America's Music City
Nashville earned the name Music City long before Broadway's neon honky-tonks became a tourist circuit. The story goes that Queen Victoria said it first, after the Fisk Jubilee Singers — students from a university founded for freed slaves — toured Europe in the 1870s raising money to keep their school open. The country music industry arrived later, built around the Grand Ole Opry radio broadcast that started in 1925 and has never stopped. RCA's Studio B cut tens of thousands of songs, including a large share of the Elvis catalog, inside a plain brick building that looks like nothing at all. Behind the bachelorette parties and boot shops is a city of real creative depth, serious food, and fast-growing neighborhoods like The Gulch and East Nashville.
