Nashville between honky-tonks and the Parthenon

The Country Music Hall of Fame traces a century of the genre's history through stage costumes, autographed guitars, and a sound archive containing the earliest commercial country music recordings from the 1920s.

The Ryman Auditorium, a former religious tabernacle that became the 'mother church of country music' in the twentieth century, hosted the Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts for over thirty years before the move to a larger venue.

Along Broadway, free-entry honky-tonk bars line up with live musicians on multiple floors simultaneously, often before noon.

The Parthenon in Centennial Park, a 1:1 scale replica built in 1897 for an exposition and reconstructed in concrete in the 1920s, houses a gilded statue of Athena over twelve meters tall inside.

It's hard to imagine another city where a concrete Greek temple and a religious tabernacle converted into a concert hall are both routine stops on the same day.

Broadway, louder than either, remains the place where Nashville keeps writing its own music rather than simply preserving it in a museum.