The soul of Nashville is not what the tourism infrastructure sells and it is not what the state legislature wants to hear. It lives in a specific collision: craft and ambition, community and commerce, erasure and memory. The city that built country music out of a tradition it buried, that gave the world the Fisk Jubilee Singers and then built Interstate 40 through their neighborhood, that makes everyone feel welcome and keeps the rent going up.
Jefferson Street
Before Nashville was Music City, it was the Black Athens of the South. By 1890, Nashville had four historically Black universities: Fisk, Tennessee State, Roger Williams, and Meharry Medical College, the first Black medical school in the country. The Jefferson Street corridor in North Nashville was a Mecca for Black American music that hosted Etta James, Ray Charles, Little Richard, Aretha Franklin, and a young James Marshall Hendrix, who learned rhythm and blues guitar from Nashville musicians before becoming Jimi Hendrix.
Then the federal government built I-40 through the center of Jefferson Street in the late 1960s. It was not an accident of routing. The highway demolished homes, clubs, schools, churches, and businesses in a pattern that the documentary Nashville’s Soul calls precisely what it was: an intentional evisceration of a Black community. The neighborhood has never fully recovered.
Nashville’s soul is partly the music that Jefferson Street made, and partly the ongoing process of the city deciding whether to acknowledge what was destroyed to build what replaced it.
The Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Nickname
The Fisk Jubilee Singers gave Nashville its name. In 1873, on tour in Europe, they performed for Queen Victoria, who reportedly said they must be from a Music City. The nickname came before the Grand Ole Opry existed, before country music existed in its current form, before any of the infrastructure Nashville now trades on. It came from a group of African American students performing spirituals to save a struggling university, raising the money that built Jubilee Hall, the first permanent building for African American higher education in the country.
Nashville calls itself Music City and markets that history, while the tradition that actually created the name has been substantially more obscure to most visitors than the Country Music Hall of Fame.
The Craft That Actually Defines the City
What distinguishes Nashville from every other entertainment economy is not the genre, not the brand, not the honky-tonks. It is the density of professional craft. Nashville’s session musicians are among the finest in the world. Its songwriters have a distinct professional culture with structural rigor unlike anything in other music cities. Producers who have shaped decades of American popular music work out of studios in Berry Hill and Music Row.
This is what draws musicians here, not the chance to be famous, but the chance to work alongside people who are excellent. The culture of craft respect between musicians, the way the city treats its best session players and songwriters, is the soul underneath the tourism economy.
The Ongoing Argument
Every Nashville generation argues about the same thing in different terms: what is authentic, who gets to claim the city’s identity, what is being lost to growth and what is being gained. The current version of this argument involves whether the bachelorette economy has permanently changed what Broadway is, whether Music Row’s consolidation represents the death of something real, whether the artists moving in from New York and Los Angeles are participating in a tradition or just borrowing its aesthetic.
These are not new questions. They are the permanent condition of a city that built its economy on an art form. What is the soul of Nashville? It is the musicians who stayed when they could have left. The ones who showed up for Tuesday night songwriter rounds at the Bluebird for years before anything happened. The session player who drove to a studio in Berry Hill at 7 a.m. for a call that might not have led anywhere. The Fisk Jubilee Singers who sang their way to Europe and back. The people who kept making music whether the city noticed or not.
The soul of Nashville is that it keeps making music regardless of what is happening to it. That is both its deepest quality and the reason it survives its own success.
Sources:
- Nashville’s Soul: documentary feature on Nashville as capital of Black culture (nashvillessoul.com)
- Wikipedia: Music of Tennessee (Jefferson Street, Jimi Hendrix, WLAC history)
- Vanderbilt Hustler: Nashville’s identity crisis (February 2023)
- Soul of America: Nashville history (soulofamerica.com)
- Why Is Nashville Called Music City (alittlelocalflavor.com, August 2025)
- Oxford Academic, Social Problems: Tipping Regimes on Nashville’s Honky-Tonk Row (May 2025)