Best Things to Do in Nashville (2026 Guide)

In a building on Third Avenue South in downtown Nashville, artifacts, recordings, photographs, and personal objects connected to one of American music’s most distinctive and complicated careers are organized with evident affection and scholarly care. The Johnny Cash Museum opened in 2013 and has since expanded to become one of Nashville’s most consistently visited attractions, drawing audiences who range from long-devoted fans of Cash’s work to younger visitors encountering his biography for the first time. The museum’s curatorial approach treats Cash as a figure whose cultural significance extends well beyond any single genre or decade.

The collection spans Cash’s entire career, from his early Sun Records recordings in Memphis through his late American Recordings series that introduced his music to a new generation of listeners. Personal items from his life with June Carter Cash, stage costumes from different periods, original recording equipment, handwritten notes, and extensive photographic documentation give the exhibits an intimacy that comes from the direct involvement of the Cash family in the museum’s development. The narrative arc of the collection emphasizes Cash’s continuous artistic evolution and his engagement with social issues including prison reform, Indigenous rights, and Vietnam-era dissent.

The museum occupies several floors and takes most visitors 90 minutes to two hours to explore thoroughly. It is open daily with hours that extend into the evening, making it a practical choice after dinner on Lower Broadway. The location between Broadway and the Gulch area places it within easy walking distance of Nashville’s main entertainment and dining district. Tickets can be purchased online in advance to skip the entry queue.

The Johnny Cash Museum fills a specific gap in Nashville’s musical landscape, presenting a career that defied easy categorization during his lifetime and remains genuinely resistant to the genre boundaries that organize most of the city’s other music-focused institutions.

In the small town of Lynchburg, Tennessee, roughly 75 miles south of Nashville, a limestone cave spring has been supplying iron-free water to a whiskey operation since at least 1866, when Jasper Newton Daniel registered his distillery with the federal government and began producing the Tennessee whiskey that would eventually become one of the most recognized spirits brands in the world. The Jack Daniel Distillery operates today on much the same footprint as the original facility, and the charcoal mellowing process used to make its product has not changed in fundamental character since the nineteenth century.

Guided tours of the distillery take visitors through each stage of production, from the grain milling and fermentation process through the charcoal mellowing vats that distinguish Tennessee whiskey from bourbon and into the barrel warehouses where the spirit ages. The Cave Spring Hollow, where the source water emerges from the limestone, is a stopping point on most tours, and the original office where Jack Daniel worked is preserved as a museum exhibit. The distillery sits within Moore County, which is officially a dry county, meaning whiskey can be purchased at the gift shop but not consumed on the premises as a sample.

Tours run throughout the day and book up quickly, particularly on weekends during warmer months; reservations made well in advance are advisable. The drive from Nashville takes approximately 90 minutes and passes through Tennessee’s rolling Middle Tennessee countryside. Allow at least two to three hours for the tour and grounds. Wear comfortable shoes as the tour involves significant walking on uneven terrain.

The Jack Daniel Distillery occupies a singular position in American spirits tourism as one of the oldest continuously operating registered distilleries in the country, functioning simultaneously as a working production facility and a living monument to Tennessee’s distilling tradition.

Lower Broadway and the streets surrounding it in central Nashville operate at a register that is difficult to find anywhere else in American cities: live music pours from every door from mid-morning until well past midnight, and the honky-tonks lining the main strip charge no cover, functioning as an open-air festival of country and Americana that requires no ticket and no plan. The neon-lit storefronts, the crowds spilling onto the sidewalks, and the sound of competing bands bleeding together at intersections create an atmosphere that is simultaneously commercial and genuinely alive.

Beyond the bar district, downtown Nashville contains a concentration of significant institutions within walking distance of each other. The Tennessee State Capitol, Bridgestone Arena, the Frist Art Museum, and the Cumberland River waterfront all sit within or adjacent to the core, giving the area more civic substance than its reputation as a party destination might suggest. The Gulch neighborhood to the southwest and the Germantown district to the north offer quieter, more residential extensions of the downtown experience.

