Before You Go. Nashville is in the South. Not the Deep South, but the Mid-South. However, Tennessee rejoined the Union a long time ago, and you won't need to bring a passport or change your money.
If you were going to a baseball game, or an early-season football game, the heat might be an issue. But this will be mid-November, so heat won't be a factor. The website of Nashville's main newspaper, The Tennessean, is predicting low 50s for daylight and mid-30s for night. They're also predicting rain for the day before the game, but not the day of. You should bring a Winter jacket.
Nashville, like most (but not all) of Tennessee, is in the Central Time Zone, an hour behind us. Adjust your timepieces accordingly.
Tickets. Vanderbilt are averaging 23,067 fans per home game this season, and this game is not against their arch-rivals, the University of Tennessee. Tickets will be easy to get.
Midfield seats are $65, toward the goal line are $45, and end zone seats are $35.
Getting There. It's 892 miles from Midtown Manhattan to downtown Nashville, and 881 miles from the Prudential Center to the Bridgestone Arena. So your first instinct would be to fly.
This seems like a good idea, since a round-trip flight could cost as little as $215, although it's more likely to be about twice as much. And it wouldn't be nonstop: You'd have to change planes in Washington or Charlotte. Nashville International Airport is 8 miles east of downtown, and the Number 18 bus can get you to downtown in under half an hour. (The airport was originally named Berry Field, after Colonel Harry S. Berry, the Tennessee administrator for the New Deal's Works Progress Administration.)
You can't take Amtrak: It doesn't serve Nashville. Greyhound can get you from New York to Nashville in a little under 30 hours, for $353 round-trip, although it could drop to as little as $212 with advanced purchase, although you'd have to change buses in Richmond. The Greyhound station is at 709 5th Avenue South, 5 blocks south of the arena.
If you do drive, it's far enough that you should get someone to go with you, to trade off, especially if one can sleep while the other drives. Get into New Jersey, take Interstate 78 West into Pennsylvania. At Harrisburg, get on Interstate 81 South, and take that down through Maryland, West Virginia and Virginia, into Tennessee, where it flows into Interstate 40 West. Take that halfway across Tennessee. Exit 210 is for downtown.
If all goes well, you should spend a little over an hour in New Jersey, 2 hours and 45 minutes in Pennsylvania, 15 minutes in Maryland, half an hour in West Virginia, 6 and a half hours in Virginia, and 2 hours and 45 minutes in Tennessee, for a total of 13 hours and 45 minutes. Given rest stops in Pennsylvania, one at each end of Virginia, and 1 in Tennessee, and we're talking about a trip of at least 17 hours -- each way.
Once In the City. Founded in 1779, and named for General Francis Nash, killed in the Battle of Brandywine outside Philadelphia in the War of the American Revolution, Nashville is in central Tennessee. It is the State capital, home to 684,000 people with a metropolitan area of about 1.9 million.
The State House, formerly featured on Tennessee license plates.
That statue of Andrew Jackson, Tennessee pioneer,
has copies in Washington across from the White House,
and in downtown New Orleans.
"White flight" hasn't hurt Nashville nearly as much as it's hurt Memphis or many other cities, North and South alike. As late as 1970, Nashville was 80 percent white; in 1990, 74 percent. Now, it's about 56 percent white, 28 percent black, 10 percent Hispanic, 4 percent Asian and 1 percent Native American.
The sales tax in Tennessee is 7 percent, and within Davidson County, including Nashville, 9.25 percent, even higher than New York's. ZIP Codes for the Nashville area start with the digits 370 to 374, and 384 and 385. The Area Code for Nashville is 615.
Address numbers on east-west streets increase away from the Cumberland River, and Broadway separates north from south. Interstate 480 serves as a bypass, rather than a beltway. The The Nashville Metropolitan Transit Authority (NMTA) runs buses, with a $1.75 fare, and the Music City Star, a commuter rail service to the city's eastern suburbs, with a fare double that, $3.50.
The Music City Star, with Nissan Stadium,
home of the Titans, in the background
He had planned to build a university on his native Staten Island. But a clergyman in Nashville, Bishop Holland McTyeire, was married to a cousin of Vanderbilt's wife, and also wanted to build a university. He convinced the Commodore to give $1 million to the university, in exchange for naming it after him. Vanderbilt University opened in 1875. When the school began playing team sports, its teams were named the Commodores.
Alone among current members of the Southeastern Conference, Vanderbilt, or "Vandy" for short, is a private university, not funded by its home State. The only other SEC school without its State in its name is Auburn, and that's named after its home town, and it is funded by the State of Alabama.
Its academic standards are well beyond those of the other SEC schools. If the South had its own "Ivy League," Vanderbilt would surely have been a member. Other members might have included, but probably would not have been limited to, Duke in North Carolina, Emory in Atlanta, Tulane in New Orleans and Rice in Houston.
It's also easily the smallest school in the SEC, with just 13,0000 undergraduate students. The next-smallest is Mississippi State, with 21,000. A result of this small base and its high academic standards is that Vanderbilt has often struggled for athletic success, especially in football. In this, it is the SEC's equivalent to the Big Ten's Northwestern University.
Notable Vanderbilt graduates include, but are not limited to:
* Arts: Novelist Robert Penn Warren (Class of) 1925, Mickey Mouse Club host Jimmie Dodd '32, Playwright William Inge '35, singer and TV talk show host Dinah Shore '38, poet Randall Jarrell '38, film director Delbert Mann '41, novelist Elizabeth Spencer '43, model Bettie Page '44, novelist James Dickey '49, novelist William Harrison '59, actor Joe Bob Briggs '74, country singer Rosanne Cash '79 (daughter of Johnny Cash), country singer Dierks Bentley '97.
* Business: Muhammad Yunus '71, pioneer of "microcredit" and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize laureate; and H. Ross Perot Jr. '81, computer magnate, son of the computer magnate and 2-time independent Presidential candidate, former owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks.
* Politics: Vice Presidents John Nance Garner 1886 and Al Gore '72, and Tipper Gore '75; Attorney General and Supreme Court Justices James McReynolds 1882; Governor and Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander '62; Governor and Senator Theodore Bilbo 1900 of Mississippi, perhaps the most openly racist politician in American history; Senator James Eastland '26 of Mississippi, who wasn't much better; Senators from Tennessee Alexander, Jim Sasser '58, Harlan Mathews '58, Fred Thompson '67 and Bill Hagerty '81 (current); current Senator and John N. Kennedy '73 of Louisiana; current Governors Greg Abbott '84 of Texas and Andy Beshear 2000 of Kentucky; and Representative Ben Quayle '02 of Arizona, son of former Vice President Dan Quayle.
