East Nashville is the neighborhood that served as home base for me throughout the duration of my time in Nashville, and there was never a moment when I didn’t love this slice of the city. Even at the height of my dissatisfaction with Nashville, I remember saying how much I still loved East Nashville itself. I’d be happy to live in a neighborhood like this one again someday. I just hope it’s not in Tennessee. The casual passerby might not see much past the monstrosity known as Gallatin Pike (which is the main “stroad” of this neighborhood), but once you get off this excruciating wasteland, there is a beautiful neighborhood waiting to be discovered.

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!

Dunno if anybody will read this, but I have learned so much about this subject that it seemed like a shame not to write it down. So here goes nothing.

I should start with one massive disclaimer: I am not now—nor was I ever—a “rock star,” so if you want to write off my advice due to the modesty of my success with this endeavor, I’d understand. But I would have killed (metaphorically) to get this information from somebody like me when I first showed up in Nashville. This is gonna be some insider shit. It won’t all be super tactical, but it should be pretty evergreen. And I can almost guarantee that this information is not written anywhere else on the internet. Or, at least not anywhere easy to find.

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.

Yes, if the articles on the Internet are to be believed, Music City is the place to be! Over the past few years, it has become an oft-recited fun fact that more than ~100 people are moving to Nashville each day. I can guarantee you that almost every single one of these people knows Nashville’s nickname, ‘Music City,’ and will visit Broadway—and maybe even the nearby Country Music Hall of Fame—in the first 6 months of living here.

However, very few of them will have ever heard of the other side of this coin: Jefferson Street.