What's the must-see thing in Nashville?

The Ryman Auditorium sits at 116 5th Avenue North, two blocks uphill from the tourist noise of Lower Broadway. Captain Thomas Ryman built it in 1892 as a gospel tabernacle, and the room's original purpose still shows. The curved wooden pews creak when you shift your weight. The ceiling arches like an inverted ship hull. The Grand Ole Opry broadcast from this stage from 1943 to 1974, and the acoustic design means a singer at the front can whisper and the person in row QQ hears it clean. Tickets for most shows run $40 to $80. The daytime self-guided tour costs $26 and includes standing on the stage, which sounds gimmicky but lands differently when you're looking out at 2,362 empty seats and the stained-glass windows throw colored light across the floorboards.

Nashville's Parthenon in Centennial Park is the one thing in the city that has no equivalent anywhere else in the United States. It is a full-scale concrete replica of the Athens original, built for Tennessee's 1897 Centennial Exposition and reconstructed in permanent materials by 1931. Inside stands a 42-foot gilded statue of Athena by sculptor Alan LeQuire, completed in 1990. The building is strange and convincing in equal measure. The Doric columns are cool to the touch even in June's 32°C heat. Admission is $10 for adults. Most visitors spend 30 to 45 minutes. The park around it is flat, shaded, and quiet enough that you can hear the fountains from the parking lot. Worth noting, this is a 15-minute drive or a 25-minute bus ride from downtown on WeGo Route 3.

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum at 222 Rep. John Lewis Way South is the right pick if you want to understand why Nashville became Music City and not, say, Memphis or Austin. The collection runs deep. Elvis Presley's gold Cadillac sits on the ground floor. Over 800 instruments fill the upper galleries. Plan for 2 to 3 hours. Tickets currently run around $28 for adults, and the combo ticket that adds a tour of Historic RCA Studio B on Music Row is $44. That studio tour tends to be the part people remember. You stand in the room where Roy Orbison recorded "Only the Lonely" in 1960, and the linoleum floor and drop ceiling look like a dentist's waiting room. The ordinariness of the space is the point.

A word on what to skip. Lower Broadway's honky-tonks are free to enter, loud enough to feel the bass in your sternum, and open from 10am to 3am. They are fine for a beer and 20 minutes of people-watching, but they are not the must-see. The music is cover bands playing requests, not Nashville's actual songwriter culture. For that, go to the Bluebird Cafe at 4104 Hillsboro Pike in Green Hills, where the format is a 4-songwriter round in a 90-seat room so quiet you can hear fingers on guitar strings. Tickets run $15 to $20 and sell out weeks ahead on their website. The Bluebird is where Garth Brooks was discovered in 1987. If you can get a seat, it belongs on your list ahead of any honky-tonk.