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Nashville is a city in north central Tennessee and capital of the state. Nashville shares the same boundaries with Davidson County; the two merged in 1963. Nashville is known as "Music City, USA" because it is the home of the recording industry for country-and-western music. Nashville is also the Middle South's center of government, education, banking, insurance, and health services. In the city is the headquarters of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant church group, and Nashville has a printing industry specialized in publishing Bibles. Nashville was founded in 1779 during the American Revolution (1775-1783) and named in honor of Brigadier General Francis Nash, mortally wounded two years earlier in the Battle of Germantown.
In the 1920s Nashville's insurance companies began using radio to reach new markets. An outgrowth was the Grand Ole Opry, sponsored by WSM Radio, which began in 1925 and became the fount of Nashville's country-music industry. During World War II (1939-1945) southern country music became popular in the United States, introduced to the rest of the nation by southern soldiers. After the war, Nashville's Music Row became the home of many recording studios, and musicians found Nashville a convenient place to record. Songwriters and music publishers relocated to Nashville from New York and other cities. By the 1960s Music Row had become a center for country, gospel, pop, and rock music.
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