The Nashville Business Oral History Project

The Nashville Business Oral History Project is a group of over 170 interviews conducted by journalist and historian Bill Carey as he wrote his books Fortunes, Fiddles, and Fried Chicken: A Nashville Business History (2000), as well as Master of the Big Board: The Life, Times and Companies of Jack C. Massey (2005). These interviews provide listeners and researchers with rich primary sources of diverse stories of the trials, tribulations, and successes of Nashville business leaders as they endeavored to grow their business over the last 70 years. The interviews together provide a unique entry point into the study and consideration of the Nashville business scene during the 20th century.

Bill Carey, historian and author of six books, was a reporter for The Tennessean throughout most of the 1990s. While reporting, he established important connections in the Nashville business world that he would call on when he began work on his foundational work about the Nashville business landscape. This story was told through a tapestry of important interviews that focused on the creation of Nashville’s major industries. His original interviews include luminaries like Monroe Carrell, Thomas Frist Jr., and Martha Ingram, among many others. His interviews also focus on the business aspects of the subject’s career, actions that often are overshadowed due to the subject’s numerous other accomplishments. These interviews form a vision of Nashville’s changing business landscape from the 1920s on and are an invaluable resource for historians and for students alike.

The first half of the interviews were digitized through the generous funding of the Tennessee Reprogramming grant during the 2025-2026 grant cycle. This is a space that will continue to grow as additional funding is procured to digitize the remainer of the collection.

Note on the collection:

These interviews were not recorded oral histories meant to inform the general listener but were originally intended to inform Carey’s research as he wrote his book. Therefore, many of the interviews do not begin with introductions and are not dated. As these interviews were digitized, an approximate date range has been included.

Additionally, no releases were procured when interviews were originally conducted. Effort has been made during the digitization of these interviews to get releases signed. Where that is the case, the full interview is available on Belmont’s Digital Repository. If a release has not been signed, a small excerpt is provided. To hear those interviews in full, please reach out to Belmont’s University Archives and Special Collections at: molly.randolph@belmont.edu.