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.

Ryman Auditorium opened in 1892 as the Union Gospel Tabernacle, a red-brick church hall in downtown Nashville. From 1943 to 1974 it was the home of the Grand Ole Opry radio show, and it remains a concert hall with 2,362 seats and church-pew seating. By day, visitors tour the auditorium, its stage and exhibits on its history.

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.

The Grand Ole Opry House, opened in 1974 at Opryland east of downtown Nashville, is the home of the Grand Ole Opry, the country-music radio show broadcast since 1925. A six-foot circle of wood from the Ryman Auditorium's stage is set into its stage floor. Shows run several nights a week, and backstage tours are held by day.

Travellers Rest is the 1799 home of John Overton, a judge and a founder of Memphis, about 10 km south of downtown Nashville. For decades the plantation was worked by enslaved people. The house museum shows the family rooms, exhibits on the 1864 Battle of Nashville and a grounds tour on the landscape of enslavement.