Evenings on Broadway are the primary draw but also the most congested period; crowds peak on Friday and Saturday nights when wait times at popular venues extend significantly. Daytime visits offer a more relaxed version of the same experience, with fewer people and more opportunity to find a seat near the stage. Nashville’s summers are hot and humid, making the air-conditioned interiors of the honky-tonks a practical refuge as well as an entertainment destination.

Downtown Nashville has transformed substantially over the past two decades from a regional music hub into a national destination, and while the scale of development has changed its texture, the concentration of live music, historic architecture, and walkable civic life continues to give it a character distinct from other mid-sized American downtowns.

On the Music Row corridor in Nashville, inside a low building that predates the surrounding industry it helped to create, a recording studio preserves the room where some of the most commercially successful American popular music of the twentieth century was made. RCA Studio B was in operation from 1957 to 1977 and during that period served as the primary recording facility for artists including Elvis Presley, Dolly Parton, Roy Orbison, and Chet Atkins, who also served as the studio’s creative director and helped define a smoother, orchestrated production style that became known internationally as the Nashville Sound.

Today the studio is operated as a museum by the Country Music Hall of Fame, and tours bring small groups into the original recording space with its vintage equipment, original console, and period-accurate setup that communicates the specific acoustic logic behind the recordings made there. The control room, vocal booth, and main tracking room are all part of the tour, and the guide narration provides production context for specific recordings and sessions that took place in the same physical space visitors are standing in. The studio remains in working order and occasional sessions are still recorded there.

Tours must be booked through the Country Music Hall of Fame, which is located nearby on Demonbreun Street. Access to RCA Studio B is not available without a tour reservation, and group sizes are limited. Combination tickets covering the Hall of Fame museum and the Studio B tour offer the best value. Tours depart at scheduled intervals and last approximately one hour.

RCA Studio B offers something genuinely rare in music tourism: the actual physical environment where landmark recordings were made, intact and accessible, with enough interpretive context to transform what might otherwise be an empty room into a vivid encounter with a specific and consequential chapter of American popular music history.

A museum dedicated to the history and ongoing influence of African American music occupies a building on Broadway in downtown Nashville, a city whose commercial music industry was built in significant part on African American artistry that went unacknowledged and uncompensated for generations. The National Museum of African American Music opened in 2021, presenting a chronicle of American musical forms rooted in Black cultural expression, from the field songs and spirituals that predate the Civil War through jazz, blues, gospel, rhythm and blues, soul, funk, and hip-hop.

The museum’s galleries take a chronological and genre-based approach to mapping how African American musical innovation shaped not only American culture but global popular music over more than three centuries. Interactive exhibits allow visitors to engage with specific musical traditions through audio and video material, and curated playlists built into the experience give texture to the historical narrative that text alone cannot provide. A collection of instruments, stage costumes, and recording equipment anchors the more tactile sections of the exhibition. The museum also documents the business history of the music industry, including the structural inequities that allowed record labels and publishers to extract enormous value from Black artists while returning relatively little.

The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, with the Broadway location placing it within walking distance of the Country Music Hall of Fame and within the broader downtown tourist corridor. Visits range from two to three hours depending on how deeply visitors engage with the audio components. Advance tickets are recommended on weekends during peak tourist season.

Positioned on the same street that defines Nashville’s commercial country music identity, the National Museum of African American Music makes an implicit argument about origins and influence that the proximity of Broadway’s honky-tonk strip makes unavoidable. Its location is not incidental to its purpose.

The building on Broadway that houses the Frist Art Museum opened in 1934 as Nashville’s main post office, and the art deco marble interior — with its soaring ceilings, decorative metalwork, and original postal counters now repurposed as visitor reception — gives the museum a grandeur that predates its role as a fine arts institution. The Frist opened as an art museum in 2001 and has established itself as Tennessee’s primary venue for major traveling exhibitions from national and international collections, bringing works to Nashville that would otherwise require travel to New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles to see.

The museum does not maintain a permanent art collection in the traditional sense; instead, the gallery spaces rotate entirely through temporary exhibitions that typically span a few months each and cover a wide range of periods, media, and geographical origins. This model means the specific experience changes substantially from visit to visit, and long-term Nashville residents find reason to return regularly. An interactive gallery designed for younger visitors runs consistently regardless of the main exhibition schedule. The building’s architecture alone warrants a visit for anyone interested in American art deco design.

