Every Council Member Said Yes. The Decision Still Isn’t Theirs.
There is a particular kind of vote a legislative body takes when it wants to be on the record about something it cannot actually decide. Nashville's Metro Council took one on Tuesday, September 1, and it took it unanimously.
The resolution, filed late by Councilmember Russ Bradford, asks that Nashville International Airport be renamed in honor of Dolly Parton. Not a single member voted against it. And yet, when the gavel came down, nothing about the airport had changed — because the council does not own it.
That distinction is the whole story. The airport belongs to the Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority, a separate body with its own board and its own naming policy, and the authority has set aside its September 17 meeting to take the question up. The council's unanimous vote is a letter of recommendation, warmly written and forcefully delivered, addressed to someone else. We wrote about that September 17 date when it was set, and the council's action now hands the board a city officially on the record.
The airport has done this once before
Nashvillians who have flown out of BNA their whole lives sometimes forget that the field has already changed its name once, and that the old name never entirely left.
The airfield opened in 1937 as Berry Field, named for Colonel Harry S. Berry — a West Point graduate who served as Tennessee's Works Progress Administration administrator and oversaw its construction during the Depression. For half a century that was simply what the place was called. A new terminal went up in 1987, international service arrived, and in 1988 the field formally became Nashville International Airport.
But the three letters stayed. BNA is short for Berry Field Nashville, and the code outlived the name it was drawn from. It has been printed on every bag tag and boarding pass out of this city for nearly forty years since the rename, quietly carrying a Depression-era engineer's surname through an era he could not have imagined.
Which is worth knowing now, because it tells you what a second rename would and would not do. Airport codes are administered globally and are not casually reassigned. Whatever the board decides on September 17, the practical odds are that travelers keep typing the same three letters into the same booking forms.
How the question got here
Dolly Parton died on August 25 at the age of 80. Within days, Nashvillians began organizing — petitions circulated and gathered signatures at a speed that surprised even the people running them, a groundswell we covered as it crossed six figures.
On August 28, Governor Bill Lee appeared alongside airport officials to announce a plan to pursue the name, saying he had raised the idea with Parton's team before going public. That moved the proposal out of the realm of online sentiment and into the realm of process — which is exactly where a city council resolution belongs.
Why a name on a terminal matters here
For a city that just posted a record $11.6 billion in visitor spending in 2025, the airport is not a piece of infrastructure so much as a first sentence. It is the first thing several million people read about Nashville each year, before the honky-tonks, before the river, before anything else.
Naming it for Parton would be an unusually literal act of self-description: a city telling arrivals, at the door, what it believes it is for. Whether the board agrees is a question with a date on it now.
