How Did Nashville Become a Music City?

February 19, 2026

The short answer involves an insurance company, a 77-year-old fiddler, and a radio announcer who made a wisecrack on the air in 1927. The longer answer stretches back further, runs through postwar economics, and connects every stage of the story to people who were trying to make money, not history.

The Insurance Company That Built Country Music

On November 28, 1925, the National Life and Accident Insurance Company launched WSM radio from the fifth floor of its downtown Nashville office. The company’s motto was “We Shield Millions,” hence the call letters. Nashville’s social elite was skeptical about the program director George D. Hay hired to run the station, a man who wanted to broadcast old-time fiddle music on Saturday nights. They wanted something more respectable.

Hay launched what he called the WSM Barn Dance with Uncle Jimmy Thompson, a 77-year-old fiddler from Laguardo, Tennessee. Listener response was overwhelming. On December 10, 1927, following an NBC broadcast of Walter Damrosch’s classical Music Appreciation Hour, Hay announced: “For the past hour we have been listening to the music taken largely from Grand Opera, but from now on we will present the Grand Ole Opry.” The name stuck. The Guinness World Records later recognized it as the world’s longest-running radio program.

This mattered for a specific business reason. National Life agents discovered that introducing themselves as representatives of the station that broadcast the Grand Ole Opry opened farmhouse doors across the rural South. The Opry was not incidentally a radio show that happened to promote an insurance company. It was a marketing vehicle from the beginning. That commercial logic drove WSM to upgrade its transmitter to 50,000 watts in 1932, making the station audible across nearly 30 states every Saturday night.

Gravity Pulls Musicians to a Signal

Once WSM reached millions of homes, country musicians across the South had one career goal: get on the Opry. The show moved to the Ryman Auditorium in 1943, which became the most famous stage in country music not because of any grand plan but because it held more people than a fifth-floor radio studio. By the mid-1940s, historian Don Cusic of Belmont University identifies the decade 1945-1955 as the Opry’s peak magnetic pull, when every country performer wanted to be there. Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, and Elvis Presley all came through the Ryman. In 1945, Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs performed together on the Ryman stage, and bluegrass was born as a genre.

Musicians came to Nashville to play the Opry. Recording studios followed the musicians. Record labels followed the studios. Publishers followed the labels. The industry assembled itself not because Nashville had some natural advantage but because the signal already existed.

The Bradley Brothers and a Quonset Hut

In 1954, Owen and Harold Bradley opened a recording studio in a converted house at 804 16th Avenue South, then added a Quonset hut behind it for additional recording space. That hut, known as the Quonset Hut Studio, was the first commercial recording operation on what would become Music Row. Three years later, RCA built Studio B at 1611 Roy Acuff Place, where Elvis Presley would eventually record 240 songs including “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” and “Little Sister.” Music Row began developing around these two anchors.

By the early 1960s, RCA Victor, Decca, and Columbia were completing the majority of their country recording sessions in this four-block stretch of converted Victorian houses. The Country Music Association, founded in the late 1950s, established its headquarters there. The Country Music Hall of Fame opened on Music Row in 1967. In 1950, WSM radio announcer David Cobb ad-libbed the phrase “Music City, U.S.A.” while introducing The Red Foley Show, and the name permanently attached. The nickname was so organic that a Nashville band released a song called “Music City U.S.A.” later that same summer.

The Nashville Sound Kept the Industry Alive

Nashville’s role as music capital was not automatic. In the mid-1950s, rock and roll devastated country music sales. Producers Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins responded by stripping out fiddles and steel guitars and replacing them with string sections and vocal choruses, creating what became known as the Nashville Sound. When asked what the Nashville Sound was, Atkins famously put his hand in his pocket, rattled his loose change, and said: “That’s what it is. It’s the sound of money.”

The strategy worked. Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” (1961), Jim Reeves’ crossover pop hits, and Brenda Lee’s records reached mainstream audiences who had never paid attention to country. Nashville retained its position as the center of the industry precisely because its producers were willing to change the product to survive the market.

The “Music City” Name Has an Earlier Claimed Origin

Nashville’s boosters often cite an 1873 performance by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a vocal group from Fisk University composed of formerly enslaved students, during their European tour. The story holds that Queen Victoria, after hearing them perform, remarked that they must come from a “city of music.” Most music historians, including Ken Burns in his country music documentary, consider this account apocryphal. What is documented is that the Fisk Jubilee Singers did tour Europe in 1873, did perform for Queen Victoria, and did put Nashville on the musical map in a meaningful way. The apocryphal quality of the story doesn’t erase the genuine significance of what those nine students accomplished when they left Nashville on October 6, 1871.

The name “Music City” as commonly used traces to David Cobb’s 1950s radio announcements on WSM, not to Victorian-era royalty.

The Infrastructure That Locked Nashville In

What makes Nashville’s status durable rather than contingent is infrastructure that accumulated over decades. By the 2010s, the city had 56,000 music industry jobs, more per capita than New York or Los Angeles, according to a 2013 report. United Record Pressing, founded in 1949 on 7th Avenue South, became North America’s largest volume-producing vinyl plant, pressing records for Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, and Beyonce. The Nashville Symphony, which holds multiple Grammy Awards, anchors the city’s classical side. The Bluebird Cafe, which opened in 1982, institutionalized the writer’s round format that turned Nashville into the acknowledged songwriting capital of the world.

No other city has the same concentration of publishers, studios, performing rights organizations, session musicians, and live venues within a few square miles. That concentration is self-reinforcing. Songwriters move to Nashville because other songwriters are there. Producers set up studios because musicians are there. Labels stay because the talent pipeline exists. The Opry signal pulled the first musicians, and everything else followed.

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