* Journalism (non-sports): Roy Blount Jr. '63, Linda Ellerbee '64, Willie Geist '97.
On the 1989-93 CBS sitcom Major Dad, the title character, U.S. Marine Corps Major John D. MacGillis, played by Gerald McRaney, was a Vanderbilt graduate and football player.
Notable Vandy athletes outside of football include:
* Baseball: Rip Sewell, Mike Willis (the Toronto lefthander was 1 of 3 pitchers to beat Ron Guidry in 1978), Scott Sanderson, Joey Cora, David Price, Sonny Gray, Mike Yastrzemski, Walker Buehler and Dansby Swanson.
* Basketball: Clyde Lee, Perry Wallace (in 1967, became the SEC's 1st black basketball player), Jan van Breda Kolff, Billy McCaffrey, Will Perdue and Damian Jones.
* Swimming: Shannon Vreeland, Gold Medalist at the 2012 Olympics.
Vanderbilt is also the alma mater of sports journalists Grantland Rice 1901, Skip Bayless '74 and Buster Olney '88.
Going In. Dudley Field opened in 1922, but was demolished and replaced with Vanderbilt Stadium in 1981, although the playing surface is still called Dudley Field, for William F. Dudley, dean of the University's medical school and the founder of the precursor league to the SEC.
Vanderbilt's athletic complex
The official address is 2600 Jess Neely Drive. Neely was a halfback who played for Vanderbilt at the time the stadium was built in 1922, and coached at Clemson from 1931 to 1939, and Rice from 1940 to 1966.
It's about 2 1/2 miles west of downtown. Take Bus 3 or 5. If you're driving in, parking is a bit pricey at $35. The field was natural grass until 1969, was switched to Astroturf in 1970, went back to grass in 1999, and has been "Shaw Sports Legion 46" artificial since 2012. The field runs southwest-to-northeast, with northeast being the open end of a horseshoe.
So after topping 32,000 in only 1 home game (the last, 50,677 seeing them beat the Pittsburgh Steelers to finish 8-8), and getting less than 18,000 in 2 of their games (the smallest NFL crowds since World War II, except for the Scab Year of 1987), Bud Adams took the hint, and swung a deal to play in Nashville a year early. Vanderbilt Stadium was the smallest NFL stadium since the early 1960s, but they sold it out in 4 of their 8 games. The next year, they moved into what's now Nissan Stadium, and dropped the Oilers name to officially become the Tennessee Titans.
Vanderbilt Stadium is adjacent to Memorial Gymnasium, built in 1952 as a memorial to the servicemen and -women of World War II. It is unique in college basketball (although this was not he case when it opened) in that both teams' benches are behind one of the baskets. Other unusual touches, and its age (there are several Division I schools with older facilities still in use) have nicknamed it The Fenway Park of College Basketball. 210 25th Avenue South.
Sidelights. On November 30, 2018, Thrillist published a list of "America's 25 Most Fun Cities," and Nashville came in 16th. Nashville is about music 1st, Tennessee State government 2nd, and sports 3rd. But it's a good sports town, even though it's never had an MLB or an NBA team.
* Nissan Stadium. Home of the Tennessee Titans since it opened in 1999, it was known as the Adelphia Coliseum until 2002, simply The Coliseum until 2006, LP Field until last June. The 69,000-seat horseshoe has seen the Titans win the AFC Championship in its inaugural season, and nearly win Super Bowl XXXIV, and Division titles in 2000 (the old AFC Central), 2002 and 2008 (the new AFC South). However, the Titans went from 2008 to 2016 without making the Playoffs, and from 2004 to 2016-17 without winning a Playoff game, before finally doing so last season.
Tennessee State University, a historically-black school in Nashville, is the stadium's collegiate tenant. The stadium also hosts the annual Music City Bowl. It hosts concerts, including the CMA Music Festival every June.
It's also been a soccer facility, including hosting the U.S. national team in a 1-0 loss to Morocco in a friendly on May 23, 2006; a 3-0 win over Trinidad and Tobago in a World Cup Qualifier on April 1, 2009; a 1-0 loss to Paraguay in a friendly on March 29, 2011; a 4-0 win over Guatemala in a friendly on July 3, 2015, a game riddled by operational and logistical issues, with the Twittersphere exploding with discussions of the stadium's inadequacy even before kickoff.
The U.S. women's team played a game of the She Believes Cup there, beating France 1-0 on March 6, 2016. And the U.S. men's team had a 1-1 draw with Panama in the CONCACAF Gold Cup on July 8, 2017. The U.S. women's team played a SheBelieves Cup match there on March 2, 2019, a 2-2 draw with England.) The Stadium hosted 2 games of the CONCACAF Gold Cup in 2017, and 1 more in 2019. And Nashville SC, an expansion team for Major League Soccer, plans to play the 2020 and 2021 seasons there.
The Arena, easily identifiable with its sloping roof and its antenna at the north end, opened in 1996, with the generic name Nashville Arena. It was renamed the Gaylord Entertainment Center in 1999, after a locally-based media company that was a minority stockholder in the team. In 2005, Gaylord sold its stock, and in 2007 the arena was renamed the Sommet Center, after Sommet Group, a local company that oversaw software development and payroll services. But Sommet was a company built on fraud, its founder went to prison, and in 2010 locally-based tire company Bridgestone bought the naming rights, and holds them to this day.
* First Horizon Park and site of Sulphur Dell. The original home of Nashville baseball is its home once again. Sulphur Dell stood on the site from 1870 to 1969, but the original ballpark faced southwest, so the State House would be in view. This put the sun in the outfielders' eyes. Along with odors from a nearby dump wafting over, and the occasional flooding from the Cumberland River that forced some games to be moved to Vanderbilt University's field, this earned the stadium the nicknames "The Dump" and "Suffer Hell."
This wooden ballpark was demolished, and replaced with stadium of concrete and steel for the 1927 season. It seated 8,500 fans at its peak. But while the new park fixed the sun problem, it did nothing to get rid of the smell from the dump, and the shape of the plot of land forced a short right field fence with a terrace, much like Cincinnati's old Crosley Field and Houston's Minute Maid Park today. When the Yankees visited for an exhibition game, Babe Ruth refused to play his usual position of right field because of the little hill, and was moved to left field.
Don't expect Nashville to get teams in MLB or the NBA: The metro area would rank 28th in population among NBA markets, and it would rank 31st, dead last, in baseball.
* Tennessee State University. As with many of the South's historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Tennessee State was set up in a city that already had what was then an all-white school, Vanderbilt. Their teams are called the Tigers, and their women's track team the Tigerbelles. This team formed the bulk of the U.S. women's track teams at the Olympics in the 1950s and '60s, including Wilma Rudolph, winner of 3 Gold Medals in Rome in 1960.
TSU has won the National Championship of black college football 12 times: 1946, 1947, 1954, 1956, 1965, 1966, 1970, 1971, 1973, 1979, 1982 and 2013. In 1973, they were also NCAA College Division National Champions, what would later be called Division I-AA and is now the FCS, the Football Championship Subdivision. Their big names have included Pro Football Hall-of-Fame defensive ends Claude Humphrey and Richard Dent, 6-foot-9 Dallas Cowboys All-Pro defensive end Ed "Too Tall" Jones, and "Jefferson Street Joe" Gilliam, briefly the Pittsburgh Steelers' starting quarterback during a slump by Terry Bradshaw.
While they play 2 home games every season at the Titans' Nissan Stadium, their usual home field is the on-campus 10,000-seat Hale Stadium, named for the school's 1st president, William J. Hale. 3500 John A. Merritt Blvd., named for the man who coached both Jackson State (1952-62) and Tennessee State (from 1963 until his death in 1983). 3 miles west of downtown. Bus 60.
Opened in 1892, it began hosting the weekly Grand Ole Opry ("grand old opera") radio show on Nashville radio station WSM in 1943 (though the show had been broadcast since 1925). The Auditorium seats 2,362 people, and with stars announced ahead of time, there were occasions when thousands had to be turned away.
By the 1960s, the building had deteriorated, and complaints about the dressing rooms grew louder: The men had to share a small one, and the women had to use a restroom. Roy Acuff, often called the King of Country Music, bought an adjacent building just so he'd have a decent place to change. And a new house for the Opry was planned. A wooden circle was cut from the stage, and transplanted to the new Opry House, much like home plate or a square of sod is sometimes removed from an old ballpark and put in the new one.
"I never want another note of music played in that building," Acuff said. He had reason beyond his bitterness over the dressing room: He was a major stakeholder in Opryland USA. (He was a bit about the money: In 1948, he was the Republican nominee for Governor of Tennessee. He lost.) But he died in 1992, and, against heavy odds, the building survived him. Ed Gaylord of Gaylord Entertainment bought the building's parent company, and had it restored.
The Ryman reopened in 1994, with its main entrance moved from the west side on 5th Avenue to the east side on 4th Avenue, plus an addition that included, yes, suitable dressing rooms, and, for the first time in its 102-year history, air conditioning. In 2012, the original stage (all but a small portion of it, left for historical reasons) was replaced as part of new renovations.
The Opry has returned every winter, while still broadcasting from its new home the rest of the year. ABC broadcast The Johnny Cash Show live from the Ryman, and Cash is among those country legends whose memorial service has been held there.
The revival of the Ryman has coincided with the revival of downtown Nashville, including the construction of the Arena, the Stadium, and the city's first real skyscrapers. 116 5th Avenue North.
* Nashville Municipal Auditorium. While Elvis had many recording sessions in Nashville, after 1954 he didn't give another concert in the city until July 1, 1973, a matinee and an evening show at the Municipal Auditorium.
Opened in 1962, it still hosts concerts and sporting events. It's hosted minor-league hockey, and had the Devils actually moved to Nashville for the 1995-96 season, it's likely they'd have played at the Auditorium for a year, even though it seats only 8,000 (even in the Meadowlands years, the Devils could top that), before what's now the Bridgestone Arena opened. 417 4th Avenue North, downtown, 3 blocks from the State House.
Elvis also performed in Eastern Tennessee at the City Auditorium in Paris on March 7, 1955; and at the Civic Auditorium in Kingsport on September 22, 1955.
The Beatles never performed in Nashville as a unit, although individual members did so on their solo tours.
* Grand Ole Opry House. As with sports venues, the Opry decided in the 1960s to leave the city for the suburbs, and create a family atmosphere, even adding an amusement park. Opryland USA opened in 1972, and the Grand Ole Opry House in 1974. The oak circle from the Ryman stage was placed at center stage, and lead singers stand there.
The new theater (no longer so new) seats about 4,000, and had all the amenities that the Ryman did not yet have. I visited Nashville in 1991, before it became a major league sports city, and the group I was with visited Opryland USA and had a great time. But I wanted to see the Ryman. I knew I couldn't get inside, but I still wanted to reach out and touch the brick.
Of course, at this time, Camden Yards was rewriting the rules for stadium and arena construction, and cities took back their leadership role from the suburbs. Attendance dropped, and in 1997, Gaylord Entertainment closed the theme park. The Opry House remained in operation, and the Opry Mills shopping mall and the Opryland Resort & Convention Center opened on the site of the park in 2000.
When the Cumberland River flooded in 2010, my first concern should have been for the people -- and 31 people died, in 3 States -- but it was for the Ryman. Instead, it sustained only minor damage, while the Arena, the Stadium, and the new Opry House all got socked, especially the Opry House. It was able to reopen in 6 months, while the show was broadcast from the Ryman and other Nashville locations. 433 Opry Mills Drive, about 9 miles east of downtown. Number 34 bus.
* Museums. Nashville isn't all about country music, although within a few steps of the Ryman (and the Arena) are museums dedicated to Johnny Cash (119 3rd Avenue S.) and George Jones (128 2nd Avenue N.), and the music in general at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (222 5th Avenue S.).
The Tennessee State Museum depicts the State's history, including the Native American, colonial, early Statehood and Civil War periods. Its collection of Civil War memorabilia is one of the largest in the world. It shares a downtown building with the Tennessee Performing Arts Center -- a boring-looking 1981 building that replaced its former home, the much more appropriate 1929 War Memorial Building. 505 Deaderick Street, between 5th & 6th Avenues.
