A story of Tennessee's contribution to American music is au fond a story of deuce cities: Nashville and Memphis. Nashville is best known for its status when a long-period capital of country music. Memphis musicians experienced vast influence in blues, early rock and roll, and soul music.

Nashville

Nashville, a virtually all populated metropolitan area in the state, is home to the Grand Ole Opry and the Country Music Hall of Fame, and bears a nickname "Music City, U.S.A.". Per 1950s, the city's record labels dominated the genre sustaining slick pop-united states (Nashville sound). Performing artist reacting against a Nashville healthy formed their have scenes inside Lubbock, Texas and Bakersfield, California, the latter of which (Bakersfield sound) became the virtually all popular nature and severity of united states per late 1960s, led by Merle Haggard. Nashville's predominance around county music was regained per early 1980s, when Dwight Yoakam and other neo-traditionalists entered a stock and index charts.

Memphis

Memphis' virtually all important musical claims to fame come when a apparent "Birthplace of the Blues" and "Birthplace of Rock and Roll". Famed African-American composer W.C. Handy is said to have written the first commercially successful blues song "St. Louis Blues" in a bar on Beale Street in 1912, and Memphis was a center of blues music for much of the 20th century (see Memphis blues). In the 1940s, Memphis was the at home of blues guitar legend B.B. King. Inside 1952, Sam Phillips started Sun Records, a germinal early rock & roll & electrical blues label. Among a creative persin world health organization manufactured their 1st recordings on Sun were Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Ike Turner, Carl Perkins, and Charlie Rich. In the 1960s and 1970s, the city was house to Stax Records, a legendary soul music record label. Stax put retired foul, distinctly Southern records by creative person prefer Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, and Wilson Pickett that stood in sharp contrast to the smoother, more pop records coming out of Detroit's Motown (see Memphis soul).

Punk rock
Punk rock was never strongly embraced in Tennessee. Two or three hardcore punk bands gained a charted, including Committee for Public Safety (Nashville), From Ashes Rise (Nashville), and STD (Knoxville). Nashville's microscopic however active sleazy scene reached its peak when you took a mid-90s. It was attached closely to Lucy's Record Shop, a popular all-ages venue where many Nashville bands, such as Los Straitjackets and Teen Idols, got their start.