I lived in Nashville for many years, pursuing my own musical endeavors. And while it was a great place to make music, I always felt a bit at odds with the larger-than-life, cowboy-hat-wearing, beer-swigging, Trump-voting, bachelorette-party-hosting persona of Nashville’s calling-card genre: country music. At the height of my involvement with Nashville’s music scene, I definitely had a bit of a stick up my butt about country music. The two main reasons for this were, (1) as a non-country musician working the Nashville circuit, I was eager for this city to be more known for music *in general* than for country music specifically, and (2) the novelty of this scene had LONG-since worn off, leaving me annoyed in the way only locals can be in regard to tourist attractions. Therefore, I always refused to cover any of Nashville’s country persona on this website.

Ironically, I actually do like country music.

And now that I am (SPOILER ALERT) leaving Nashville, I thought it’d be prudent to cover the country scene here… you know, for the court record. Afterall, this can make for a super fun trip if you’re visiting from out of town. So without further ado, let’s get country!

The Country Music Hall of Fame

I don’t have any photos of this one for you (sorry), but I visited Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame a few years ago with a friend who was visiting from out of town, and I actually very much enjoyed it. It was one of the best museums I have ever visited, in any category. There are lots of music-related museums around Nashville that take various deep-dives into specific pieces of this city’s (and country music’s) history—such as the Johnny Cash Museum—but this is Nashville’s flagship. It shows the evolution of country music from the earliest days more than 100 years ago, to Keith Urban’s guitars and Taylor Swift’s tour bus.

It’s really engaging and cool, and a major piece of the museum just opened in 2014, so it’s also new and shiny. I would highly recommend you take the time to visit if you ever find yourself in the neighborhood.

Broadway & Printer’s Alley

Okay, we’ve arrived. THIS is the main event.

In the interest of presenting the most holistic picture possible, I do want to recommend that you also check out my recent article, “Peter Unpacks the Racial Disparities of Nashville’s Historic Music Districts: Broadway v. Jefferson Street.”

To give you the scoop on Broadway, I will pull a quote from that article for you here:

“This crowded strip of Honky Tonk bars boasts kitschy bright neon signs and—because this is ‘Music City’—round-the-clock live bands. Indeed, this is an A-list attraction in Nashville, constantly awash with tourists. It is estimated that as many as 15 million tourists will visit Broadway in a year. To put that in perspective, that is more people than visit Brazil and Argentina combined in a year. So, I am never surprised when I hear stats saying that a single bar on Broadway can bring in as much as $20 million in a calendar year. Nash-vegas is a cash cow!

Whether or not these kinds of country bars are ‘your scene,’ there is one thing that can be said for certain about Nashville’s Honky Tonks: they are the genuine artifact. Almost anywhere else you would encounter this kind of atmosphere, it would be a rip-off of something else. But THESE bars are the O.G.s. It was here that the “Father of Country Music” Jimmy Rogers started playing at bars almost a century ago in the 1930s. The area has gone through some ups and downs over the past 100 years, but today Broadway is enjoying multiple consecutive decades of economic growth.”

The way Broadway gets talked about by locals (the ones in my circles, at least), you’d think it was a literal dumpster fire. I’ll sometimes hear it compared to how New Yorkers talk about Times Square; loud, overwhelming, dirty, full of tourists… yes, that is Broadway! And if you stopped me on the street to ask me about this place at any point in recent memory, I probably would not have had positive things to say.

But when I first came to Broadway all the way back in 2013, I had a really good time! I was fresh out of the car from Boston, and as a lifelong northerner, I had never seen anything like this. It was the most southern thing I had yet experienced at that point in my life, and I loved every minute of it. I was also in college, so that helped. During that first night in 2013, I had such a good time bar-hopping my way down Broadway with a gaggle of Vanderbilt sorority girls that I decided to come back the very next night. Unfortunately, when I arrived that next night, the novelty had worn off.

That 2nd night in 2013 was the last time I willingly came to Broadway. 😂

That is… until I wrote this article. 10 years later, as I prepare to say my final goodbyes to Nashville, I was able to see Broadway with new eyes. I came here to do a solo photo walk as the sun set on a Saturday night in early summer, and I actually had an unexpectedly fun time! I felt like a tourist in my own city, and it helped me appreciate how fun this place can be as a visitor. By the time I was ending my photo walk with some old-school country music at Robert’s Western World, I was getting introspective. What is it in me that prevented me from just having fun here all along? Why did I need to be on the way out to appreciate what had been right in front of me the whole time? These are questions for my therapist. But what I can tell you for certain, reader, is that this place is fun as hell! That is, for at least one night.

The Ryman Auditorium

The Ryman Auditorium is one of the most famous venues in the world. Originally called the Union Gospel Tabernacle, it first opened its doors all the way back in 1892, with construction having been started on it 7 years earlier. Its place in the modern era was cemented by its role as the home of the Grand Ole Opry country radio show from 1943 to 1974. Started in 1925 under the name “WSM Barn Dance,” this is now the longest-running radio broadcast in the history of the U.S. There’s a ton of history behind this show, but suffice to say, it played a major part in Nashville’s origin story and did a lot of the heavy lifting in establishing Nashville’s reputation as “Music City.” It’s SO important, that you will actually see welcome signs as you drive into Nashville that say “Home of the Grand Ole Opry.”

The Grand Ole Opry is still alive and well today, but it has long since parted ways with The Ryman and found a new home in a larger, custom-built venue called, (wait for it…) “The Grand Ole Opry.” Meanwhile, The Ryman’s very existence was put in jeopardy in the years following the show’s departure. For a while, there were active efforts on the part of the Grand Ole Opry organization to have the building demolished, which was met with vehement push-back from the general public. In the end, the citizens of this fine city won out and the Ryman was saved from demolition, but that did not stop the Ryman from falling into disrepair, where it stayed until the 1990s.