There are 3 Presidents with connections to Tennessee. Al Gore should have made it 4, and he made enough mistakes that, if he had done any one of them differently, his rightful victory would have been too big to get stolen from him. But, like the 3 who actually did get into the White House, he wasn't born in Tennessee, but rather in Washington, D.C., when his father, Albert Sr., was a Congressman. (Both father and son would serve Tennessee in each house of Congress.)
As for the other 3, 2 were born in North Carolina, and the other might have been: Andrew Jackson was born somewhere near the Carolina State Line, although no one is sure precisely where, and both North and South Carolina claim him. But the 7th President (serving from 1829 to 1837) and War of 1812 General nicknamed Old Hickory is best known, as far as his residences are concerned, for being one of the founding fathers of the State of Tennessee.
The Hermitage was a plantation he owned from 1804 until his death in 1845. On that property, he and his wife Rachel lived in a log cabin until the main house was completed in 1821. It burned in 1834, and he then had the current house built. Today, conspiracy theorists would have blamed Henry Clay or the Bank of the United States for the fire, even though Jackson himself didn't. (He did, however, blame his political opponents for the smears against both him and Rachel that gave her a heart attack that killed her between the 1828 election and the 1829 Inauguration.)
Aside from George Washington's Mount Vernon and Elvis' Graceland, it's the most-visited former private home in America. 4580 Rachels Lane, in the town of Hermitage, 12 miles east of downtown. It's on a section of the Cumberland River known as Old Hickory Lake. The Number 6 bus gets you to within a mile and a half, and the bus and the walk combined takes about an hour.
The State Capitol, which opened just before the Civil War in 1859, contains the tomb of James K. Polk, the 11th President (1845 to 1849), and his wife Sarah. The man who waged the Mexican-American War and gained us a huge chunk of our West, including all of California, he has been hailed as a visionary and assailed as a warmonger and a racist. He chose to serve only one term, and died just 3 months after leaving office, the shortest retirement of any ex-President. Sarah outlived him by 42 years, a record for a Presidential widow, and only Grover Cleveland's wife Frances, at 50 years, had a longer retirement from being First Lady. 600 Charlotte Avenue.
The other President with a Tennessee connection is Andrew Johnson, the 17th President, who succeeded to the office on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, and was impeached for a ridiculous reason: He fired his Secretary of War (also Lincoln's), Edwin Stanton, without the permission of the Senate. He believed that the law barring him from doing so was unconstitutional, and when the aforementioned President Cleveland challenged it in 1886, the Supreme Court said they were both right. For all the good it did Johnson: Surviving his Senate trial by 1 vote, he knew he couldn't get elected on his own in 1868, got back into the Senate in 1874 (welcomed by the men who had tried him with a standing ovation), and died the next year.
He was an unrepentant racist, making it odd that Lincoln would choose him for the Vice Presidency in 1864 (it was because he was the only Southern Senator who stayed loyal to the Union when his State seceded), and he remains a contender for the title of worst President ever. His hometown of Greenville, Tennessee is 250 miles east of Nashville. His museum is at 67 Gilland Street. (Charlotte, North Carolina is actually the closest major league city to Greenville, but it's not close.)
There's actually a 4th President with a minor connection to Nashville: In 2008, Barack Obama and John McCain had the 2nd of their 3 debates at the Black Box Theatre at Belmont University. Compton Avenue at Belmont Blvd., about 3 miles southwest of downtown. Number 2 bus.
Five of the six tallest buildings in Tennessee are in Nashville, only one in the larger city (but not larger metro area) of Memphis. The tallest went up in 1994, but has already changed names with one phone-service company buying out another: The South Central Bell Building, the BellSouth Building, and now the AT&T Building. At 617 feet high, its twin-spired roof has led to it being nicknamed the Batman Building. 333 Commerce Street.
Many music-themed movies have used Nashville as both a setting and a film location, including biopics of Elvis (Elvis, starring Kurt Russell), Patsy Cline (Sweet Dreams, starring Jessica Lange) and Loretta Lynn (Coal Miner's Daughter, starring Sissy Spacek). Each of these included the Ryman as a filming location. While the TV drama Nashville, soon to wrap up after 6 seasons (the 1st 4 on ABC, the last 2 on CMT), is filmed in Los Angeles, the 1975 film of the same title was filmed on location.
*
Nashville is more than history and music, as important as those things are. It's also the home of an NHL team that is usually good, got very close to ultimate success last year, has developed quite a following among people you wouldn't think would take to hockey, and is now another good reason to visit this legendary city.
President John F. Kennedy gave the University's commencement address at the Stadium on May 18, 1963. The Rev. Billy Graham held crusades there in 1954 and 1979. It's hosted concerts by Pink Floyd in 1994, The Rolling Stones in 1997, The Dave Matthews Band in 2009, U2 in 2011, Luke Bryan in 2015, and Beyoncé and Jay-Z in 2018.
At 40,550 seats, Vanderbilt Stadium is the smallest stadium in the SEC. In a manner of speaking, it's the newest. It is easily the least successful. And yet, it's the only one to have hosted a season of NFL football. (After Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Saints played 4 "home" games at Louisiana State's Tiger Stadium.)
After leaving Houston following the 1996 season, the plan was for the Oilers to play at the Liberty Bowl in Memphis for 2 years, as the Tennessee Oilers, before moving to the new stadium in Nashville for 1999. But this was a public-relations disaster, as Memphians, hating Nashville as both the State capital and as a natural rival, stayed away from Nashville's team in droves, heedless of the State's name on the team.
So after topping 32,000 in only 1 home game (the last, 50,677 seeing them beat the Pittsburgh Steelers to finish 8-8), and getting less than 18,000 in 2 of their games (the smallest NFL crowds since World War II, except for the Scab Year of 1987), Bud Adams took the hint, and swung a deal to play in Nashville a year early. Vanderbilt Stadium was the smallest NFL stadium since the early 1960s, but they sold it out in 4 of their 8 games. The next year, they moved into what's now Nissan Stadium, and dropped the Oilers name to officially become the Tennessee Titans.
A December 23, 2020 article on Moneywise called Vanderbilt Stadium the worst in college football: "For a private university once called one of the most expensive colleges in America, it's somewhat surprising that Vanderbilt doesn't have a better stadium to host their Commodores. Instead, one of the nation's most beautiful campuses has an ugly stadium built in 1922 that often draws only half-capacity crowds for football. It's our choice for the worst field in the FBS." (Football Bowl Subdivision, the new name for Division I-A.)
