Even among living legends, Dolly Parton’s star shines with unusual brilliance. Her fame casts a wider, brighter light today than at any time in her career of sixty-plus years. The Country Music Hall of Fame member has enjoyed seemingly effortless success as a singer, songwriter, movie and television actor, author, businesswoman, and philanthropist ever since she first hit the record charts in 1967. In truth, however, her achievements required determination to get past those who tried to limit the scale of her dreams.

The Museum’s latest exhibition, Muscle Shoals: Low Rhythm Rising, explores how an Alabama community developed a distinctive sound, became a global recording epicenter in the 1960s and 1970s, and continues to inspire music today. The exhibit tells the story of Black and white musicians who found a way to work together at a time when segregation prevailed. Producer Rick Hall and his FAME Recording Studio and the session aces at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio built a home-made approach to cutting music that mattered. As a result, hitmakers from R&B, rock, pop, and country music flocked to this quiet backwater to record, and a new rhythm arose. Exhibit supported by OneLouder.

Country’s Grandest Stage: The Opry at 100  celebrates notable performers and moments in the history of the longest-running radio show in the world, as well as one of the most important radio programs in broadcasting history. 

Lainey Wilson: Tough as Nails is open now. The exhibit explores the Louisiana native’s ascent to stardom and her identity as both a pragmatic farmer’s daughter and the free-spirited originator of “bell bottom country.”

This annual exhibit offers a broad look at country music and its place in American culture over the past year, exploring musical developments, artist achievements, and notable events. The latest installment, which will be open through January 2026, features music and moments from cozy clubs to arena rafters.

Open now, the Museum’s latest exhibit, Rosanne Cash: Time Is a Mirror, traces the life of an artist, raised within a legacy few get to experience, who established a legacy all her own. Referred to as “a musical mystic” and a “songwriting time traveler,” Cash has created work that moves among genres and transcends time with a singular voice.

The exhibit features photographs from Rode’s 2024 book, “Songwriter Musician: Behind the Curtain with Nashville’s Iconic Storytellers and Players.” The exhibit is free and will be open to the public through July 2026 in the museum’s first-floor gallery.

The book is the culmination of decades of stories captured on film: playing snooker with John Prine, celebrating Mardi Gras in New Orleans with Brad Paisley, traversing Tennessee with Ketch Secor and more. The idea for the book was inspired by a 1991 photo Rode took of Country Music Hall of Fame member Chet Atkins, whom Rode met shortly after moving to Nashville in 1990.

One of the best-selling female country singers of the twentieth century, Patsy Cline achieved iconic status following her tragic death at age thirty in 1963. Cline was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1973, and is frequently invoked as a standard for female vocalists, having inspired scores of singers including k. d. lang, Loretta Lynn, Linda Ronstadt, Trisha Yearwood, and Wynonna Judd.

DeFord Bailey was an influential harmonica player in both country music and blues, one of the Grand Ole Opry’s most popular early performers, and country’s first African-American star.

Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn—performing together as Brooks & Dunn—charged onto the country music scene in 1991. They went on to become the best-selling country duo of all time, with forty-one Top Ten hits (including twenty #1s) and two decades of packing concert arenas. They collected a mountain of music-industry honors, including two Grammys, nineteen CMA awards, and twenty-five ACM awards.

Reba McEntire ranks as the most successful female country performer of her generation, and she has been cited as a role model by nearly every successful woman to follow in her wake. She has achieved more than fifty Top Ten singles and more #1 country albums than any other female artist. McEntire has won CMA Female Vocalist of the Year four times and was CMA Entertainer of the Year in 1986. She also has won three Grammy Awards, and in 2018 received the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors for her lifetime of contributions to American culture.

Hank Williams’s legend has long overtaken the rather frail and painfully introverted man who spawned it. Almost singlehandedly, Williams set the agenda for contemporary country songcraft, but his appeal rests as much in the myth that even now surrounds his short life.