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Country music evokes a simple, agrarian past, with images of open land and pickup trucks. While some might think of the genre as a repository of nostalgia, popular because it preserves and reveres traditional values, Jeremy Hill argues that country music has found such expansive success because its songs and its people have forcefully addressed social and cultural issues as well as geographic change. Hill demonstrates how the genre and its fans developed a flexible idea of “country,” beyond their rural roots, and how this flexibility allowed fans and music to “come to town,” to move into and within urban spaces, while retaining a country “character.”

To understand how the genre has become the far-reaching commercial phenomenon that it is today, Hill explores how various players within the country music fold have grappled with the notion of place. He shows both how the industry has transformed the city of Nashville and how country music—through song lyrics, imagery associated with the music, and branding—has reshaped ideas about the American landscape and character. As the genre underwent significant change in the last decades of the twentieth century, those who sought to explain its new styles and new locations relied on a traditional theme: “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy.” Hill demonstrates how this idea—that you can still be “country” while no longer living in a rural place—has been used to expand country's commercial appeal and establish a permanent home in the urban space of Nashville.

In February 1960, as lunch counter sit-ins began in Southern cities, national attention focused on Nashville, where demonstrations were carried out by an unusually organized and disciplined group of students tutored extensively in nonviolent direct action. Their mentor was Reverend James Lawson Jr., a graduate student at Vanderbilt University Divinity School with longstanding nonviolent credentials. His workshops with Nashville students, exploring Gandhian style philosophies and tactics, had predated the famed Greensboro sit-ins.

As demonstrations continued in Nashville and successive sit-ins saw violence erupt downtown, local Black ministers demanded an audience with Mayor Ben West. At this meeting, an exchange occurred that was misconstrued by subsequent newspaper reportage. Shortly thereafter, Lawson was summarily expelled from Vanderbilt, one semester shy of graduating.

Lawson’s ouster triggered a wave of repercussions and headlines. After extended negotiations with their superiors were rebuffed, a large contingent of Divinity School faculty resigned en masse. Simmering dissension between the university’s professors, Board of Trust, and administrators kept the crisis ongoing. Sustained criticism of Vanderbilt both within the city and nationally made for a turbulent situation as Lawson’s expulsion came to symbolize profound tensions about civil rights and racial justice.

However, the story of the Magdalene community is not about these statistics, but about the stories the women tell. They say they thrive in the community because it is a place where they are free to be themselves, safe to give and receive love, and free to speak their trutheven to complain sometimes about how their storytelling is exploited "for the good of the community." A Place about Mercy is a participantobservation account of the history of this remarkable community founded in 1997, its structure, its Thistle Farms beauty products operation, and Reverend Becca Stevens's communal and spiritual vision. The book is finally about what it means to walk the path of healing with a group of unlikely women as guide.

Magdalene House was the subject of a multiplepart documentary on National Public Radio.

Whether it’s building skyscrapers, running successful restaurants, researching diseases, performing music, cleaning hotel rooms, or holding public office, immigrants are changing Nashville from a mid‑sized city known for its country music industry to an increasingly diverse, multicultural destination. In Metro Nashville schools today, students speak more than 120 languages. The city is bigger, more congested, and more expensive than it’s ever been, drawing criticism from both longtime residents and newcomers. But growth has also brought top‑notch scientists and educators, a world‑class symphony, major league sports teams, investment from major corporations—and a wide range of immigrants whose talent and hard work have helped make all of that happen.

Through its profiles of thirty-nine immigrants from thirty-eight countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Australia, Nashville’s New Americans provides a case study from one of the fastest-growing cities in the country on the contributions immigrants are making to its culture and economy.

This is the origin story of Nashville’s surging contemporary art scene told by the ones who were there before anyone else. Not a story about commercial spaces or official institutions—this is the story of moldy warehouse studios and improvised galleries, happy-kegger after-parties and front lawn art sales, exhibitions in apartment living rooms and secret art displays hidden in plain sight.

