Explore Nashville

The Johnny Cash Museum on 3rd Avenue South in downtown Nashville opened in 2013 with the approval of the singer's estate. It traces Johnny Cash's life and career through stage clothes, instruments, letters, records and film clips, and includes a stone wall taken from his lake house in Hendersonville.

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in downtown Nashville collects and presents the history of country music. Chartered in 1964, it moved in 2001 to a building whose windows recall piano keys. It shows instruments, stage costumes, cars and recordings, the Hall of Fame rotunda with its members' plaques, and the Hatch Show Print letterpress shop.

The Frist Art Museum opened in 2001 in Nashville's former main post office, an Art Deco building of 1934 near Union Station. It has no permanent collection: its galleries show changing exhibitions of art from around the world and from many periods, and it has a hands-on art studio for families.

The Tennessee State Museum tells the history of Tennessee from its first peoples to the present. Its current building opened in 2018 at the foot of Capitol Hill, beside the Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park. A walk-through Time Tunnel leads past artefacts, documents and objects, and there are changing galleries and a children's gallery.

The Parthenon in Centennial Park is a full-scale replica of the temple in Athens, built for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition of 1897 and rebuilt in concrete in the 1920s and 1930s. It is Nashville's art museum, with a collection of American paintings and, in the main hall, a 13-metre recreation of the Athena Parthenos statue.

Lane Motor Museum, opened in 2003 in a former bakery south-east of downtown Nashville, holds a collection of more than 500 cars and motorcycles, most of them European. About 150 vehicles are shown at a time, from microcars and amphibious vehicles to prototypes, and most are kept in running order.