Butch Spyridon, CEO, Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp.

If you enjoy Nashville’s 4th of July and New Year’s Eve fireworks – from the midst of the crowd on Broadway or from Nine Mile Hill – thank Butch Spyridon. If it fills your spirit to see Carrie Underwood and CeCe Winans perform together live from the Ryman on one of the many national award shows broadcast from Nashville, thank Butch Spyridon. If you appreciate the millions in tax revenues that go into the city’s coffers every year from tourism, thank Butch Spyridon.

Butch is the consummate leader, guiding the city’s hospitality industry through the best of times and the worst. Since 1991, he has overseen the industry grow from one largely based on a theme park and summer visitors to the second largest industry in Nashville. He has seen us go from honkytonk haven to a richly diverse place that attracts visitors for our food, our sports teams, our meeting venues, our museums, and our live music – from country to rock to R&B to jazz and a lot more.

Under Butch’s leadership, Destination Nashville survived the closing of Opryland, the opening of Branson, an unimaginable flood and two deadly tornadoes, a Christmas Day bombing, and, of course, the ongoing pandemic. But he’s also witnessed with pride as Broadway fills every year with marathon runners and 4th of July and New Year’s Eve revelers. And the epic party known as the 2019 NFL Draft and the sea of gold for the 2017 NHL Stanley Cup Finals in Smashville? Butch helped make it all possible (without intercepting one pass or scoring a single goal).

And he has called the amazing National Museum of African American Music “both a personal and a professional mission for me.”

By the numbers, visitors to Nashville spend more than $7.5 billion annually, generating more than 70,000 jobs and income of almost $2 billion, and state and local taxes of $566 million.

Born in Pascagoula, MS, Butch received a BA in Business Administration from Vanderbilt University and graduated from the Institute of Comparative Political and Economic Systems at Georgetown University. He managed the Travel and Conventions Department of the Mobile Chamber of Commerce and was Executive Director of the Baton Rouge Area Convention & Visitors Bureau before taking his position in Nashville.

Butch and his wife, Sunny, have four children and three grandchildren.