Nowville is an oral history of the Nashville art scene beginning in the 1990s. Author Joe Nolan tracks down the city’s art punks, art monks, radical art students, and visionary pioneers to share what made their moments in Nashville so special. He also offers insights into how this homespun movement powered by DIY innovating came to be a thriving creative community and a cornerstone of the city’s contemporary allure.

This book is the recipient of the 2025 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of art or medicine.

Since opening in 1925 as the Hillsboro Theatre, the Belcourt has stood at the center of Nashville’s changing cultural life. Over the course of a century, it has been a neighborhood movie house, a stage for live performance, a home for community theater, an art-house cinema, a music venue, and a nonprofit film center. Its story is also the story of a city shaped by shifting technologies, urban change, grassroots activism, and evolving ideas about what cultural institutions are for.

The Belcourt Theatre offers the first full history of this enduring landmark, tracing how one cultural center adapted again and again to serve new audiences while remaining a vital place for public gathering, artistic exchange, and shared experience.

An authentic rock band story from Chicago to Nashville and, just maybe, back again

On the cusp of turning thirty, Chicago indie musician Maggie Corbin has hustled for a decade, set on making her rock and roll dreams come true. Her band, Spinning Birds, fronted by Maggie and her romantic partner Matt Turkish, releases a debut record to critical acclaim, hits the road, and begins working on a follow-up. From the outside, her path looks like success—but as streaming deconstructs the industry and Maggie’s relationships shift and slip, the question remains: Can you live for art alone?

When a sudden move back to the South forces Maggie to reframe her dreams and reckon with familial rifts and her past—while still fighting to reimagine what her future could be—a natural disaster in Nashville and a surprise encounter with a character from her childhood shift her perspective on healing, community, and the ties that bind. Drifting in and out of songwriting sessions, cozy kitchens, and moments of bearing witness to the curious power of the natural world, The Come Apart celebrates the times when we must come fully undone in order to put ourselves back together.
 

Early in the morning on June 1, 1953, five African American men boarded a van to make the 200-mile trip from Nashville to Memphis for a daylong recording session at the legendary Sun Studios, to be overseen by Sun founder Sam Phillips. One of the two tracks cut that day, “Just Walkin' in the Rain,” would go on to become a regional R&B hit, Sun Records' biggest record of the pre-Elvis era. It would, however, be the group's only hit. They were the Prisonaires, a vocal quintet who had honed their skills while inmates at the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville. 

In this book, John Dougan tells the story of the Prisonaires, their hit single, and the afterlife of this one remarkable song. The group and the song itself represent a compelling concept: imprisoned men using music as a means of cultural and personal survival. The song was re-recorded by white singer Johnnie Ray, who made it a huge hit in 1956. Over the years, other singers and groups would move the song further away from its origins, recasting the deep emotions that came from creating music in a hostile, controlled environment. 

The story of the Prisonaires, for all of its triumphs, reflects the disappointment of men caught in a paradoxical search for personal independence while fully cognizant of a future consigned to prison. Their brief career and the unusual circumstances under which it flourished sheds light on the harsh realities of race relations in the pre–Civil Rights South. The book also provides a portrait of Nashville just as it was gaining traction as a nationally recognized music center.

In They Came to Nashville, Chapman records the personal stories of musicians shaping the modern history of music in Nashville, from the mouths of the musicians themselves. The trials, tribulations, and evolution of Music City are on display, as she sits down with influential figures like Kris Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris, and Miranda Lambert, and a dozen other top names, to record what brought each of them to Nashville and what inspired them to persevere. The book culminates in a hilarious and heroic attempt to find enough free time with Willie Nelson to get a proper interview. Instead, she's brought along on his raucous 2008 tour and winds up onstage in Beaumont, Texas singing "Good-Hearted Woman" with Willie.

They Came to Nashville reveals the daily struggle facing newcomers to the music business, and the promise awaiting those willing to fight for the dream.

Co-published with the Country Music Foundation Press