Nashville

NASHVILLE

NASHVILLE, the capital of Tennessee, is in the north-central region of the state. In many ways a typically "New South" metropolis, the city has always exercised disproportionately large political and cultural influence over the mid-South. Nineteenth-century American presidents Andrew Jackson, James Polk, and Andrew Johnson all adopted Nashville as their hometowns, as did Vanderbilt University's "Fugitives," a southern literary movement led by Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom.

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Nashville was founded by a group of settlers led by James Robertson in the winter of 1779/80. Investors and speculators from North Carolina and Virginia were soon attracted to Nashville's prime location in the fertile Cumberland River Valley, and by 1806, the fledging town was officially incorporated. The city grew steadily throughout the nineteenth century, never booming like neighboring Memphis and Atlanta, but growing in population from 17,000 in 1860 to 80,000 by 1900. During this time, Nashville became known as the "Athens of the South" for its cultural institutions and highly regarded universities such as Fisk and Vanderbilt, and the city gained somewhat of a genteel reputation.

Nashville began to grow into a major metropolis with the onset of the Great Depression and the subsequent New Deal programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority, which provided cheap and plentiful power. The city's economy boomed throughout the remainder of the twentieth century. Never a major industrial center, Nashville's banking, insurance, and entertainment industries allowed it to take advantage of the national shift to a more service-centered economy. The entertainment industry provided Nashville with a new image, as the Grand Ole Opry helped make Nashville into "Music City," the center of the country music recording industry.

After World War II, the civil rights movement forced the South to end segregation de jure, and Nashville followed suit somewhat more peacefully than other Southern cities. In contrast to many American cities in the postwar era, Nashville's population rose the fastest during the 1960s, from 170,000 to 426,000, largely because of the city's governmental functions merged with Davidson County.

As of 2000, the Nashville-Davidson population had risen to 569,891, an eleven percent increase from 1990. The metropolitan area reached 1,231,311, a twenty-five percent increase, making Nashville the fastest-growing metropolitan area between Atlanta and Dallas. The city's economy remains diverse, with religious publishing joining tourism, banking, auto manufacturing, and health care as major growth sectors.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Doyle, Don Harrison. Nashville in the New South: 1880–1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985.

———. Nashville since the 1920s. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985.

John McCarthy

See also Music: Country and Western ; Tennessee .