Nashville: A City on the Rise

The following is adapted from Climbing the Charts by Angie Lawless, Brandon Miller, and Steve Morris.

In the past three decades, Nashville has been catapulted from relative obscurity to one of the media’s favorite cities. We’ve experienced a three-pronged explosion of population, economy, and culture. In terms of population, Metro Nashville is now home to 1.9 million people from a diverse set of backgrounds. Economically, we have become a hub for businesses, especially in the healthcare sector, and many companies continue to open or move headquarters here. Culturally, we’re one of the most unique cities in the United States. We have a thriving culinary scene, many galleries and museums, three major sports franchises, and, in our opinion and many others’, the best live music scene in the world. There’s a reason millions of people visit Nashville each year, with over 15 million visitors in 2018 alone.

Here are a few highlights of Nashville’s accomplishments in just the past few years:

• In 2016, despite having “no chance,” Nashville was the first city selected to receive a Major League Soccer expansion team — the Nashville Soccer Club.
• In 2017, the Nashville Predators (who ESPN voted as the best franchise in not just the NHL but across all sports) made it to the Stanley Cup finals for the first time.
• In 2018, Amazon announced it will be opening up an Operations Center for Excellence, which will bring a $230 million investment to the city, as well as 5,000 new jobs, with a focus on management and tech roles, with an average predicted salary of $150,000.
• In 2019, Nashville hosted the NFL draft and smashed several records in the process, bringing in a record 600,000 attendees and generating a record $133 million in direct spending for the city; by comparison, Dallas, which hosted the draft in 2018, generated $74 million.
• Also in 2019, Nashville was ranked as having one of the best job markets for major US cities, having the lowest unemployment rate of any top 50 metropolitan statistical area (MSA), at 2.4 percent.

While Nashville’s achievements might shock outsiders, they’re no surprise to Nashville’s residents. Nashville has certainly evolved, but more than the city itself, it is the perception of the city that has changed. As Forbes put it, “Nashville’s current boom isn’t so much of a rebirth as it is a Renaissance.” Yes, Nashville has a lot to offer right now, but as any Nashvillian can attest, it’s always had a lot to offer. It’s just taken a while for the rest of the country to realize and fully appreciate it. As locals, we love our city and have known that feeling for as long as we’ve been here.

This shift in perception is due in part to a change in media portrayals. One of the most illustrative examples of this is the stark differences between Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville and the 2012 ABC TV series Nashville.

Nashville’s Image Evolution: Rural Backwater to Progressive Cosmopolis

Robert Altman may be best known for his film M*A*S*H, which inspired the TV show by the same name, but Nashville is considered his masterpiece. In the words of critic Roger Ebert, “After I saw it, I felt more alive. I felt I understood more about people. I felt somehow wiser. It’s that good a movie.” Nashville received 11 Golden Globe nominations and 3 Oscar nods, including nominations for Best Picture and Best Director and a win for Best Original Song (“I’m Easy” by Keith Carradine, which also won a Golden Globe). The acclaim continues today. In 2017, the film was ranked number 59 on the American Film Institute’s 100 Years, 100 Movies, 10th Anniversary Edition List.

Though Nashville enjoyed commercial and critical success, not everyone was a fan. The film was widely despised by the mainstream country music community. Many artists, especially Nashville natives, believed Altman’s masterwork ridiculed their talent, sincerity, and the city itself, perpetuating negative and false stereotypes. After the local premiere of the film in Nashville, Minnie Pearl, a familiar and beloved face at the Grand Ole Opry, kept her comments brief: “It was interesting. Sure is good to see you tonight.” Ronnie Milsap, who was in the midst of a career that would produce 35 number 1 country hits and win 6 Grammys, said, “I’ve seen a lot of movies in my day, and this is one of them.” Despite the tongue-in-cheek southern diplomacy, the message was clear: this was a movie by and for outsiders; it was not a true picture of Nashville.

Despite having an ensemble cast, with 24 main characters, Nashville failed to represent the diverse complexity of Nashvillians. Nearly all the characters of the film were in the country music or gospel industry, and the majority were portrayed as unsophisticated yokels. Many argue that the film perpetuated an image of the South as a rural, backward place of rednecks and simpletons. For those who loved the city and had a vision of building Nashville into a booming cosmopolitan center, the film was the ultimate slap in the face. It was also ironic that those portraying Nashville as a place of ignorance were in fact the ignorant ones, creating an anachronistic, inaccurate picture of the city.

That was how Nashville was framed in 1975. Flash-forward to 2012, to the ABC TV series Nashville created by Callie Khouri (who had actually lived in Nashville), and you get a vastly different perspective. Like Altman’s Nashville, Khouri’s Nashville revolves around the music business, with many of the characters being aspiring artists. Truly, no story about Nashville is complete without proper attention paid to music.

However, Khouri’s Nashville also has strong political and economic themes. The show features political intrigue and paints Nashville as a city of movers and shakers. The characters are not portrayed as country bumpkins but as well-educated, sophisticated, and complex individuals. In addition to talented musicians and songwriters, the show also features savvy businesspeople and shrewd politicians. The show reflects the reality of Nashville as a hotbed of innovators and creators, be they musicians, entrepreneurs, or real estate developers.

The city of Nashville had already begun its climb when Khouri’s Nashville began airing, but the show played a critical role in framing Nashville as a tastemaker city that sets trends. Love it or hate it, the show, with its millions of viewers and billboards across the country, did much to change popular perceptions of Nashville. It also didn’t hurt Nashville’s tourism industry, which has been booming over the past decade, with many giving Khouri’s Nashville partial credit. As Butch Spyridon, CEO of the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corporation, said, “We couldn’t have asked for any better treatment of Nashville.”

The way filmmakers and TV producers have told Nashville’s story has shaped the popular imagination in terms of what Nashville is like as a city. Just as influential as these fictional portrayals is the news media spin, which has also played a key role in Nashville’s rise.

For more information on Nashville, you can find Climbing the Charts on Amazon.

Angie Lawless, Brandon Miller, and Steve Morris are the attorneys and founders of Lockeland Law Group, PLC, and Wagon Wheel Title, a boutique real estate title and escrow company based in Nashville, Tennessee. Angie and Steve are graduates of Vanderbilt Law School, and Brandon graduated from Harvard Law School. Combined, they have nearly fifty years of experience in the legal and real estate worlds. They met while working together at Bass, Berry & Sims, one of Tennessee’s preeminent law firms.

They are all Kentucky and Tennessee natives — Angie is from Mount Vernon, Kentucky; Brandon is from Cleveland, Tennessee; and Steve is from Gleason, Tennessee. They now call Nashville home. They love the city for its progressive, growth-focused mindset; the cultural diversity; and the live music (which includes a lot more than just country).