Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

1967

The first museum building opened in 1967 in the shape of a barn

The Country Music Foundation was chartered by the state of Tennessee in 1964 to collect, preserve and publicize the history of country music. The museum opened on April 1, 1967, in a barn-shaped building at the head of Music Row, modeled after the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

The Hall

The Hall of Fame began in 1961 with Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers and Fred Rose

The hall of fame honor was created in 1961 by the Country Music Association. The first inductees were Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers and Fred Rose. Roy Acuff, elected in 1962, was the first living artist to join. No nominee was inducted in 1963.

Downtown

The museum moved downtown in May 2001 and doubled in size in 2014

In May 2001 the museum moved to a new 140,000-square-foot facility in the heart of downtown Nashville's arts and entertainment district. In 2014 it unveiled an expansion that doubled its size to 350,000 square feet.

350,000square feet after the expansion of 2014

The collection

It holds Mother Maybelle Carter's guitar and Elvis Presley's Cadillac

The collection includes over 900 musical instruments, among them Mother Maybelle Carter's Gibson L-5 guitar, Bob Wills's fiddle and Bill Monroe's mandolin, as well as Elvis Presley's 1960 Solid Gold Cadillac limousine. The Bob Pinson Recorded Sound Collection holds over 250,000 sound recordings.

Studio B

Hatch Show Print and Historic RCA Studio B belong to the museum

Hatch Show Print, one of the country's oldest letterpress print shops, is inside the museum. Historic RCA Studio B, on Music Row, is Nashville's oldest surviving recording studio, where recordings by Elvis Presley, Dolly Parton, Waylon Jennings and many others were made.