The 2025 Music City Hot Chicken Fest, featuring a firetruck parade, an amateur cooking competition and the city's best hot chicken joints, burns into action at East Park tomorrow.

Why it matters: Hot chicken is a uniquely Nashville dish that's been exported around the world.

The inside coop: Local hot chicken restaurants will set up shop to feed festivalgoers, including Prince's, Smack Ya Momma Chicken Shack Express, Hurts Hot Chicken, Eugene's, Nashville Chicken and Waffles, Hattie B's, Momma Joy's and Bill's Hot Fish and Chicken. We suggest trying them all.

• Think of it as a sort of around the world challenge that's also a really bad idea.
• Yazoo will provide the beer. There's also a fun zone for kids and live music.
• The amateur contest is a prestigious badge of honor for home chefs who have mastered Nashville's vintage dish.

Flashback: Hot Chicken Fest launched in 2007. It was the brainchild of then-Mayor Bill Purcell, who explained his thought process to the Bitter Southerner in an excellent story about the history of the dish.

• "Hot chicken is truly our indigenous food," Purcell said. "It seemed a way to convene the city around something special to us, worth celebrating but also allowed everybody to participate."

If you go: Music City Hot Chicken Fest takes place at East Park from 11am until 3pm.

• It's free to attend. Vendors are cashless, so bring a card.

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In addition to shotgunning hot chicken, you can spend Friday celebrating our nation's independence.

Why it matters: The city's free July 4 celebration, called Let Freedom Sing!, is a very Nashville-y mix of world-class musicians, food trucks and an enormous fireworks display.

Zoom in: The Nashville Symphony performs during the fireworks show to cap a free all-day music festival. Dierks Bentley headlines this year's concert.

• Grace Bowers and the Hodge Podge, Keesha Rainey, Charlie Worsham and Les Kerr and the Bayou Band are among the notable artists who will perform.

If braving throngs of people downtown isn't your thing, many of Nashville's suburban cities also do fireworks shows. WSMV compiled a list of fireworks and other festivities on Friday.

Zoom out: If you're looking for something to do besides fireworks, we suggest the Nashville Zoo, which recently opened its Leopard Forest exhibit.

• In addition to leopard, the immersive exhibit features colobus monkeys, De Brazza monkeys and klipspringers. At the end of the forest, you can spot giraffes stretching their necks over the tree line.

Tennessee is missing out on $106.4 million in federal education funding that was expected to be accessible on July 1 but has yet to be released by the Trump administration.

The big picture: The Department of Education's funding delay has exacerbated the uncertainty for after-school, summer and other programs, leaving schools in limbo, advocates and policy experts say.

• The Education Department said in a last-minute notice that the funds would not be released while the programs were under review, according to the School Superintendents Association.

By the numbers: An estimated $6.2 billion in K-12 funds across five programs remains unavailable, according to the Learning Policy Institute, which conducts research to improve education policies.

• That includes funding for after-school and summer learning through the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, money to support migratory children, educator development funds and more.
• Metro Nashville Public Schools forecast about $10.1 million in federal funds for those programs in its latest budget.

Zoom in: The Department of Education referred Axios' questions for this story to the Office of Management and Budget. An OMB spokesperson said no decisions have been made amid "an ongoing programmatic review of education funding."

Threat level: If unreleased 21st Century Community Learning Center funds — the chief stream for academic enrichment outside of school hours — remains blocked, the "the fallout will be swift and devastating," Boys and Girls Clubs of America President and CEO Jim Clark said in a statement.

• Up to 926 Boys and Girls Clubs could be forced to shut their doors, he said, and club sites and camps "could shutter mid-season — upending care for working parents and leaving kids without critical safety nets."

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Nashville's violent crime rate dropped by 10% in the first six months of 2025. (Nashville Banner)

A nonprofit songwriting program helps veterans use music to process their pain. (Tennessean)

You can livestream a rare corpse flower blooming in Clarksville. (WPLN)

We're approaching the perennial problem — how to keep pets calm as the sounds of July 4th fireworks and revelry ring through their hyper-sensitive ears.

Why it matters: Dog intakes and runaways are the highest around the Fourth of July, according to Shelter Animals Count, as animals perceive the loud, unpredictable crashes of fireworks as a threat and try to escape.

By the numbers: Animal control officials across the U.S. see a 30%-60% increase in lost pets each year between July 4-6, according to PetAmberAlert, a national pet recovery system.

The intrigue: One possible calming mechanism in recent years is CBD oils and chews. CBD is extracted from hemp, which has very low traces of THC.

• 83% of dogs showed a decrease in stress when given CBD ahead of a stressful event, according to a study from Cornell.

Yes, but: The American Veterinary Medical Association does not currently recommend CBD products as calming agents.

• "We still need more information regarding factors such as how CBD behaves in an animal's body, appropriate dosages, potential side effects and interactions with other medications," AVMA spokesperson Michael San Filippo tells Axios.

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