Why Is Nashville Called Music City?

Nashville is called Music City because a WSM radio announcer, David Cobb, began using the name “Music City” on the air around 1950, and the city’s growing recording and broadcasting industry made the label stick. The older story is that Queen Victoria heard the Fisk Jubilee Singers and said they must come from a “city of music”, but no one has been able to document it.

Both parts of that answer matter, because the legend still circulates as if it were the origin.

The Documented Origin: WSM in the Early 1950s

WSM was the radio station owned by the National Life and Accident Insurance Company, and the company slogan “We Shield Millions” gave the station its call letters. It went on the air on October 5, 1925, and on November 28 of that year began the Saturday night barn dance that George D. Hay renamed the Grand Ole Opry in December 1927, according to the Opry’s own history page.

By the early 1950s that signal had made Nashville the place country performers wanted to be heard. WPLN’s Curious Nashville series, drawing on Ken Burns’s research for his country music documentary, credits announcer David Cobb with using the nickname on WSM, at a time when the station’s Opry was popular across the South (WPLN). The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s entry on the Nashville recording industry dates the name “Music City, USA” to the early 1950s and notes that the city has used it as a brand ever since.

Accounts that give an exact date and program for Cobb’s first use of the phrase differ from one another, and none of the sources above pins it down, so treat any precise date you see as unconfirmed.

The Legend: Queen Victoria and the Fisk Jubilee Singers

The Fisk Jubilee Singers were the student choir of Fisk University, a school founded in 1866 to educate formerly enslaved African Americans. Beginning in 1871 the nine-member choir toured to raise money to save the school, including a year-long concert tour of Europe (Tennessee Encyclopedia, Fisk University). Those tours were real, and they did put Nashville’s name in front of European audiences. The part that does not hold up is the quotation. WPLN notes that the Queen Victoria story is hard to prove and that the group’s long-time director has said it is not true.

If you hear a different version, such as a visiting European queen in the 1890s, it is not a recorded event either. The Jubilee Singers story is the only form of the legend with a real tour behind it, and even that one lacks the quote.

The history of the choir itself is covered in who the Fisk Jubilee Singers were.

What Made the Name Accurate

A nickname from a radio announcer only lasts if the place keeps living up to it. Three developments did that work, each documented in the Tennessee Encyclopedia:

1. Broadcasting reach. WSM increased its power and joined the NBC network in 1927, and after 1946 the Opry’s network exposure, along with the decline of Chicago’s National Barn Dance, left it as the dominant country radio program (WSM entry; recording industry entry).
2. Record labels moving in. After World War II, Mercury, Capitol, RCA Victor, Columbia, and Decca opened Nashville offices to reach the talent the Opry attracted. In 1954 Owen and Harold Bradley moved their studio to Sixteenth Avenue South, the first business on what became Music Row, and in 1957 RCA built what became Studio B (Music Row entry).
3. Recording beyond country. The same studios recorded the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, and Roy Orbison, and in 1966 Bob Dylan recorded much of Blonde on Blonde in Nashville, which the encyclopedia credits with drawing other pop and rock artists to the city.

The encyclopedia now describes Nashville as one of the three major recording centers in the United States, alongside Los Angeles and New York. That is the substance behind the slogan: not a single genre, but a concentration of studios, publishers, session players, and broadcasters.

Where to Go Deeper

Nashville did not invent country music on record. The Tennessee Encyclopedia dates the birth of contemporary country music to August 1927, when Victor executive Ralph Peer recorded the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in Bristol, and says Peer made only one stop in Nashville, in September 1928. The city’s recording industry “actually began after World War II”. The first major-label session came on December 4, 1944, when Eddy Arnold recorded four songs for Victor in WSM’s Studio B. The Country Music Association followed in 1958 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1963, and those events “solidified Nashville’s claim as the capital of country music” (Tennessee Encyclopedia). For the radio show at the center of it all, see what the Grand Ole Opry is.

When someone tells you the Queen Victoria story, the accurate reply is that it is a legend about a real tour, and that the name itself came from Nashville radio in the 1950s.