The Airport Already Changed Its Name Once. Now 125,000 People Want It Changed Again.
The airport has been renamed before. In 1988 it stopped being Berry Field and became Nashville International Airport, and the only reason most travelers ever notice the old name is the three letters printed on every boarding pass since: BNA, for Berry Field Nashville. A name can change. The code, it turns out, is the part that sticks.
That history has become suddenly relevant. Since Dolly Parton died in Nashville on August 25 at the age of 80, a petition asking the city to rename the airport in her honor has gone from a quiet long-shot to one of the largest public campaigns the city has seen. As of Thursday morning it had gathered more than 125,000 verified signatures — and the number was still climbing by the hour.
A petition that predates the grief
The campaign is not new. Lydia Popovich and Dan Dion started it on January 21, 2025 — more than a year and a half before Parton's death — arguing that an institution as significant as Nashville's airport ought to carry the name of the state's most beloved figure. For most of its life it drew modest, steady support.
Her death changed that overnight. Tens of thousands signed within days, turning a dormant page into a memorial in its own right.
It has also drawn a response from the one place that actually matters: the legislature. State Rep. Todd Warner, a Republican from Chapel Hill who represents House District 92, has pledged to file legislation to rename the airport when lawmakers return. He has indicated it would be among the first bills he files in November unless a colleague files it first, and he expects the idea to draw support from both parties, pointing to Parton's contributions to Tennessee, to country music and to the Imagination Library.
Nothing has been decided. No government body has acted, no bill has been filed, and the airport's name remains what it has been since 1988.
Who the airport is named for now
The name it replaced has a story worth knowing. The federal government authorized the airfield in 1936 and it opened the following year as Berry Field — a terminal building, two hangars, a single 4,000-foot concrete runway and a flashing beacon on a patch of Davidson County farmland.
It was named for Colonel Harry S. Berry, a World War I veteran and engineer who had run the Tennessee Highway Department and served as the local administrator for the Works Progress Administration while the field was being built. He was exactly the kind of person airports used to be named after: a public works man, honored by the public works he delivered.
Renaming it for Parton would be a different kind of choice — not the builder of the infrastructure but the person the place is known for. The argument is not really about aviation. It is about what a visitor should understand about Tennessee in the first ninety seconds after the wheels touch down.
The case, and the complication
The case is easy to make. Parton founded the Imagination Library in 1995 to mail free books to children in her home county, and it grew into a program that has gifted well over 200 million books and now sends out more than two million a month. That is the work most people in this state name first — ahead of the catalog, ahead of the films, ahead of the theme park.
The complication is geography. Parton was born and raised in Sevier County, in the mountains of East Tennessee, roughly 200 miles from the terminal in question. Nashville is where she arrived as a teenager and built her career. Whether the airport carrying her name should be the one nearest her birthplace or the one nearest the industry she conquered is a real question, and one the legislature may have to answer out loud.
For now the number on the petition keeps moving, the bill does not exist yet, and the letters on the boarding pass still stand for a highway engineer from a different century. Tennessee has a habit of keeping both the old name and the new one. It may yet find a way to do that again.
