Nashville Adventures Blog

By Briley Bell Nashville has always been a music city, you feel it on Lower Broadway, hear it in the walls of the Ryman, and you find it on a random Tuesday night when you wander into a venue and walk out with a new favorite band. But Nashville's 2026's touring lineup might be the best this city has ever seen. I'm Briley Bell, a tour guide for Nashville Adventures and an independent artist here in Music City, so I follow this town's concert calendar like most people follow sp

Nashville hot chicken is everywhere now — fast food chains, food magazines, airport menus. But the real origin story starts with a woman who was furious at a man. Here's the Nashville hot chicken history worth knowing before you order.

In August 1920, inside the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville, a 24-year-old legislator read a letter from his mother and cast the deciding vote for women's suffrage. Here's the Tennessee 19th Amendment story that changed American history.

By Briley Bell Nashville is not just a country music town after dark. Yes, there are honky-tonks on Broadway, and yes, they are worth your time at least once. But this city also has underground clubs and bars pumping pop, house, EDM, rap, and electronic dance music, with sound systems that'll make your chest rattle in the best possible way. If you're here to go clubbing, to find a real dance floor, and hear music that makes it impossible to stand still, you are in the right c

By Briley Bell Most people come to Tennessee for the music, the whiskey, and the football. That's the version we're happy to sell you. But strange stories have been coming out of these hills and hollows since before Tennessee was even a state. These legends have persisted for centuries, not because people are superstitious, but because enough people have seen something they couldn't explain and have been forever changed by it. A surprising number of those stories circle right

By Nashville Adventures Staff Ask me for the best poems about Nashville and I'll give you the honest answer first. This ain't a city with a tidy little stack of postcard poems about the skyline and the neon. It's something better than that. Nashville grew some of the most important poets in American history, and a handful of them wrote this city, its dirt and its ghosts, right into the work. Let me walk you through them. A poetry town hiding in plain sight People come to Nash

Beneath Nashville’s neon glow lies a dark history of murder, political intrigue, and the flat-out unexplained. Our Nashville true crime tour covers Printers Alley, the Hermitage Hotel, the Tennessee State Capitol, and the Ryman Auditorium — real events, real names, and the ghosts that never left.

There's a moment on almost every tour when somebody asks me how long Nashville has been "Music City." And I love that question. Because the honest answer is: not that long, actually. Nashville had already been a capital city, a university town, a Civil War battlefield, a river trading hub, and the "Athens of the South" long before the first guitar chord ever echoed out of a honky tonk on Broadway. The city's story doesn't start with country music. It just gets told that way.

Most ghost tours start with a fog machine and a cheap scream. Ours started with a stack of library books and a year of arguments about what's actually true. This is the Nashville ghost tour history you don't hear on the walk itself: the long, stubborn story of how we built the thing, and why I'm prouder of it than just about anything else we do. Grab a flashlight. Let me take you behind the curtain. Nashville Ghost Tour History: How We Built It Here's the honest version. We r

Some cities get a song or two written about them. Nashville is basically a song with a zip code. Walk down Broadway on a Friday night and you'll hear three of them pouring out of three different doorways before you reach the corner. So a while back I started keeping a list. These are my favorite songs about Nashville, ranked from the ones that nail this place to the one a Beatle scribbled at three in the morning and released anyway. Pour something cold. Here we go. 1. "Nashvi

By Paul Whitten I read a lot of books that claim to be about Nashville. Yeah, I know... it's weird. I spend all my time reading and learning about Nashville. It's a problem, but that's enough about my nerdiness... let me tell you what's wrong with these books. Most of them get the neon right and the soul wrong. But every so often a writer nails the thing I spend two hours trying to show people on a walking tour... the way this city hums under your feet. These are the novels s

Stand at the corner of Broadway and 4th on any given afternoon and you'll hear honky tonks cranking up before noon. You might catch the smell of bourbon drifting down from a rooftop bar. What you probably won't notice is that you're standing on the edge of what was once one of the most strategically vital Union supply bases in all of North America. That contrast is exactly the point. Nashville's Civil War history doesn't announce itself. It hides inside city blocks, underneat

On a spring morning in 1960, a 22-year-old college student stood on the steps of the courthouse and asked the mayor of Nashville one simple question. Diane Nash had no microphone and no official title. What she had was a question so honest it cut straight through every excuse the city had been hiding behind. And the mayor, to his credit, answered it. A Student From Chicago Who Chose the Front Lines Diane Nash wasn't a Nashville native. She grew up in Chicago and came south to

The FIFA World Cup 2026 has come to America, and Nashville is losing its mind in the best possible way. With U.S. match watch parties packing Geodis Park and Centennial Park on June 12, 19, and 25, Music City is right now experiencing one of the biggest tourist moments in its entire history. If you flew in for the football and you're wondering what to do in Nashville before or after the match... you landed in exactly the right city. Because here's what the locals know that mo