The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum is a museum at 222 Fifth Avenue South in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Its mission is to document the history of country music and to honor its major figures. Within the building lies the Hall of Fame itself, which consists of plaques honoring the most famous of country and western music-related personalities as designated by the Country Music Association (CMA).

The Cumberland River is an important waterway in the southern United States. It is 687 miles (1,106 km) long. It starts in Harlan County in eastern Kentucky on the Cumberland Plateau, flows through southeastern Kentucky before crossing into northern Tennessee, and then curves back up into western Kentucky before draining into the Ohio River at Smithland, Kentucky. The Cumberland is one of three major Kentucky rivers with headwaters there. The others are the Kentucky River and the Big Sandy River.

In 1748, Dr. Thomas Walker led a party of hunters across the Appalachian Mountains from Virginia. Walker, a Virginian, was an explorer and surveyor of renown. He gave the name "Cumberland" to the lofty range of mountains his party crossed, in honor of Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland whose name became popular in America after the Battle of Culloden (Stewart, 1967). Walker's party pursued their journey by way of the Cumberland Gap into what is today Kentucky. Finding a beautiful mountain stream flowing across their course they called it the "Cumberland River." Walker's journal entry for April 17, 1750, reads in part: "I went down the creek a-hunting, and found that it went into a river about a mile below our camp. This, which is Flat Creek and some other join'd, I called Cumberland River."