Food. Memphis has a reputation as a city of fine Southern food, particularly barbecue. Nashville, less so: They're known for music first, and food, and everything else, somewhere down the line. However, in the last few years, "Nashville hot chicken" has become a popular thing nationwide.
According to an article at SportsCredential.com:
Vanderbilt Athletics is providing a new and improved lineup of food, drink and service options to Vanderbilt Stadium for the 2021-22 football season. The Commodores will host seven home games during the season. All payment transactions will be cashless, with vendors and concessionaires accepting cards only.
Patrons will also have the ability to place orders from their seats on mobile devices for quick pick-up at the nearest concession stand. The “Fan Favorite” concession stands will offer game day essentials like hot dogs, popcorn, pretzels, nachos and more. The reimagined “1873 Grille” station will provide burgers, hot chicken, sandwiches and fries, among other offerings. The “Craft & Draft” stand and “End Zone Market” stations will provide local craft beverages to fans, while self-service fountain stations featuring Pepsi products will provide free refills to decrease time spent in concession lines.
Team History Displays. Vanderbilt's football team has won 13 Conference Championships. You'll notice I didn't say, "Southeastern Conference Championships." They won the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association title in 1897, 1901, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1915 and 1921. And they won the Southern Conference title in 1922 and 1923. They were founding members of the SEC in 1933, and they're the only ones that have never won it.
The Commodores have been to 9 bowl games, 6 of them since 2008. They've only won 4: The 1955 Gator Bowl, the 2008 Music City Bowl (in Nashville), the 2012 Music City Bowl, and the 2013 BBVA Compass Bowl.
There are no retired numbers, and only 5 Vanderbilt players are in the College Football Hall of Fame: 1900s halfback John Tigert, 1910s tackle Josh Cody, 1920s end Lynn Bomar, 1920s quarterback William Spears, and 1930s center Carl Hinkle. Probably the most notable Vanderbilt football player, aside from Jess Neely, has been Bill Wade, who quarterbacked the Chicago Bears to the 1963 NFL Championship.
Vanderbilt's main rivalry is with the University of Tennessee, 181 miles to the east in Knoxville. They've played each other since 1892, and Tennessee leads the series 75-32-5. After beating the Volunteers, including a senior named Reggie White, in 1982, the Commodores dropped 22 straight. But from 2012 to 2018, they won 5 out of 7. Tennessee has won the last 2, though.
Stuff. There isn't a big team store at the stadium. You're better off going to the Vanderbilt Bookstore, 3 blocks away, at 251 West End Avenue.
As far as I can tell, the only book about Vanderbilt football is Vanderbilt Football: Tales of Commodore Gridiron History, by William L. Traughber, published in 2011. Don't expect to find any team videos.
During the Game. As I said, Vanderbilt is the most Ivy-ish of SEC schools. It also, more than any SEC school, pursues a nationwide, and even worldwide student body. As a result, it's the least Southern school in the Southeastern Conference. So the fans are going to be the least intense, which means you're probably safer at a Vanderbilt game than anywhere else in the SEC.
The Spirit of Gold Marching Band forms a block "V" at the players' entrance, and the players run through it to start the game. The Band plays the National Anthem, and, throughout the game, they play the fight song, "Dynamite." After each touchdown, reference is made to the original Commodore's nautical heritage by playing a boat horn. When the game ends, the Band plays the Alma Mater, titled "Conquer and Prevail."
After the Game. There shouldn't be any trouble after the game. And West End Avenue, a.k.a. State Route 1, 2 blocks north of the stadium, has lots of places to get a postgame meal, including chains like McDonald's, Wendy's, Chipotle and P.F. Chang's.
However, I could find no place in Nashville catering to fans of any Tri-State Area team: Not the Yankees, the Mets, the Giants, and so on.
If you visit Nashville during the European soccer season, which we are now in, the best place to watch your local club is Fleet Street Pub, 207 Printers Alley, off Church Street between 3rd and 4th Streets downtown.
Sidelights. On November 30, 2018, Thrillist published a list of "America's 25 Most Fun Cities," and Nashville came in 16th. Nashville is about music 1st, Tennessee State government 2nd, and sports 3rd. But it's a good sports town, even though it's never had an MLB or an NBA team.
* Nissan Stadium. Home of the Tennessee Titans since it opened in 1999, it was known as the Adelphia Coliseum until 2002, simply The Coliseum until 2006, LP Field until last June. The 69,000-seat horseshoe has seen the Titans win the AFC Championship in its inaugural season, and nearly win Super Bowl XXXIV, and Division titles in 2000 (the old AFC Central), 2002 and 2008 (the new AFC South). However, the Titans went from 2008 to 2016 without making the Playoffs, and from 2004 to 2016-17 without winning a Playoff game, before finally doing so last season.
Tennessee State University, a historically-black school in Nashville, is the stadium's collegiate tenant. The stadium also hosts the annual Music City Bowl. It hosts concerts, including the CMA Music Festival every June.
It's also been a soccer facility, including hosting the U.S. national team in a 1-0 loss to Morocco in a friendly on May 23, 2006; a 3-0 win over Trinidad and Tobago in a World Cup Qualifier on April 1, 2009; a 1-0 loss to Paraguay in a friendly on March 29, 2011; a 4-0 win over Guatemala in a friendly on July 3, 2015, a game riddled by operational and logistical issues, with the Twittersphere exploding with discussions of the stadium's inadequacy even before kickoff.
The U.S. women's team played a game of the She Believes Cup there, beating France 1-0 on March 6, 2016. And the U.S. men's team had a 1-1 draw with Panama in the CONCACAF Gold Cup on July 8, 2017. The U.S. women's team played a SheBelieves Cup match there on March 2, 2019, a 2-2 draw with England.) The Stadium hosted 2 games of the CONCACAF Gold Cup in 2017, and 1 more in 2019. And Nashville SC, an expansion team for Major League Soccer, plans to play the 2020 and 2021 seasons there.
No problems were reported on any of those occasions. And so, it has been selected by the U.S. Soccer Federation as a finalist to be one of the host venues for the 2026 World Cup.
1 Titans Way, across the River from downtown. There's no bus service, but it is accessible from downtown by walking across the John Siegenthaler Pedestrian Bridge, which makes for a great visual on Titans gamedays.
1 Titans Way, across the River from downtown. There's no bus service, but it is accessible from downtown by walking across the John Siegenthaler Pedestrian Bridge, which makes for a great visual on Titans gamedays.
