Nashville arts philanthropist Martha Rivers Ingram dies at 90

Martha Rivers Ingram, the billionaire businesswoman known as Nashville's "First Lady of the Arts," died on 6 August 2026 at age 90. Born 20 August 1935, she channelled her family's distribution-and-logistics fortune into the city's classical music and performing-arts institutions, most visibly the Martha Rivers Ingram Center for the Performing Arts at Vanderbilt University's Blair School of Music. A funeral service was held 14 August 2026.