Nashville’s museum landscape splits into two categories: music history and general history. The music institutions are among the strongest of their kind anywhere in the country. The general history institutions are underappreciated by visitors who come for the music and leave without knowing they exist. Both categories have options worth serious time.
The Anchor: Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
The Country Music Hall of Fame is the Smithsonian of country music. That is not hyperbole; it is how the institution describes itself, and the description holds up. The museum holds more than 2.5 million artifacts: instruments, costumes, handwritten lyric sheets, recordings, photographs, stage-worn clothing. The Hall of Fame Rotunda inductees are displayed in a space that communicates genuine institutional weight.
The museum opened its first location on Music Row in 1967. It moved to its current downtown building at 222 Rep. John Lewis Way S in 2001, then expanded in 2014 with a $100 million addition that doubled its footprint to 350,000 square feet. Admission also unlocks access to the Taylor Swift Education Center and two performance spaces, the CMA Theater and Ford Theater, which host regular live programming. The museum owns and operates Hatch Show Print, the letterpress printing shop that has been in continuous operation since 1879, and manages Historic RCA Studio B. Rotating exhibits address both historical and contemporary country music; current shows as of early 2026 include “Rosanne Cash: Time Is a Mirror” and “Country’s Grandest Stage: The Opry at 100.”
Johnny Cash Museum and Patsy Cline Museum
The Johnny Cash Museum at 119 3rd Ave S opened in May 2013 and has accumulated an extraordinary set of recognitions: USA Today voted it Best Music Museum in the United States three consecutive years from 2023 to 2025, National Geographic and Forbes rank it among the world’s top music museums, and Conde Nast Traveler lists it as the number-one must-visit museum for music lovers. The collection includes a stone wall from Cash’s lakehouse in Hendersonville, stage costumes, handwritten lyrics, personal letters, and guitars. It is officially authorized by the Cash estate.
The Patsy Cline Museum occupies the floor directly above the Johnny Cash Museum, which means you can visit both in one trip. Cline died in a plane crash in 1963 at age thirty. The museum’s 4,000-square-foot gallery includes rare video clips, awards, personal letters, and the costumes she wore performing, many of which she designed and her mother made.
Tennessee State Museum
The Tennessee State Museum is the most important general history museum in the city and also the most overlooked by tourists. Located at 1000 Rosa L. Parks Blvd, it covers 13,000 years of Tennessee history across six permanent exhibitions, a hands-on Children’s Gallery, and a digital learning center featuring a “Tennessee Time Tunnel.” Admission is free. This is the place to understand Nashville and Tennessee as historical entities: how Indigenous civilizations built mound cities along the Cumberland, how the state entered and exited the Civil War, what Reconstruction actually meant in Middle Tennessee, and how Nashville developed into what it is today. The Civil War collection alone justifies the trip.
National Museum of African American Music
NMAAM opened in 2020 at 510 Broadway in the Fifth + Broadway development, making it the only museum in the country dedicated to preserving and celebrating the musical contributions of African Americans across all genres. The 56,000-square-foot facility includes the Roots Theater, a multimedia origin experience tracing African musical traditions through spirituals, blues, and gospel; and the Rivers of Rhythm Pathways exhibit, which follows the development of music from early African rhythms through contemporary hip-hop. The location is important: the museum sits at the intersection of country music’s commercial district and the history of Black Nashville, which shaped that music more than any official narrative has acknowledged.
Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage
The Hermitage at 4580 Rachel’s Lane is a National Historic Landmark: the 1,120-acre plantation where Andrew Jackson lived from the 1790s until his death in 1845, and where he and his wife Rachel are buried. Jackson was Nashville’s most famous resident, a city founder figure who served as the seventh U.S. president from 1829 to 1837. Approximately 250,000 people visit annually, making it the fourth most visited presidential home in the country. The site includes the original mansion, enslaved workers’ quarters, and extensive interpretive programming that addresses both Jackson’s historical significance and his role as a slaveholder and architect of Indian removal policy. It is not a sanitized or celebratory experience; it is a genuinely complex one.
Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum
The Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum takes a different angle than the Country Music Hall of Fame by honoring the session musicians, engineers, and producers who created the sounds attributed to famous artists. The museum includes an immersive Grammy Museum Gallery and artifacts including Jimi Hendrix’s guitar. It covers all genres rather than focusing exclusively on country music, which gives it a breadth the more specialized institutions lack.
Belle Meade Historic Site and Fort Nashborough
Belle Meade Plantation at 5025 Harding Pike is an antebellum estate that was one of the most celebrated Thoroughbred horse farms in nineteenth-century America. The interpretation addresses slavery and the enslaved people who made the plantation function. Fort Nashborough, on the downtown riverfront, is a reconstructed 1779 frontier fort marking the original site of Nashville’s founding settlement.
Sources
- Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum official site (countrymusichalloffame.org)
- Wikipedia, “Johnny Cash Museum” (en.wikipedia.org)
- Johnny Cash Museum Yelp listing (yelp.com)
- National Museum of African American Music (trolleytours.com/nashville)
- Tennessee State Museum (tennesseemuseum.org)
- The Escape Game, “13 Best Nashville Museums to Visit” (theescapegame.com)
- Wanderlog, “The 32 Best History Museums in Nashville” (wanderlog.com)
- Nashville Downtown, Country Music Hall of Fame listing (nashvilledowntown.com)
- Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage (thehermitage.com)