The name “Music City” was handed to Nashville by a stranger in 1950, and the city has been building on it ever since. When Queen Marie of Yugoslavia visited in 1892, she was so taken with the number of piano factories and music teachers that she reportedly exclaimed, “It’s a veritable city of music!” But the nickname didn’t stick from that moment. It took a radio program to nail it in place.
On November 10, 1950, WSM radio personality David Cobb introduced a broadcast of the Grand Ole Opry to a national audience with the words: “This is WSM, from Music City USA, Nashville, Tennessee.” He improvised it. The name caught immediately and went into use across the country. Francis Craig, a Nashville bandleader, had actually used “Music City” informally before that, but Cobb’s broadcast is the moment that fixed it nationally.
What Justified the Name
Nashville’s claim to “Music City” goes beyond country music, though country is the load-bearing wall of the identity.
The Grand Ole Opry launched in 1925 as a WSM radio barn dance and became the longest-running live radio program in American history. It turned Nashville into a destination for artists, publishers, and fans before there was a Music Row to send them to.
Music Row, the cluster of recording studios and publishing houses on 16th and 17th Avenues South, developed through the 1950s and exploded in the 1960s. At its peak, Music Row housed all three major country labels (RCA, CBS/Columbia, Capitol) within a few blocks of each other. The sound coming out of those studios wasn’t just country: Elvis Presley recorded “Are You Lonesome Tonight” and “It’s Now or Never” at RCA Studio B. Bob Dylan recorded Blonde on Blonde here. Simon & Garfunkel. Joan Baez. Kris Kristofferson was a janitor at Columbia Studio before he became one of the most covered songwriters in American music.
The Infrastructure Behind the Name
What really made Nashville “Music City” wasn’t geography or luck. It was the accumulation of infrastructure that can’t be replicated overnight. Nashville has:
- 180+ recording studios spread across the metro
- Major publishing headquarters for Sony Music Publishing, Universal Music Publishing, and hundreds of independents
- The Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum, the largest popular music museum in the world at 350,000 square feet
- Hatch Show Print, the oldest working letterpress print shop in the US (1879), which printed show posters for virtually every major touring act of the 20th century
- A dense concentration of session musicians: the “A-Team” of Nashville session players who shaped the sound of American popular music from the late 1950s onward
The Name Is Still Earned
Nashville currently attracts more aspiring musicians per capita than any other American city. ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC all maintain Nashville offices. Belmont University’s music business program is one of the most recognized in the country. MTSU has a separate audio production program specifically because the demand from Nashville’s recording infrastructure is that concentrated.
The music industry generates roughly $10 billion annually for the Nashville economy, counting live music, recording, publishing, and music tourism. CMA Fest alone draws 90,000+ attendees daily and generates hundreds of millions in visitor spending.
Austin calls itself “Live Music Capital of the World,” a title it began promoting aggressively in the 1990s. The competition is real. But Nashville’s claim is older, deeper in infrastructure, and rooted in an industry rather than a scene. Austin has more live music venues per capita; Nashville has more music industry jobs, more publishing deals, and more recording infrastructure. Both titles can coexist. They describe different things.
Sources
- “Nashville’s Music City Nickname,” Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum
- WSM Radio broadcast history, David Cobb (November 10, 1950)
- Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp, 2024 Economic Impact Report
- American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Nashville office historical record
- Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum, museum overview