The museum is closed on Mondays; Tuesday through Sunday hours vary seasonally. Admission prices vary depending on the featured exhibitions, with reduced rates on certain evenings each month. The downtown location, adjacent to the convention district and a short walk from Lower Broadway, integrates naturally into a broader Nashville itinerary. Parking is available in nearby public garages.

The Frist Art Museum fills a role in Nashville’s cultural life that goes beyond local or regional scope, connecting the city to the international art world through a rotating program that routinely brings museum-quality exhibitions to an audience that might not otherwise access them.

On a rise in the West End neighborhood of Nashville, a full-scale replica of the ancient Athenian Parthenon stands in a public park, looking very much as the original Greek temple might have looked when it was new, with painted details on the pediment and a scale that only becomes fully apparent when people walk alongside it. The Nashville Parthenon was built in 1897 as a temporary exhibit for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition and has been a permanent fixture of Centennial Park ever since, serving as the park’s architectural centerpiece and one of the city’s most quietly eccentric landmarks.

Inside the Parthenon, the Naos gallery houses a 42-foot statue of Athena Parthenos, completed in 1990, that replicates the chryselephantine sculpture believed to have stood in the original Athenian temple. The lower level functions as an art museum with a permanent collection of American paintings donated to the city in the early twentieth century, supplemented by rotating temporary exhibitions. The combination of a classical architectural experience, a monumental sculpture, and a working gallery creates a layered visit that takes most visitors between 60 and 90 minutes to cover.

Centennial Park itself is a 132-acre green space that attracts joggers, picnickers, and families on weekends, particularly in spring and fall when the temperature is mild. The park is busiest on warm weekend afternoons; visiting the Parthenon building during weekday morning hours provides a quieter experience inside. Admission to the building is charged; the surrounding park is free and open daily.

The Nashville Parthenon occupies a genuinely unusual position among American civic monuments — a full-scale classical temple in a Southern city that adopted the nickname Athens of the South during its nineteenth-century educational expansion, and then quite literally built the part.

Inside Centennial Park’s Parthenon building, a 42-foot gilded statue of the goddess Athena dominates the main gallery with a scale that surprises even visitors who have read about her dimensions in advance. The Nashville Parthenon replica was built in 1897 for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, and the interior statue — completed in 1990 by sculptor Alan LeQuire — represents the modern world’s most detailed reconstruction of the chryselephantine Athena Parthenos that once stood in the original Athenian temple. The combination of a full-scale classical temple and this monumental figure creates an experience unlike anything else in American public art.

The Athena statue stands on a plinth in the main hall, holding a winged Nike figure in her right hand and a shield at her left side, with a serpent coiled behind the shield. The level of iconographic detail in the figure draws scholars of classical antiquity as well as casual visitors. The gallery surrounding the statue includes interpretive panels explaining the mythology and iconographic choices in the design. The lower level of the building houses the Cowan Collection, a permanent gallery of American paintings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Parthenon building is open Tuesday through Sunday during daylight hours, with a modest admission charge. Early afternoon on weekdays is typically the quietest visiting period. The building sits within the larger Centennial Park, which is worth exploring before or after the Parthenon visit; the lake, walking paths, and bandshell make for a pleasant extension of the outing.

The Nashville Parthenon offers a genuinely rare experience: standing at eye level with a monumental ancient deity in a building that itself replicates one of the most influential structures in the history of Western architecture, all within a Southern city park.

At the crest of a hill overlooking downtown Nashville, a Greek Revival building constructed of Tennessee limestone has housed the state’s government since 1859. The Tennessee State Capitol is one of the oldest functioning state capitol buildings in the United States, and its architect, William Strickland, is buried within its walls — a condition stipulated by the legislature in recognition of his death during construction and his wish to remain connected to the building he designed. The Capitol stands on a rise that was once the highest point in central Nashville, and the view from its grounds encompasses much of the city’s evolving skyline.

