One Night Out - Nashville

Ernest Tubb Record shop, est 1947.  Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville café. The evening air wraps close and hot as guilt around the tourists hugging Elvis statues, the panhandlers slumped in doorways, the bouncers flicking a sharp eye over bar-goers falling in and out of Music City’s honky-tonks.

Tootsie’s World Famous Orchid Lounge – ‘Come on in for a holler and a swaller’– has been jumpin’ and pumpin’ to honky tonk for half a century.

Outside it’s painted purple; inside it’s plastered floor-to-ceiling with famous-people photos. The plaintive wails of country greats Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline and Waylon Jennings bounced off these walls in times gone by.

Even on a Sunday night the place is wall-to-wall baseball caps and cowboy hats. Some beefy guys wearing Budweiser boxes on their heads sip beer and bourbon from squashy plastic cups.

A girl in a veil with ‘Bride’ scrawled on her back clambers onstage to hip grind alongside country-rappers Anthony Orio & the Goodfellers. The place is noisy, rowdy, and smells of booze and bodies. Nobody’s leaving anytime soon.

It’s 2am, next door at Legend’s Corner. A bluegrass band strums to our foursome and a quintet of chirpy girls from Cincinnati. The band’s teenage fiddler saws off the odd perfunctory note.

“Play something toe-tapping,” my cowboy-hatted sister shouts. When the band rips into the bluegrass anthem ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’, the young fiddler flexes her fingers, flies into high gear and knocks everybody’s boots off.

At 10am, Broadway boils under a hazy morning sun. We sprint for the shade of Bridgestone Arena, the big-time venue for country rockers Taylor Swift and Karl Urban. Sometimes these superstars show up at the honky-tonks after a show. It’s a Music City tradition.

The arena, a modern saucer-shaped thing, looms large and strange among Broadway’s brick and stone built heritage: the Customs house, the Baptist churches, Ryman Auditorium. Tucked  down a side street, the Ryman was home to the star-maker Grand Ole Opry country music show for decades, until the soulless Opryland USA theme park stole its glory.

Boots are what you buy on Broadway: cowboy boots tooled and stitched in red, blue and orange critter skins. Ostrich, snake, crocodile. The disembodied boots bring to mind rows of line dancers snatched away by aliens.

‘Buy one pair of boots, get two pairs free’ sounds irresistible, until I imagine myself hauling home three pairs of pointy-toed ‘gatorskin Durangos to scoffs and guffaws.

At this early hour, there’s barely a warm body left at Tootsie’s. A country boy in ripped jeans is unlucky enough to draw the Monday morning slot. He sings his breakin’ heart out to a dozen bemused early risers, fresh off the Redneck comedy bus.

Clutching their cups of beer they stare at the famous faces on the walls, scarcely turning an ear to yet another honky-tonk hopeful aiming to see his name in neon.