Nashville

Nashville sits on the Cumberland River in the rolling Nashville Basin, a bowl of fertile limestone country ringed by the Highland Rim in north-central Tennessee. Founded in 1779 at a riverside bluff, it grew as a river port and trading center and became the permanent state capital in 1843, its Greek Revival capitol crowning a downtown hill.

The Cumberland River loops through the city on its way to the Ohio, and the surrounding basin's good soil and limestone springs supported early farms and horse country. Long the capital of country music — "Music City" — Nashville has boomed into one of the fastest-growing metros in the South, anchoring a region of more than two million.

• Tennessee
  The Volunteer State, a long ribbon across the South located in
• Memphis
  A Mississippi River city on the Chickasaw Bluffs same state