Nashville Area

Nashville has a consolidated city-county government which includes seven smaller municipalities in a two-tier system. The population of Nashville-Davidson County stood at 619,626 as of 2007, according to United States Census Bureau estimates. The 2007 population of the entire 13-county Nashville Metropolitan Statistical Area was 1,521,437, making it the largest metropolitan area in the state.

Nashville is often labeled the "Athens of the South" due to the many colleges and universities in the city and metropolitan area. The colleges and universities in Nashville include American Baptist College, Aquinas College, The Art Institute of Tennessee, Belmont University, Fisk University, Lipscomb University, Meharry Medical College, Nashville School of Law, Tennessee State University, Trevecca Nazarene University, Vanderbilt University, and Watkins College of Art&Design.

The Tennessee Performing Arts Center is the major performing arts center of the city. It is the home of the Tennessee Repertory Theatre, Nashville Children's Theatre, the Nashville Opera, and Nashville Ballet. In September 2006, the Schermerhorn Symphony Center opened as the home of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra.

Nashville has several professional sports teams, most notably the Nashville Predators of the National Hockey League and the Tennessee Titans of the National Football League. Several other pro sports teams also call Nashville home, as does the NCAA college football Music City Bowl. The Vanderbilt Commodores are members of the Southeastern Conference. The football team of Tennessee State University plays its home games at LP Field.

The Center's neoclassical exterior belies the technological and acoustical advances embodied inside. For example, the orchestra level seats are mounted on several motorized wagons that can be driven forward and lowered through the floor on spiral lifts, revealing an ornate Brazilian cherry and hickory parquet floor and enabling the Hall to be converted from a concert hall into a ballroom in approximately two hours. Further, dozens of motorized acoustic drapes and panels can be quickly adjusted to predetermined positions in order to accommodate many styles of acoustic and amplified music. Finally, those inside the Hall are spared the intrusion of the inevitable downtown noises by an acoustical isolation joint that encircles the entire Hall and prevents sound waves from traveling into or out of the Hall.

The venue has also hosted numerous concerts and religious gatherings, and some major basketball events. Since 2002, it has also hosted a PBR Built Ford Tough Series bull riding event every year.

The Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus appears each January.

Sommet Center has a seating capacity of 17,113 for ice hockey, approximately 20,000 for basketball, 10,000 for half-house concerts, 18,500 for end-stage concerts and 20,000 for center-stage concerts, depending on the configuration used. It has also hosted several professional wrestling events since its opening.

The arena can be converted into the 5,145-seat Music City Theater, used for theater concerts and Broadway and family shows, by placing a stage at the north end of the arena floor and hanging a curtain behind the stage and another to conceal the upper deck. The arena also features 43,000 square feet of space in a trade show layout.

The Opry was nationally broadcast by the NBC Radio Network from 1944 to 1956; for much of its run, it aired one hour after the program that had inspired it, the National Barn Dance. From October 1955 to September 1956, ABC-TV aired an hour-long television version live from Nashville once a month on Saturday nights, pre-empting one hour of the then-90-minute Ozark Jubilee.

On October 2, 1954, a teenage Elvis Presley made his first (and only) performance there. Although the public reacted politely to his revolutionary brand of rockabilly music, after the show he was told by one of the organizers (Opry manager Jim Denny) that he ought to return to Memphis to resume his truck-driving career, prompting him to swear never to return. In an era when the Grand Ole Opry represented solely country music, audiences did not accept Elvis on the Opry because of his infusion of rhythm and blues as well as his infamous body gyrations, which many viewed as vulgar.

The Ryman was home to the Opry until March 16, 1974, when the show moved to the 4,400-seat Grand Ole Opry House, located nine miles east of downtown Nashville on a former farm in the Pennington Bend of the Cumberland River. The Opry currently plays several times a week at the Grand Ole Opry House except for an annual winter run at the Ryman Auditorium.

In 1961, the CMA announced the creation of the Country Music Hall of Fame. In 1963, the CMA announced that a Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum was to be built on Music Row in Nashville. The original Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum opened on Music Row (Music Square East and Division Street) on April 1, 1967. Operations of the museum came to include educational programs, the CMF Press and CMF Records, the Country Music Foundation Library (1968), and the historic sites RCA Studio B (1977) and Hatch Show Print (1986). The Music Row location of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum was closed December 31, 2000.

On May 17, 2001, the CMF held the grand opening of its new $37,000,000 facility ten blocks away in downtown Nashville. Inside, the Museum presents its collection to illustrate country music's story as told through the turns of two centuries. Included are historic country video clips and recorded music, as well as a regular menu of live performances and public programs, a museum store, live XM Satellite Radio broadcasts, and on-site dining.

The new building's exterior is laced with symbolic images. The most obvious of these are the windows that mirror the configuration of piano keys. More conspicuous images include the diamond-shaped radio mast, which is a miniaturized replica of the WSM tower located a few miles south of Nashville. The round discs surrounding the tower symbolize the different size records and CDs country music has been recorded upon. When viewed from the air, the building is in the shape of a bass clef. The north-west corner of the building juts out like the tail fin of a 50s Cadillac. The Country Music Hall of Fame was designed by local architecture firm Tuck Hinton Architects and museum design firm Ralph Appelbaum Associates.

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum is accredited by the American Association of Museums, certifying that the Museum operates according to the highest standards, manages its collection and provides quality service to the public. Of the 8,000 museums nationwide, only some 750 are accredited.

The auditorium was first opened as the Union Gospel Tabernacle in 1892. It was built by Thomas Ryman (1843–1904), a riverboat captain and Nashville businessman who owned several saloons. Ryman conceived of the auditorium as a tabernacle for the influential revivalist Sam Jones. After Ryman's death, the Tabernacle was renamed Ryman Auditorium in his honor.

It was used for Grand Ole Opry broadcasts from 1943 until 1974, when the Opry built a larger venue just outside Nashville at the Opryland USA theme park. The Ryman then sat mostly vacant and fell into disrepair until 1992, when Emmylou Harris and her band the Nash Ramblers performed a series of concerts there. The Harris concerts renewed interest in the restoring the Ryman; it was reopened as an intimate performance venue and museum in 1994. Audiences at the Ryman find themselves sitting in pews, the 1994 renovation notwithstanding. The seating is a reminder of the auditorium's origins as a house of worship, hence giving it the nickname "The Mother Church of Country Music".

In 2001, the Ryman Auditorium was designated a National Historic Landmark and included in the National Register of Historic Places.

Gaylord Opryland Resort Hotel & Convention Center
Luxury Resort Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee

Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center invites you to experience the energy and excitement of Music City. On the banks of the Cumberland River, this landmark Nashville hotel is just minutes from Nashville International Airport and a short drive or riverboat cruise from downtown Nashville.

Centrally located and close to everything, Gaylord Opryland offers more than any other Nashville hotel—indeed, more than any hotel in the Southeast—when it comes to meetings and conventions. And with more than 600,000 square feet of flexible meeting space, Gaylord Opryland has not only the most plentiful and flexible meeting space of any Nashville hotel... it boasts the largest non-gaming, in-hotel exhibition space in the world.