* Bridgestone Arena. The home of the Nashville Predators is downtown, with an official address of 501 Broadway, at 5th Avenue South. Across Broadway, on either side of 5th, are the Nashville Convention Center and the Ryman Auditorium, legendary home of The Grand Ole Opry. Major entrances are at the north and south ends, smaller ones at the east and west.
The Arena has hosted Southeastern Conference Tournament, Ohio Valley Conference Tournament, and NCAA Tournament basketball -- in each case, both men's and women's. It hosted the Women's Final Four in 2014. The Country Music Association (CMA) Awards have been held there since 2006.
* First Horizon Park and site of Sulphur Dell. The original home of Nashville baseball is its home once again. Sulphur Dell stood on the site from 1870 to 1969, but the original ballpark faced southwest, so the State House would be in view. This put the sun in the outfielders' eyes. Along with odors from a nearby dump wafting over, and the occasional flooding from the Cumberland River that forced some games to be moved to Vanderbilt University's field, this earned the stadium the nicknames "The Dump" and "Suffer Hell."
This wooden ballpark was demolished, and replaced with stadium of concrete and steel for the 1927 season. It seated 8,500 fans at its peak. But while the new park fixed the sun problem, it did nothing to get rid of the smell from the dump, and the shape of the plot of land forced a short right field fence with a terrace, much like Cincinnati's old Crosley Field and Houston's Minute Maid Park today. When the Yankees visited for an exhibition game, Babe Ruth refused to play his usual position of right field because of the little hill, and was moved to left field.
The team that played there the longest was called the Nashville Vols, short for "Volunteers," as the University of Tennessee (in Knoxville) calls its teams the Volunteers or the Vols, as Tennessee is known as the Volunteer State. They won Southern Association regular-season Pennants in 1901, 1902, 1908, 1916, 1940, 1943, 1948 and 1949; Playoffs for the SA title in 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1949, 1950 and 1953; and the Dixie Series against the Champions of the Texas League in 1940, 1941, 1942 and 1949.
Hall-of-Famers who played for the Vols included Yankee pitcher Waite Hoyt and Pittsburgh Pirates slugger Kiki Cuyler. The 1940 Vols have been remembered as one of the greatest minor league teams. It featured future All-Star pitcher and Yankee World Champion Johnny Sain, former Detroit Tigers pitcher Cletus "Boots" Poffenberger going 26-9, and catcher Charles "Greek" George won the SA Most Valuable Player award. Unlike Sain, George he didn't play much in the major leagues, and after getting called up in 1945 due to the World War II manpower shortage, he punched an umpire during an argument and got unofficially blackballed from baseball. In his case, "Vol" might have been short for "Volatile."
The Negro Leagues' Nashville Elite Giants (who are best remembered today as the Baltimore Elite Giants, and that's pronounced EE-light, not El-EET) played at Sulphur Dell from 1920 to 1928, winning a Pennant in 1921.
The National Association, the governing body of minor league baseball, ordered that all leagues under its umbrella be desegregated for the 1962 season. Rather than comply, the Southern Association folded. The Vols, who valued staying in business over white supremacy, were inactive for 1962, but started again in the South Atlantic League for 1963. But they lost money, and folded.
Like the aforementioned Crosley Field, Sulphur Dell was used as a police impound lot, before being demolished in 1969 and being used as parking for State government buildings.
First Tennessee Park, named for a bank, opened on the site in 2015, and the Nashville Sounds moved in. It seats 8,500 people, with grassy outfield seating pushing capacity to around 10,000. It has a view of downtown Nashville. And it copied the idea of a guitar-shaped scoreboard from Greer Stadium. In 2020, it was renamed First Horizon Park.
The old address was 900 5th Avenue North, but it's now listed as 19 Junior Gilliam Way, for the Nashville native who wore Number 19 as a Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers player and coach. A mile from downtown, and several buses go there.
* Tom Wilson Park. Black businessman Thomas T. Wilson built a ballpark for the Elite Giants to use, and they did so from 1929 to 1934, before moving north. It seated 8,000 people, and was demolished sometime after 1946. 2nd Avenue S. and Chestnut Street, about a mile southeast of downtown. Bus 25.
* Herschel Greer Stadium. Named for the late former president of the Vols, this ballpark seats 10,300 people, with standing room pushing it to a possible 15,000, which made it one of the largest minor-league ballparks.
From 1978 to 2014, it was the home of the Nashville Sounds, who started out in the Double-A Southern Association, and moved to Triple-A, first to the American Association, and then, when that league was split up, to the Pacific Coast League. (Yes, I know, Tennessee is pretty far from the Pacific Coast.) The Sounds won Pennants there in 1979, 1982 and 2005, meaning that Nashville has won either a regular-season Pennant or a Playoff Pennant 17 times: 1901, '02, '08, '16, '39, '40, '41, '42, '43, '44, '48, '49, '50, '53, '79, '82 and 2005. (Compare this with Memphis' 10 and Knoxville's 3.)
The stadium was easily identifiable by its nod to Nashville being "Music City": A guitar-shaped scoreboard. But as Camden Yards and a series of new ballparks, in both the majors and the minors, rewrote the rules for what a baseball stadium should be in the 1990s, Greer Stadium began to be seen as outdated, and so a new park was built.
With the Sounds having moved out, its future is uncertain. 534 Chestnut Street, about a mile and a half south of downtown. The Adventure Science Center is next-door. Buses 8, 12 and 25 will get you to within a short walk.
The nearest Major League Baseball team is the Atlanta Braves, 246 miles away, with the Cincinnati Reds a little farther away at 272 miles. According to an April 24, 2014 article in The New York Times, baseball fandom in Nashville is set by TV watching: The 3 most popular teams are the Braves, the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, with some people rooting for the Braves and the Reds due to the comparative proximity.
The nearest NBA team is the Memphis Grizzlies, 213 miles away. But Nashvillians don't root for the Grizzlies, because of the inherent Intra-Tennessee rivalry. For those who care about the NBA at all, according to a May 23, 2014 article in The New York Times, they tend to divide their fandom among the "cool teams": The Los Angeles Lakers, the Chicago Bulls, the Miami Former LeBrons, and the Cleveland Once-and-Again LeBrons.
