T. Minton
Come the end of the Belcourt Theatre’s 100-year celebration in 2025, T. Minton will box up all the archives they painstakingly collected since 2021 as part of the Belcourt Stories oral history project and pass it along to a museum for storage. Then they’ll be onto the next project.
It will be satisfying, Minton tells the Scene. As a musician, they’re used to finishing a project and setting it loose into the world in this way. Working as a public historian and archivist at the Belcourt is a dream project for Minton, who pivoted to the field after touring for years as a drummer.
They earned a master’s degree in public history at Middle Tennessee State University, but it’s important to them to study history outside of academia, and closer to the public. Minton seeks to connect history to present-day social and political issues, and importantly, everyday people. Most of all, they want to make it interesting in a way that elementary school history classes and other historians have failed to do.
“History is made by real people everyday doing the work of imagining better futures and being in community with each other, and challenging power,” Minton says. “That’s how history is made, but history is told by the people who win things and people who we think should be important figures, and we forget that they are just regular people.”
The seed for Minton’s current life was planted at the Southern Girls Rock and Roll Camp (now the Yeah! Rocks Summer Camp), where they taught a music history class. Minton was hoping to inspire young girls by introducing them to female musicians who came before them — and the inspiration worked on Minton, too. Their involvement evolved into a seven-year run of She’s a Rebel, a girl-group tribute show, as well as an MTSU final project focused on women musicians in Nashville.
“I’ve always felt that I found my personal place in existence by being aware of and appreciative of people who have come before me,” Minton says. “To me, that’s the work of history — helping people and communities understand who they are and where they’ve come from, and [letting] the story that they want to tell about themselves be heard, particularly if it’s something that has been silenced by dominant narratives, people in power.”
Minton lives by the philosophy that “history is always incomplete, and it’s always a fiction as much as it is a truth.” All the different truths have to be in communication with one another to arrive at the most complete picture of a time and place. Here are a few things about the Belcourt that are factual: The gilded stage inside the Belcourt’s 1925 Hall began as a site for theatrical productions in the 1920s, and housed the Nashville Children’s Theatre and The Grand Ole Opry during its tenure. The Belcourt as we know it now, an independent cinema nonprofit, was born out of the 1999 “Save the Belcourt” campaign — when the theater came dangerously close to shutting down.
Nashville used to be filled with neighborhood theaters and movie palaces, but the Belcourt has outlasted them all. Minton thinks it is a combination of luck and the public’s attachment to the place — and as a historian to the public, they’ll tell us all about it.
“We have existed, I think, for 100 years because of the efforts of actual everyday Nashvillians seeing the potential for this place to be a gathering for the creative and performing arts and to build community around those things,” they say. “I think that’s the thing that has saved it.”
Photographed by Angelina Castillo at the Belcourt
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