I don't listen to country music. I mean, I didn't. I grew up on Brahms and Debussy. My Spotify is embarrassingly heavy on string quartets. When my editor assigned me Nashville, I assumed I'd write about architecture and food and avoid the honky-tonks entirely.
Nashville had other plans.
Lower Broadway at 2PM on a Wednesday is already at volume. Three-story bars with open windows and balconies blast competing songs into the street. Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, painted purple, has a band on the ground floor playing Merle Haggard. The Stage next door has a different band playing Lynyrd Skynyrd. Robert's Western World, across the street, has a man in a rhinestone jacket playing pedal steel guitar to a room that isn't half full.
I went into Robert's. Because it was the quietest.
The band — a five-piece in matching Western shirts — was playing George Jones. The pedal steel player coaxed sounds from his instrument that sounded like a human voice crying. The singer was twenty-something, probably hoping Nashville would make him famous. The drummer kept perfect time with a minimalist kit. The upright bass player bobbed his head with his eyes closed.
I ordered a PBR tallboy ($5) and sat at the bar. By the end of the set, I'd tipped the tip bucket $10 and hadn't checked my phone once.
The next evening, I'd won the lottery. Not the actual lottery — the Bluebird Cafe's ticket lottery. Ninety seats. No talking during performances (strictly enforced). And a songwriter round where four writers sit in a circle, face each other, and play the songs they wrote.
The Bluebird is where Garth Brooks was discovered. Where Taylor Swift first performed. It's in a strip mall. The sign is small. Inside, it looks like a community college classroom with better lighting.
Four songwriters took their stools. One of them — a woman in her fifties named Sarah — introduced a song by saying, "I wrote this in 2019 and it ended up on a Keith Urban album. But he changed the second verse. So tonight you get the real version."
She played it on acoustic guitar. No production. No band. No effects. Just her voice and the guitar and the words. The song was about a marriage ending. It was devastating.
I don't cry at concerts. I don't cry at concerts. I was definitely not crying at the Bluebird Cafe.
The songwriter round format forces you to listen differently. There's no spectacle to hide behind. No light show. No pyrotechnics. Just songs and the people who wrote them. When a songwriter explains why they wrote something — what happened in their life that needed to become music — the song changes. It becomes personal. It becomes yours.
Friday night. The Opry has been broadcasting live since 1925. The current venue at Opryland seats 4,400 people and looks like a church — because it essentially is one.
Tickets: $65 for my seat, which was decent but not close. The show runs 2.5 hours with five or six acts, each doing 2-3 songs, with a live house band that can play anything from bluegrass to pop-country without blinking.
The energy is reverent and joyful simultaneously. When a veteran performer — in my case, Vince Gill — walks onto the stage, the audience stands. Not because a jumbotron tells them to. Because it's the Opry. You stand.
Vince Gill played "Go Rest High on That Mountain." He wrote it after his brother died. He's played it a thousand times. His voice cracked on the bridge anyway. The audience was silent. Four thousand people, silent.
That's when I understood. Country music isn't a genre. It's a delivery mechanism for raw human emotion. The honky-tonks are the party version. The Bluebird is the intimate version. The Opry is the cathedral version. But underneath all of it is the same thing: someone telling you what happened to them and trusting you to feel it.
Left the Opry and took an Uber to East Nashville. Five Points neighborhood. A bar called The 5 Spot was having a Monday-style funk night on a Friday. Cover: $10. The band was seven pieces with a horn section playing James Brown covers.
This is what surprised me about Nashville. It's called Music City, and people assume that means country. But the Third Man Records store on 7th Avenue South (Jack White's label, tours $10) is a rock institution. The National Museum of African American Music ($25) covers gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, and hip-hop. Printer's Alley has a blues bar that would feel at home in Chicago.
Nashville is all genres. Country is the headline act, but the supporting cast is extraordinary.
At 11PM, post-funk-night, I went to Prince's Hot Chicken Shack. The original. Since 1945. A tiny building on Dickerson Pike that looks like it might be closed until you see the line.
Ordered medium heat. The chicken arrived in a paper-lined basket, sitting on white bread, with pickles. The first bite was excellent — crispy, peppery, the cayenne building slowly. By the third piece, my lips were numb. By the fourth, I was sweating visibly.
The white bread absorbs the heat. The pickles cut through it. These aren't random accompaniments — they're engineering. The whole system is designed.
Prince's hot chicken is the opposite of Nashville's music scene in one way: it's been doing the same thing since 1945 and has zero interest in evolving. That's the correct approach.
I saved this for my last day. Three floors. Elvis's gold Cadillac. Patsy Cline's cocktail dress. Taylor Swift's sparkly guitar. Hank Williams' suit.
But the thing that stopped me cold was a listening booth on the second floor. You put on headphones and select from a catalog of songwriting demos — the original recordings made before the songs became hits. You hear the songwriter's raw version, often just voice and guitar, before the producer added drums and strings and background vocals.
I listened to demo after demo. Songs I'd heard on the radio but never thought about. The demo versions were always better. Always more honest. Always closer to whatever feeling made someone pick up a guitar.
Entry: $28. Combo with RCA Studio B tour: $42. Allow 3 hours. The listening booths alone are worth the admission.
I flew home and put on a Mahler symphony. It sounded different. Not worse — Mahler is Mahler. But I could hear the same thing I'd heard at the Bluebird. Someone trying to express something that language can't hold. Using melody and harmony and rhythm because words alone aren't enough. For more insights, check out our Nashville vs Austin comparison. For more insights, check out our Top 10 Things to Do in Nashville Beyond Broadway.
Country music does this with three chords and a story. Classical does it with orchestras and motifs. They're both reaching for the same impossible thing.
I didn't become a country music convert. I became a music listener. Nashville did that.
What it cost:
