When some folks go to funerals, they bring casseroles. Gina Gwynne likes to carry big checks. That’s because if your loved one had life insurance through her State Farm agency, she wants to honor that trust and ensure her customer’s family doesn’t have to worry about money during a sorrowful time.
Gwynne has been in the insurance business for over 32 years, but many folks know her from an entirely different context and have no idea she’s an agent. To them, she’s a hard-core rock-n-roll fan and the host of the very successful “Ginger the Bengal Cat” Facebook page with over 22K followers. She’s been a regular at many of Nashville’s best music venues for decades, especially Exit/In.
Don’t get it wrong, Gina Gwynne loves being in the insurance business, but “My biggest passion is music,” she insists. And that’s nothing new. “When I was a little girl, I would go to bed having the radio on, and I would lay it on my pillow and practically lay my ear on top of it listening to music. And I’d wonder, ‘How do those people get inside there?’”
When she became a student at Vanderbilt, Gwynne lived in the dorm and walked to the Exit/In every night. “I was not in a sorority,” she recalls. “I didn’t want that. I wanted to spend all my time hearing live music, and that’s what I did.”
Decades later, she’s still doing it. You’ll likely find her in the front row at shows; at five feet tall, she quips, “I have to worm my way down there!” Gwynne is so at home at Exit/In that she rented it for her 60th birthday and had herself a show with The White Animals, Mike Arnold & the Music City Rockers, Brady Lee, and Adam Dread. Her taste in music ranges wide. She’s a loyal, long-time fan of The Bodines, would love to have dinner with Dolly Parton, and is a self-described Taylor Swift freak.
Say what? “I’ve always been Gina, the rocker chick, so people are surprised by that,” she explains. She admires Swift’s songwriting and loves seeing her perform. “She brings people together, and everyone is having a good time. I saw her when I was 61, and the girl standing next to me was 18, and we got to be the best of friends,” Gwynne recalls.
And even though she claims her music fandom as her greatest passion, she’s pretty passionate about her insurance business, too. Gwynne prides herself on having life-long customers — many well-known stars among them — and serving families for multiple generations.
It’s the greatest honor when someone puts their trust in me.
Gwynne began her professional life as an engineer. After graduating as valedictorian at Smyrna High School, excelling in math and science, studying engineering at Vanderbilt seemed the obvious choice.
“I graduated and worked for three months in engineering, and I hated it,” she says. “I was the only female. I was the youngest person there. I was 22 and looked 12. I have a gregarious personality, and I was working on drawing runways for airports in Florida. I was dying inside, and I had no social interactions. So I quit, much to my parents’ displeasure.”
She quickly hustled up work selling computers and was good at it. But the industry was new; computers were still luxury items, and the companies she worked for kept going out of business. Gwynne recalls having “five jobs with five different companies between the ages of 22 and 29.”
Gwynne decided she needed to do something more stable to allow her to own her own business, provide something everyone needed, and be recession-proof. Insurance made sense, so she got licensed and eventually started her own agency.
Her father, Bob Gwynne, had worked at the corporate level for State Farm, but she told her State Farm mentor, John Slaughter, “I’m not gonna be known as Bob Gwynne’s daughter. Someday, they’re gonna introduce him as Gina Gwynne’s daddy.”
And that’s what happened one day when Gwynne was recognized for her service and success at a corporate event. She and her father had a distant relationship, and her success as an agent made him proud and brought them closer. She credits her passion as an insurance agent and business owner for that.
“It was the best decision I ever made in my life.”