The building remains an active seat of government and is open to the public for self-guided tours during legislative sessions and on most weekdays throughout the year. Visitors can walk through the legislative chambers, view the exterior colonnade and ornamental details, and access the grounds surrounding the building, which include monuments to significant figures in Tennessee history. Guided tours are available on a scheduled basis and provide more detailed historical context than the self-guided option.

The Capitol is most accessible by foot from downtown hotels and from the nearby Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park, which sits on the north side of the hill and was designed to frame views of the building from ground level. Visiting on a weekday morning typically allows access to the legislative chambers, which may be restricted during active floor sessions. No admission is charged for tours of the building or grounds.

The Tennessee State Capitol functions as both a working government facility and a significant architectural landmark, representing a moment in mid-nineteenth-century American civic building when Greek Revival architecture was used deliberately to align new democratic institutions with the ideals of ancient Athens.

A few blocks east of the Frist Art Museum in downtown Nashville, a concert hall opened in 2006 with an exterior of Indiana limestone and an interior designed around a single overriding concern: the sound. The Schermerhorn Symphony Center was built for the Nashville Symphony after years of the orchestra performing in spaces that were never designed for orchestral music, and the main hall was conceived from the earliest planning stages as an acoustically optimized room, the result of extensive collaboration between architects and acoustic engineers that drew on the science of the world’s best-regarded symphony halls.

The main performance hall seats approximately 1,800 people in a vineyard-style configuration that wraps audience seating around the sides and rear of the stage, bringing listeners into closer acoustic and visual relationship with the performers than a traditional proscenium layout allows. The hall is also designed with natural light in mind — operable windows and skylights allow daylight into the space during afternoon events, a feature rare in contemporary concert venues. The building hosts the Nashville Symphony’s regular season alongside visiting ensembles, touring soloists, and occasional non-orchestral performances.

Tickets for Nashville Symphony performances should be purchased in advance for popular programs and subscription concerts. The venue also offers backstage tours and daytime educational events on a scheduled basis. The downtown location near the Cumberland River and the Convention Center area makes it accessible from most central Nashville hotels. Dress code for performances is relaxed by major-city symphony standards, with casual attire commonly seen alongside formal wear.

The Schermerhorn represents a significant civic investment in a city known primarily for popular music, and the building’s architectural ambition and acoustic quality have established Nashville as a serious venue on the international classical music touring circuit in a way that was not previously possible.

In late winter, bare branches frame a Georgian mansion at the end of a long drive in west Nashville, and by April the same approach is hemmed in by flowering trees and sculptural forms that seem to have grown out of the Tennessee earth. Cheekwood Estate and Gardens, set on 55 acres at 1200 Forrest Park Drive, operates in two registers at once — a meticulously preserved historic house and a living botanical garden that changes with every season.

The mansion, built in the early 1930s for the Cheek family, whose fortune came from Maxwell House coffee, now serves as an art museum housing American decorative arts and paintings spanning several centuries. The galleries are intimate and the collection carefully selected, giving the house a domestic coherence that larger institutions rarely achieve. Outside, the gardens are organized into distinct areas including a Japanese garden, a perennial garden, and seasonal display beds that shift focus from bulbs in spring to dahlias and ornamental grasses in late summer and fall.

The estate draws its largest crowds for seasonal events and installations, so visiting during a regular weekday avoids the thickest congestion. Comfortable walking shoes are worth the planning — the grounds involve moderate terrain and considerable distance. Spring and fall are the most visually rewarding seasons, though each month brings something different to the garden calendar.

Cheekwood occupies a position in Nashville’s cultural landscape that is genuinely unusual for a city better known for music venues than for horticulture. The combination of a functioning art museum within a significant garden estate, both maintained to high standards, gives the property a range that sets it apart from Nashville’s other historic house museums.

The neon signs of Broadway in Nashville have competed for attention since honky-tonk bars started clustering along this stretch in the mid-twentieth century, but Honky Tonk Central occupies a particular position on the strip by stacking three floors of live country music above one of the most trafficked corners in the district. On any given evening the sound of competing bands filters through the open facades of multiple levels simultaneously, creating an acoustic layering that defines the Broadway experience for millions of visitors annually.

Each floor functions as a separate bar with its own stage and band performing simultaneously during peak hours. The ground floor tends toward traditional country sounds while upper levels sometimes lean into a broader country-rock mix, though programming varies by night and season. Cover charges are not standard on Broadway, with venues relying instead on drink sales, which means exploring multiple floors or moving between adjacent bars carries no financial penalty beyond what you order. The rooftop level offers views down Broadway toward the Cumberland River when weather permits.

Broadway operates at full volume Thursday through Saturday evenings, with crowds peaking between nine at night and two in the morning. Weekday afternoons offer a quieter experience of the same spaces, with bands performing to lighter audiences. Nashville’s summer heat makes open-facade bars most comfortable after sunset during July and August.

On a strip lined with venues competing for the same tourist dollar, Honky Tonk Central has built its reputation on consistent live music across multiple floors rather than novelty theming or celebrity affiliations. That focus on the music itself, variable as any given night may be, keeps it connected to what Broadway originally was before it became a destination industry unto itself.

On the alley behind the Ryman Auditorium, tucked between Broadway’s honky-tonks and the loading docks of Nashville’s entertainment district, a bar that has been operating since 1947 occupies a narrow space where the walls are covered in photographs of musicians who have performed, passed through, or simply drunk there over the past several decades. Tootsies Orchid Lounge takes its name and its lavender exterior paint from Hattie Louise “Tootsie” Bess, who purchased the bar in 1960 and made it a sanctuary for performers during the years when the Grand Ole Opry broadcast from the Ryman next door.

The bar’s layout is deliberately unglamorous: a long counter, closely packed tables, a small stage at the back, and live music that runs from midday until late at night without cover charge. The walls and ceiling are covered so densely with photographs, album covers, and memorabilia that it functions as an unofficial museum of Nashville’s musical history, organized entirely by accumulation rather than curatorial intent. The performers who appear most nights are working musicians rather than established artists, and the quality of playing is consistently high.

Tootsies is open seven days a week and draws a mix of locals, tourists, and occasional celebrities throughout the day. Afternoon visits on weekdays offer the most relaxed atmosphere; evenings and weekends pack the bar to capacity. The venue does not take reservations and there are no tickets — arrival and persistence determine access to a seat. The alley entrance from the Ryman side and the Broadway entrance both lead to the same interior.

Tootsies occupies a place in Nashville’s musical mythology that newer venues cannot replicate — it functioned as a de facto green room for the Opry during its Ryman years, and the informal mentorship and community that formed within its walls shaped country music’s commercial era in ways that are difficult to trace but widely acknowledged.

On the north side of the Tennessee State Capitol, a long rectangular park descends from the base of the hill in a formal design that frames the Capitol building in views from street level below. Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park was opened in 1996 to mark the 200th anniversary of Tennessee’s statehood, and its nineteen-acre footprint combines open lawn, a reflecting pool, fountains, and an extensive system of monuments, markers, and time capsules embedded in the ground and walls along its length.

The park’s design functions as an outdoor history museum, with 31 fountains representing Tennessee’s counties, a 200-foot granite map of the state, a walkway of historical chronology panels tracing Tennessee history from pre-contact Native American cultures through the twentieth century, and a World War II memorial with individual panels for each county’s fallen soldiers. The farmers market that operates on the park’s edge on weekends adds a lively local dimension to the otherwise monumental character of the space. The lawn between the market area and the Capitol steps is used for outdoor events and concerts throughout the warmer months.

The park is open daily and free to visit at any hour, though the interpretive content is most comfortably explored in morning or late afternoon when direct sunlight is not beating down on the exposed granite surfaces. The park connects naturally to a walk through the Capitol grounds above and to the downtown core below, making it an efficient component of a broader civic sightseeing route rather than a standalone destination requiring a dedicated visit.

The Bicentennial Capitol Mall creates a civic space that Nashville lacked before its construction, linking the state’s legislative center to the city’s street level through a formal landscape that encodes Tennessee’s history literally into the ground beneath visitors’ feet.

