Eight Years and Three Governors: Martha Rivers Ingram Built the Room Nashville’s Arts Grew Into
Nashville is a city that gets described by its music, and then, almost as an afterthought, by everything else. The everything else — the symphony hall, the ballet, the opera, the repertory theater, the room downtown where touring Broadway lands — did not simply accumulate. A great deal of it traces back to one person who decided the city deserved it and then refused to be told otherwise.
Martha Rivers Ingram died on Thursday, August 6, at 90.
Charleston to Nashville
She was born Martha Robinson Rivers in Charleston, South Carolina, on August 20, 1935, the daughter of John Minott Rivers and Martha Elizabeth Robinson. She grew up in a family that owned the local radio and television stations, was educated at Ashley Hall, and took a history degree from Vassar College in 1957. Her first job was at her father's broadcast stations back home in Charleston.
During her senior year at Vassar she began dating a Princeton man named E. Bronson Ingram. They married on October 4, 1958, at St. Philip's Church in Charleston, and three years later moved to Nashville — a mid-sized Southern city with a booming music business and, by the standards of the day, very little civic infrastructure for anything else.
They raised four children: Orrin Henry III, John Rivers, David Bronson and Robin Bigelow.
The eight-year argument
The story Nashville tells about her most often is the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, and it is worth being precise about why. TPAC was not a donation. It was a campaign — an eight-year one, spanning the terms of three different Tennessee governors, in which the central task was persuading a state and a city that a serious performing arts center was not a luxury but a necessity.
She kept at it. The endowment goal was set at $3.5 million. The campaign closed $1.5 million past it.
TPAC opened, and a whole ecosystem organized itself around the fact that Nashville finally had the room. She went on to help create the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, co-founded Tennessee Repertory Theatre, and sat on the boards of the Nashville Symphony, Nashville Ballet, Nashville Opera and the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. The performing arts center itself has said plainly that without her vision, determination and conviction about what the arts could mean to the city and the state, it would not exist.
The other career
What is sometimes lost in the “first lady of the arts” framing is that she also ran an enormous company.
When Bronson Ingram died in 1995, she succeeded him as chairman and chief executive of Ingram Industries — a conglomerate built on book distribution and Mississippi River barge transportation, and one of the largest privately held companies in the United States. It was not a ceremonial handoff. She served on the corporate boards of Baxter International, Ingram Micro, Regions Financial and Weyerhaeuser.
The same year she took over the company, Vanderbilt University elected her to its Board of Trust. She chaired that board from 1999 to 2011 — twelve years spanning an era of significant expansion for the university. She was also a trustee of Vassar, of Ashley Hall in Charleston, and of Harpeth Hall here in Nashville, and she co-wrote three books, among them two biographies and a history of the performing arts in this city.
She was inducted into the Music City Walk of Fame — in a town where that honor usually goes to people who make records.
Services
Visitation is scheduled from 4 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, August 13, at St. George's Episcopal Church. A service follows at 10 a.m. on Friday, August 14, with a private graveside service afterward.
What she actually left
Buildings are the obvious inheritance, and they are real ones — you can walk into them tonight. But the more durable thing she left is a civic assumption: that Nashville is a city where an orchestra, an opera company, a ballet and a Broadway house all belong, and belong permanently, rather than existing on sufferance until the money gets tight.
That assumption did not exist here before she started arguing for it. It took her eight years and three governors. It has outlasted all of them.