* Nashville Fairgrounds Stadium. Nashville SC began play at Nissan Stadium in 2020, and construction is underway on their 30,000-seat stadium that will open on the site of the Nashville Fairgrounds. It is expected to open in May 2022. 625 Smith Avenue, about 2 miles south of downtown. Bus 52 to Fairgrounds Station, then a half-mile's walk west on Walsh Road.
The Negro Leagues' Nashville Elite Giants (who are best remembered today as the Baltimore Elite Giants, and that's pronounced EE-light, not El-EET) played at Sulphur Dell from 1920 to 1928, winning a Pennant in 1921.
The National Association, the governing body of minor league baseball, ordered that all leagues under its umbrella be desegregated for the 1962 season. Rather than comply, the Southern Association folded. The Vols, who valued staying in business over white supremacy, were inactive for 1962, but started again in the South Atlantic League for 1963. But they lost money, and folded.
Like the aforementioned Crosley Field, Sulphur Dell was used as a police impound lot, before being demolished in 1969 and being used as parking for State government buildings.
First Tennessee Park, named for a bank, opened on the site in 2015, and the Nashville Sounds moved in. It seats 8,500 people, with grassy outfield seating pushing capacity to around 10,000. It has a view of downtown Nashville. And it copied the idea of a guitar-shaped scoreboard from Greer Stadium. In 2020, it was renamed First Horizon Park.
* Tom Wilson Park. Black businessman Thomas T. Wilson built a ballpark for the Elite Giants to use, and they did so from 1929 to 1934, before moving north. It seated 8,000 people, and was demolished sometime after 1946. 2nd Avenue S. and Chestnut Street, about a mile southeast of downtown. Bus 25.
* Herschel Greer Stadium. Named for the late former president of the Vols, this ballpark seats 10,300 people, with standing room pushing it to a possible 15,000, which made it one of the largest minor-league ballparks.
The stadium was easily identifiable by its nod to Nashville being "Music City": A guitar-shaped scoreboard. But as Camden Yards and a series of new ballparks, in both the majors and the minors, rewrote the rules for what a baseball stadium should be in the 1990s, Greer Stadium began to be seen as outdated, and so a new park was built.
The nearest Major League Baseball team is the Atlanta Braves, 246 miles away, with the Cincinnati Reds a little farther away at 272 miles. According to an April 24, 2014 article in The New York Times, baseball fandom in Nashville is set by TV watching: The 3 most popular teams are the Braves, the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, with some people rooting for the Braves and the Reds due to the comparative proximity.
The nearest NBA team is the Memphis Grizzlies, 213 miles away. But Nashvillians don't root for the Grizzlies, because of the inherent Intra-Tennessee rivalry. For those who care about the NBA at all, according to a May 23, 2014 article in The New York Times, they tend to divide their fandom among the "cool teams": The Los Angeles Lakers, the Chicago Bulls, the Miami Former LeBrons, and the Cleveland Once-and-Again LeBrons.
* Nashville Fairgrounds Stadium. Nashville SC began play at Nissan Stadium in 2020, and construction is underway on their 30,000-seat stadium that will open on the site of the Nashville Fairgrounds. It is expected to open in May 2022. 625 Smith Avenue, about 2 miles south of downtown. Bus 52 to Fairgrounds Station, then a half-mile's walk west on Walsh Road.
Don't expect Nashville to get teams in MLB or the NBA: The metro area would rank 28th in population among NBA markets, and it would rank 31st, dead last, in baseball.
* Tennessee State University. As with many of the South's historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Tennessee State was set up in a city that already had what was then an all-white school, Vanderbilt. Their teams are called the Tigers, and their women's track team the Tigerbelles. This team formed the bulk of the U.S. women's track teams at the Olympics in the 1950s and '60s, including Wilma Rudolph, winner of 3 Gold Medals in Rome in 1960.
TSU has won the National Championship of black college football 12 times: 1946, 1947, 1954, 1956, 1965, 1966, 1970, 1971, 1973, 1979, 1982 and 2013. In 1973, they were also NCAA College Division National Champions, what would later be called Division I-AA and is now the FCS, the Football Championship Subdivision. Their big names have included Pro Football Hall-of-Fame defensive ends Claude Humphrey and Richard Dent, 6-foot-9 Dallas Cowboys All-Pro defensive end Ed "Too Tall" Jones, and "Jefferson Street Joe" Gilliam, briefly the Pittsburgh Steelers' starting quarterback during a slump by Terry Bradshaw.
While they play 2 home games every season at the Titans' Nissan Stadium, their usual home field is the on-campus 10,000-seat Hale Stadium, named for the school's 1st president, William J. Hale. 3500 John A. Merritt Blvd., named for the man who coached both Jackson State (1952-62) and Tennessee State (from 1963 until his death in 1983). 3 miles west of downtown. Bus 60.
Since 1990, TSU have also played the annual Southern Heritage Classic against Mississippi's Jackson State University at the Liberty Bowl in Memphis -- which must have given Dent and his Chicago Bears teammate, Jackson State alumnus Walter Payton, some interesting conversations. Tennessee State leads the rivalry 17-9.
* Ryman Auditorium. If country music has a Yankee Stadium or a Madison Square Garden, this is it. The Mother Church of Country Music, a.k.a. the Carnegie Hall of the South, is easily the 2nd-most famous building in the State of Tennessee, behind Graceland, the Memphis home of Elvis Presley, who performed at the Ryman very early in his career, on October 2, 1954. After this show, he went across the street and did another show at another famous musical institution, this one long owned by an established country star, the Ernest Tubb Record Shop, at 417 Broadway.
Opened in 1892, it began hosting the weekly Grand Ole Opry ("grand old opera") radio show on Nashville radio station WSM in 1943 (though the show had been broadcast since 1925). The Auditorium seats 2,362 people, and with stars announced ahead of time, there were occasions when thousands had to be turned away.
"I never want another note of music played in that building," Acuff said. He had reason beyond his bitterness over the dressing room: He was a major stakeholder in Opryland USA. (He was a bit about the money: In 1948, he was the Republican nominee for Governor of Tennessee. He lost.) But he died in 1992, and, against heavy odds, the building survived him. Ed Gaylord of Gaylord Entertainment bought the building's parent company, and had it restored.
The Ryman reopened in 1994, with its main entrance moved from the west side on 5th Avenue to the east side on 4th Avenue, plus an addition that included, yes, suitable dressing rooms, and, for the first time in its 102-year history, air conditioning. In 2012, the original stage (all but a small portion of it, left for historical reasons) was replaced as part of new renovations.