About eight miles west of downtown Nashville, on a property that once formed the core of one of the largest thoroughbred horse breeding operations in the antebellum South, a Greek Revival mansion built in the 1820s opens its doors to visitors willing to engage with a history that encompasses both extraordinary privilege and the institution of slavery that sustained it. Belle Meade Historic Site and Winery occupies the original plantation grounds, and the guided tours offered there have in recent years moved toward a more comprehensive account of the site that includes the enslaved men and women who built and maintained the estate alongside the white family who owned it.

The mansion itself is a formal example of Greek Revival domestic architecture with period furnishings restored to the antebellum era, and the broader grounds include several original outbuildings that have been incorporated into the interpretive experience. The property’s history as a stud farm for racehorses continues in the visitor experience through exhibit material about the notable thoroughbreds associated with the estate. A working winery established on the grounds produces wines available for tasting in a dedicated facility that occupies part of the historic carriage house complex.

Guided tours run throughout the day and cover both the mansion and the interpretive areas focused on the full community that lived and worked on the property. The winery tasting room operates independently and can be visited without a mansion tour. The site is most comfortable to visit in spring and fall when temperatures are mild; the grounds include significant outdoor walking between buildings.

Belle Meade occupies an important and evolving role in Nashville’s historical landscape, offering one of the most substantive attempts in Middle Tennessee to present a plantation site’s history in a way that includes all of its inhabitants rather than only the family who owned the land.

Along 16th and 17th Avenues South in Nashville, a stretch of low-slung studios, publishing offices, and music industry buildings has been generating commercially recorded music since the 1950s. Music Row is less a tourist attraction in the conventional sense than a working professional district where record labels, songwriting firms, and production companies continue to operate, many in the same buildings where landmark recordings were made decades ago. The physical area is compact, walkable in an afternoon, and dotted with historical markers that connect the present streetscape to specific recordings and careers.

The most significant surviving historic site within the district is RCA Studio B, now operated as a museum by the Country Music Hall of Fame, where Elvis Presley, Dolly Parton, and dozens of other major artists recorded during the golden era of Nashville Sound production. Several other studios and publishing houses along the corridor offer their own historical resonance, though many operate as private businesses rather than public venues. A large guitar sculpture and memorial garden mark the entrance to the Row’s main corridor.

The district is most rewarding for visitors with genuine interest in the music industry’s mechanics rather than those seeking a performance-based experience. Walking the streets during business hours on weekdays occasionally yields glimpses of the industry at work. Combining a Music Row walk with a tour of RCA Studio B or a visit to the Country Music Hall of Fame, which sits nearby, creates a coherent half-day itinerary focused on the production side of Nashville’s musical identity.

Music Row represents Nashville’s transition from regional honky-tonk culture to international recording center, and the physical buildings along these avenues contain a history of American popular music that extends well beyond the country genre’s core audience.

At the edge of Riverfront Park where the Cumberland River bends through downtown Nashville, a reconstruction of a late eighteenth-century frontier settlement marks the site where a group of settlers from the Watauga Association arrived by flatboat in April 1780 and established the cluster of log structures that would eventually grow into the city of Tennessee’s capital. Fort Nashborough is a modest but historically precise site, reconstructed to reflect the character of a stockaded frontier fort from the early American settlement period, when the region was contested between European-American settlers and the Cherokee and Chickasaw nations whose territory it was.

The reconstruction includes several log cabin structures that interpret the living and working conditions of early settlement life, along with interpretive signage that provides context for the political and military situation facing the settlers who built the original fort. The site is small and can be explored in 20 to 30 minutes; it functions best as a layered stop within a broader riverfront and downtown walking itinerary rather than as a standalone destination requiring dedicated travel time. The views of the Cumberland River from the fort site are among the more unobstructed available along the downtown waterfront.

Fort Nashborough is located within Riverfront Park and is accessible on foot from Lower Broadway, making it easily combined with the nearby park, the Ryman Auditorium area, and the Johnny Cash Museum to the south. Interpretive programming and special events occur at the site periodically, particularly around dates of historical significance in Tennessee’s early history. Admission to the exterior grounds is free.

Fort Nashborough serves as Nashville’s most direct acknowledgment of the settlement history that preceded the city’s transformation into a commercial and cultural center, offering a grounded, site-specific reference point at the edge of the river where that history literally began.