It was not until the late 1990s that the Ryman was rehabilitated and re-established as the musical Mecca it is today. Today it holds 2,362 people and has world-class A-list acts performing most nights of the week, often to sold-out crowds. The focus of this article is on “Country” culture in Nashville, and while The Ryman definitely has strong historical ties to Country music—and has even been called “The Mother Church of Country Music"—today it’s more about music in general.

The name “Music City” is more apt than most people will ever understand (this is something I know a lot about), and The Ryman is THE preeminent venue of this city. Here are a few shots of Ryan Adams performing here with the Cardinals in the summer of 2023. I guess this might count as an alt-country show. It was pretty rock & roll though. Ryan Adams is a G.

Opryland

So, when the Grand Ole Opry radio show left The Ryman for dead, where did they go?

As we touched on above, they moved into a newer, bigger, custom-built venue called (you guessed it), THE GRAND OLE OPRY, which is now the ultimate country music venue in Nashville. They do all kinds of shows there—I saw The Grinch The Musical here one Christmas—but it’s predominantly for country artists.

Although I don’t have any shots from the Grand Ole Opry for you today, I feel obliged to tell you that if you love country music, you should catch a show there! In this article, however, I want to show you something else bearing the name “Opry.” Today, there’s a whole cluster of giant establishments with “Opry” in the name. There’s the Grand Ole Opry venue, there’s Opry Mills Mall—which is just a giant mall right next to the venue—and then, there’s Opryland Resort, which is nestled in between those first two.

The Opryland Resort is something akin to a lower-key, Southern/Appalachian version of EPCOT. The entirety of it is a climate-controlled synthetic indoor paradise. The air feels like the jungle rooms in a zoo, which makes it a great escape from the cold Nashville winters. Oh, and this place is HUGE. You could spend days exploring its many enormous, sky-lit chambers.

There’s a maze of gated, paid parking lots surrounding this place, which can make it cumbersome and annoyingly expensive to find your way into this place, but the free entry point is to park on the outside of the Opry Mills movie theatre parking lot and follow the stream of people through the back door. Actually, I don’t know that Opryland has a “front” or a “back” — but there is “A” door within a 5-minute walk of this free parking lot. And because this place is a hotel, it’s open 24/7/365.

Here are some snaps from a sunset walk through Opryland.

The ~Indie~ Honky Tonk Experience

I started this article on the Broadway Honky Tonks, and I’m going to end it on the other side of that coin. As you now know, I have very mixed feelings about Broadway. But to get somewhat anthropological about this, my introduction to Broadway came in a specific cultural context: the height of the popularity of “Cruise” by Florida Georgia Line 😂. In retrospect, this flash-point for “bro-country” music prompted something of a reckoning within the country scene, because it brought new meaning to the term “douche bag.” Much of what has happened within the country genre since then—I would argue—has been in reaction to this moment. “Bro-country” even has its own Wikipedia page. 😆

I said it once and I’ll say it again: I actually do like country music. But I understand why it’s a polarizing genre. There’s a lot to love, but there’s also a lot to hate. Given our growing cultural divide in the U.S., the number of people who are “on the fence” about country music is near an all-time low. People tend to either love it or hate it, and these sentiments are often carried over to apply to Broadway’s Honky Tonks as well. But consider this: what you see on Broadway today is just one moment in time. It, and the surrounding cultural context, as well as the underlying art form, will continue to evolve in the future, just as they have up to this point.

Imagine being in a Broadway Honky Tonk in 1960. There’s not an iPhone in sight, the band onstage is playing classic bluegrass, honkytonk, western, or rockabilly music, and people in the crowd are dancing the night away in ways that today would be considered all-around wholesome.

Well, that forgotten reality still exists in one little-known corner of Nashville. The American Legion Post 82 in East Nashville is open to the public every Tuesday night for “Honky Tonk Tuesday,” and it is truly something to behold.

Please excuse the dark, grainy pictures. They are from a few years ago and I didn’t have time to go back and do better ones. But I promise that if you are ever in Nashville on a Tuesday night, you will not regret checking this out. It feels like a movie set in there. BUT IT’S REAL LIFE BABY!

YEP, that’s Nashville.

Or, that’s a big slice of Nashville at least. Transparently, I have really wrestled with exactly how I should be relating to this particular slice of Music City. It feels like I need to have a perspective on it, but I am conflicted. I see the good and bad in it… and, to be honest, it’s really complicated. I’ve lived here for more than 8 years, and it’s still confusing to me sometimes. When I talk to my Nashville-based, music-involved friends, our conversations draw on a shared understanding of this niche world that would be desperately difficult to explain to outsiders. However, Emily Nussbaum at the New Yorker did—for an out-of-towner—a surprisingly great job of unpacking all of this in her recent article “Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville.” I am fully aware that this article is longer than most people have the patience for, but if you want to understand the competing currents of Music City, there’s a lot of ground to cover. I’ve yet to hear a summation of this place that was both concise and accurate.

I even had a hard time picking the ‘Track of the Day’! In the end, I had to go with Dolly Parton because (1) she embodies the best of country music and Tennessee in a bunch of ways (even though she’s been more soft-spoken than I’d like in recent years), and (2) the old-school country vibes of this song remind me how much fun country music can be. But here’s a sampler of a few other, more contemporary country songs that I know to be from artists that are not riding the Trump train. This is not the ‘end-all-be-all’ of non-MAGA country music, but it’ll get you started.