* Nashville Municipal Auditorium. While Elvis had many recording sessions in Nashville, after 1954 he didn't give another concert in the city until July 1, 1973, a matinee and an evening show at the Municipal Auditorium.
Elvis also performed in Eastern Tennessee at the City Auditorium in Paris on March 7, 1955; and at the Civic Auditorium in Kingsport on September 22, 1955.
The Beatles never performed in Nashville as a unit, although individual members did so on their solo tours.
* Grand Ole Opry House. As with sports venues, the Opry decided in the 1960s to leave the city for the suburbs, and create a family atmosphere, even adding an amusement park. Opryland USA opened in 1972, and the Grand Ole Opry House in 1974. The oak circle from the Ryman stage was placed at center stage, and lead singers stand there.
When the Cumberland River flooded in 2010, my first concern should have been for the people -- and 31 people died, in 3 States -- but it was for the Ryman. Instead, it sustained only minor damage, while the Arena, the Stadium, and the new Opry House all got socked, especially the Opry House. It was able to reopen in 6 months, while the show was broadcast from the Ryman and other Nashville locations. 433 Opry Mills Drive, about 9 miles east of downtown. Number 34 bus.
* Museums. Nashville isn't all about country music, although within a few steps of the Ryman (and the Arena) are museums dedicated to Johnny Cash (119 3rd Avenue S.) and George Jones (128 2nd Avenue N.), and the music in general at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (222 5th Avenue S.).
The Tennessee State Museum depicts the State's history, including the Native American, colonial, early Statehood and Civil War periods. Its collection of Civil War memorabilia is one of the largest in the world. It shares a downtown building with the Tennessee Performing Arts Center -- a boring-looking 1981 building that replaced its former home, the much more appropriate 1929 War Memorial Building. 505 Deaderick Street, between 5th & 6th Avenues.
There are 3 Presidents with connections to Tennessee. Al Gore should have made it 4, and he made enough mistakes that, if he had done any one of them differently, his rightful victory would have been too big to get stolen from him. But, like the 3 who actually did get into the White House, he wasn't born in Tennessee, but rather in Washington, D.C., when his father, Albert Sr., was a Congressman. (Both father and son would serve Tennessee in each house of Congress.)
As for the other 3, 2 were born in North Carolina, and the other might have been: Andrew Jackson was born somewhere near the Carolina State Line, although no one is sure precisely where, and both North and South Carolina claim him. But the 7th President (serving from 1829 to 1837) and War of 1812 General nicknamed Old Hickory is best known, as far as his residences are concerned, for being one of the founding fathers of the State of Tennessee.
The Hermitage was a plantation he owned from 1804 until his death in 1845. On that property, he and his wife Rachel lived in a log cabin until the main house was completed in 1821. It burned in 1834, and he then had the current house built. Today, conspiracy theorists would have blamed Henry Clay or the Bank of the United States for the fire, even though Jackson himself didn't. (He did, however, blame his political opponents for the smears against both him and Rachel that gave her a heart attack that killed her between the 1828 election and the 1829 Inauguration.)
Aside from George Washington's Mount Vernon and Elvis' Graceland, it's the most-visited former private home in America. 4580 Rachels Lane, in the town of Hermitage, 12 miles east of downtown. It's on a section of the Cumberland River known as Old Hickory Lake. The Number 6 bus gets you to within a mile and a half, and the bus and the walk combined takes about an hour.
The State Capitol, which opened just before the Civil War in 1859, contains the tomb of James K. Polk, the 11th President (1845 to 1849), and his wife Sarah. The man who waged the Mexican-American War and gained us a huge chunk of our West, including all of California, he has been hailed as a visionary and assailed as a warmonger and a racist. He chose to serve only one term, and died just 3 months after leaving office, the shortest retirement of any ex-President. Sarah outlived him by 42 years, a record for a Presidential widow, and only Grover Cleveland's wife Frances, at 50 years, had a longer retirement from being First Lady. 600 Charlotte Avenue.
The other President with a Tennessee connection is Andrew Johnson, the 17th President, who succeeded to the office on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, and was impeached for a ridiculous reason: He fired his Secretary of War (also Lincoln's), Edwin Stanton, without the permission of the Senate. He believed that the law barring him from doing so was unconstitutional, and when the aforementioned President Cleveland challenged it in 1886, the Supreme Court said they were both right. For all the good it did Johnson: Surviving his Senate trial by 1 vote, he knew he couldn't get elected on his own in 1868, got back into the Senate in 1874 (welcomed by the men who had tried him with a standing ovation), and died the next year.
He was an unrepentant racist, making it odd that Lincoln would choose him for the Vice Presidency in 1864 (it was because he was the only Southern Senator who stayed loyal to the Union when his State seceded), and he remains a contender for the title of worst President ever. His hometown of Greenville, Tennessee is 250 miles east of Nashville. His museum is at 67 Gilland Street. (Charlotte, North Carolina is actually the closest major league city to Greenville, but it's not close.)
There's actually a 4th President with a minor connection to Nashville: In 2008, Barack Obama and John McCain had the 2nd of their 3 debates at the Black Box Theatre at Belmont University. Compton Avenue at Belmont Blvd., about 3 miles southwest of downtown. Number 2 bus.
Five of the six tallest buildings in Tennessee are in Nashville, only one in the larger city (but not larger metro area) of Memphis. The tallest went up in 1994, but has already changed names with one phone-service company buying out another: The South Central Bell Building, the BellSouth Building, and now the AT&T Building. At 617 feet high, its twin-spired roof has led to it being nicknamed the Batman Building. 333 Commerce Street.
Many music-themed movies have used Nashville as both a setting and a film location, including biopics of Elvis (Elvis, starring Kurt Russell), Patsy Cline (Sweet Dreams, starring Jessica Lange) and Loretta Lynn (Coal Miner's Daughter, starring Sissy Spacek). Each of these included the Ryman as a filming location. While the TV drama Nashville, soon to wrap up after 6 seasons (the 1st 4 on ABC, the last 2 on CMT), is filmed in Los Angeles, the 1975 film of the same title was filmed on location.
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Nashville is more than history and music, as important as those things are. It's also the home of an NHL team that is usually good, got very close to ultimate success last year, has developed quite a following among people you wouldn't think would take to hockey, and is now another good reason to visit this legendary city.
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