennessee State Museum moved into this purpose-built facility in 2018 after decades in an older downtown location.

• Germantown (North Nashville)

  Germantown, Nashville's oldest surviving residential neighborhood, spreads out in front of you as one of the most intact Victorian streetscapes in the American South.

• Marathon Village (North Nashville)

  These brick industrial buildings are Marathon Village, once the Marathon Motor Works, which built the Marathon automobile here from roughly 1907 to 1914 — one…

• Salemtown (North Nashville)

  Just north of Germantown, Salemtown grew up in the late nineteenth century as a mixed working-class community and has been predominantly African-American for most of…

• Fisk University (North Nashville)

  Welcome to the campus of Fisk University, one of the oldest and most historically significant HBCUs in the United States.

• Meharry Medical College (North Nashville)

  Meharry Medical College, founded in 1876, is the oldest historically Black medical school in the American South, and you are right beside it.

• RCA Studio B (Music Row)

  RCA Studio B, the building in front of you, is arguably the most important recording studio in country music history and the room where the…

• Music Row (Music Row)

  Music Row, the stretch of 16th and 17th Avenues South where Victorian houses became offices with studios built behind them, took shape as the nerve…

• Vanderbilt University (Midtown)

  Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad magnate, never visited the campus of Vanderbilt University, the private research university he founded here in 1873 with a $1 million…

• Belmont Mansion (Belmont)

  Adelicia Hayes Franklin Acklen, one of the wealthiest women in the antebellum South, built Belmont Mansion between 1849 and 1860, and you are looking at…

• Centennial Park (West End)

  Back in 1897 this green space hosted the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, a world's fair held one year late to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Tennessee…

• The Parthenon (Centennial Park / West End)

  Athens has the original, but the Parthenon in front of you is Nashville's full-scale concrete replica, the only such reproduction in the world.

• 12 South Neighborhood (12 South)

  Twelve South, named for 12th Avenue South, is the neighborhood you have entered, and it represents the urban revival that has reshaped Nashville's inner ring…

• The Gulch (The Gulch)

  Railroads gave the Gulch its name: the natural depression you are walking through made this land suitable for the rail infrastructure that defined it for…

• Jefferson Street Blues Heritage (North Nashville / Jefferson Street)

  From the Reconstruction era through the 1960s, Jefferson Street, just ahead of you, was the main commercial artery of Nashville's African-American community and the heart…

• Fort Negley (South Nashville)

  Fort Negley, on St. Cloud Hill, was the largest inland Union Army fortification built during the Civil War, and its earthworks are one of Nashville's…

• Nashville National Cemetery (South Nashville)

  Established by the U.S. government in 1867, Nashville National Cemetery is one of the original fourteen national military cemeteries, a permanent burial ground for Union…

• Nashville City Cemetery (South Nashville)

  Nashville City Cemetery, opened in 1820 as the city's first public burial ground, is one of the oldest continuously operating cemeteries in Tennessee, and its…

• Printers District / SoBro (SoBro)

  SoBro means South of Broadway, and you are in the former industrial and warehouse district directly south of Nashville's entertainment corridor.

• East Nashville (East Nashville)

  East Nashville, where you are now, has been through more identity transformations in the past two decades than most American neighborhoods manage in a century.

• Nashville Yards / 5th & Broadway (Downtown)

  Office towers now rise where surface parking once sat, and you are near 5th and Broadway and the adjacent Nashville Yards, among the largest urban…

• Tennessee State Penitentiary Site (West Nashville)

  Until 1992, the old Tennessee State Penitentiary, a Gothic Revival prison complex dating from the 1830s, operated on this site west of downtown Nashville, near…

• Opry Mills (Opryland)

  Opryland USA, the theme park that ran from 1972 to 1997 on the banks of the Cumberland River northeast of downtown, once filled this ground…

• Grand Ole Opry House (Opryland)

  Home to the Grand Ole Opry since 1974, the Opry House is right in front of you.

• Wild Horse Saloon (Downtown)

  Three levels of honky tonk rise ahead of you at the Wild Horse Saloon, a Nashville institution that opened in 1994 and helped define the…

• The Hermitage (Hermitage (east Nashville))

  Picture Andrew Jackson at home here: this Greek Revival mansion, the Hermitage, ranks among Tennessee's most historically significant — and morally complicated — sites.

• Nashville's Bicentennial (Downtown / Capitol Hill)

  Winter of 1779 to 1780 brought a party led by James Robertson overland and John Donelson's flotilla of flatboats up the Cumberland to meet them…

• Cheekwood Estate and Gardens (Belle Meade / West Nashville)

  Maxwell House coffee paid for Cheekwood Estate and Gardens, the 55-acre botanical garden and art museum you have arrived at.

• Belle Meade Plantation (Belle Meade)

  Belle Meade Plantation, an estate established in 1807, became one of the most celebrated thoroughbred horse breeding farms in nineteenth-century America, and you have reached…

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