Nashville Business Oral History Reaches 25 Hours of Digitized Recordings

Grant-funded effort preserves firsthand accounts of Nashville's business legacy

When passing a golf course one day, Nashville businessman Jack C. Massey came across a young boy selling buckets of golf balls retrieved from the sand and water traps for $1 apiece. When he tried to purchase one, the boy shook his head.  

“$10,” he said. 

This started a lively back-and-forth, as each party pushed the price up or knocked it down. Finally, the prominent Nashville businessman settled for $5 per bucket, convinced by a boy hardly old enough to play golf himself. 

Rather than frustration, Massey felt a deep respect for the boy’s entrepreneurial spirit and would go on to fund his private school education: an act of generosity sparked by a simple interaction on a golf course. 

This anecdote is just one of many discovered in the Nashville Business Oral History Project, housed in the Belmont Digital Repository. 

Following historian Bill Carey’s 2025 donation of more than 150 cassette interviews on Nashville’s business landscape to Belmont University’s Special Collections, the archivists have continued to uncover never-before-heard stories and turn the raw material into searchable, citable sources for research and discovery. With 25 hours of interviews fully digitized so far, the project has laid the groundwork for a considerable digital archive. 

"I feel such a deep sense of honor and duty being trusted with these precious memories,” said university archivist and gallery curator Molly Randolph. “Getting to bring them to current students, researchers, faculty and anyone who wants to access them is such a gift for me as a curator and for the Belmont community as a whole.”

With the average commercial cassette tape lasting around 30 years before it begins to decay, many of the interviews are nearing that limit. The digitization effort, led by professor of audio engineering technology Doyuen Ko and supported by graduate assistant Victoria Kieckhefer, converts the audio into digital files for safe storage and preservation. 

Ko’s expertise in audio and technology has been essential to the project, from selecting equipment to maintaining quality standards. As the lead on the digitization process, he drew on his years of experience and on lessons from other grant-funded projects.  

“My hope is for the Belmont community to make the most of this history,” Randolph said. “There is so much wisdom here for students to learn from, so many examples of people who started with nothing and built empires.” 

Once the collection is complete, a special lecture with Carey will be held to discuss the creation and impact of the collection. This event will be recorded and made publicly available in the Belmont Digital Repository, alongside the collection itself.