Tennessee Music: The Whole Album, Not Just the Hit Single

If you only know Tennessee music from Nashville, you've heard the hit single. The full album is much longer and a lot more interesting.

Bristol: Where Country Music Was Born

In August 1927, Ralph Peer set up a recording studio in Bristol, Tennessee, and in one week recorded both the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. Music historians call it the Big Bang of country music. The Birthplace of Country Music Museum in Bristol tells this story properly — and it's worth the drive.

Memphis: Sun Studio and the Sound That Changed Everything

Sun Studio on Union Avenue is where Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and B.B. King all recorded. Sam Phillips had a theory: find the music Black and white artists were making toward each other and document it. What came out was rock and roll. Memphis did that.

Stax Records and the Memphis Soul Sound

While Motown made polished soul in Detroit, Stax made something rawer and deeper in Memphis — Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers. The Stax Museum on McLemore Avenue is one of the best music museums in the country and almost no one outside Tennessee knows it exists.

The Mountains: Old-Time and Bluegrass

East Tennessee's musical tradition predates all of it. The old-time fiddle tunes from the Appalachian Mountains were already old when the Carter Family recorded them. When Bill Monroe first played the Opry, he was playing music with a hundred years of Tennessee mountain culture behind it.

Nashville is the industry. The music belongs to the whole state.

Wear the music. Shop Tennessee Pride Apparel — designed for people who know the full story.