The honest answer requires splitting Nashville into two eras, with 2010 as the rough dividing line. Before then, Nashville had tourists. It had honky-tonks on Broadway that went back decades. It had the Grand Ole Opry, the Country Music Hall of Fame, Opryland. What it did not have was the sense that tourism was the city’s defining industry, or that the entire downtown existed primarily to entertain out-of-town visitors for a long weekend.
Lower Broadway: Functional Before It Was Famous
In the 1970s and 1980s, Lower Broadway was not the party zone it became. It was, in stretches, genuinely rough. The honky-tonks that now charge premium prices for branded bottles of whiskey were, at the time, bars where actual musicians played for tips and genuine regulars drank after work. Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge and a handful of other establishments served the Grand Ole Opry crowd from the Ryman next door. The music was real, but the scene was local and unsentimental.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, Mayor Phil Bredesen’s downtown revitalization cleaned up Broadway and opened the Bridgestone Arena and the new Country Music Hall of Fame. Tourism increased, but it was recognizable as tourism. Families came to see country music history. Older fans attended Opry shows. Music industry visitors came to do business. The bars on Broadway were loud and full, but the pedestrian mix looked different. There were no pedal taverns. There were no mechanical bulls shaped like bulls or otherwise. There were no six-story bars with celebrity-branded floors and multiple stages playing simultaneously.
What the Music Scene Felt Like
Ken Spring, a cultural sociologist at Belmont University who moved to Nashville in 1998, described the city at that time as having a lot of subcultural capital. You could see live music two or three nights a week for free, and most of it was not country music. Nashville in the late 1990s had an underground scene that coexisted with the country industry. East Nashville, still affordable and slightly disreputable, attracted artists who were drawn by cheap rent and proximity to Music Row without wanting to be on Music Row. Clubs like Soulshine Pizza Factory hosted local bands with those official Nashville Venue guitar pick signs. One of them was eventually shut down for noise complaints, the kind of irony that became a dark local joke: an official Nashville venue forced out by noise ordinances while the loud tourist bars downtown expanded.
Nashville was a temporary stop for musicians who eventually wanted to go to New York or Los Angeles. It was not yet a final destination or a place with the self-confidence to insist on its own identity. That shift happened gradually through the 2000s and accelerated sharply after 2010.
The Country Music Industry as the City’s Center of Gravity
Before the tech and healthcare industries became the dominant economic story, Nashville’s identity was inseparable from the music business. Music Row, the cluster of studios and publishing companies along 16th and 17th Avenues, employed thousands of session musicians, staff songwriters, A&R people, and studio engineers. The economy that supported those jobs also supported a particular kind of city: cheaper, more DIY, oriented toward working professionals in the music business rather than tourists or transplants seeking lifestyle.
The industry had its own social infrastructure. There were industry bars and industry restaurants where musicians and producers and label people gathered. There was a circuit of small venues, from the Station Inn for bluegrass to a network of East Nashville bars for Americana and singer-songwriters, that existed primarily for locals and industry insiders, not for visitors.
The Pre-Flood Neighborhoods
East Nashville in the early 2000s was genuinely affordable. Five Points had a handful of bars and restaurants that felt local because they were local. Germantown was quieter than its current restaurant-dense incarnation. The Gulch was an industrial district. SoBro south of Broadway was underdeveloped. 12 South had a few boutiques and coffee shops but none of the foot traffic or tourist awareness it has now.
The 2010 flood created development opportunity throughout these areas. As developers rebuilt damaged properties and bought out overwhelmed owners, the physical fabric of neighborhoods changed. Within a few years, what had been working-class or creative-class neighborhoods started the price appreciation that eventually made them unrecognizable to people who had lived in them a decade earlier.
What Locals Knew That Tourists Didn’t
Before Nashville’s reputation spread nationally, it had a local culture that was genuinely its own. Hot chicken existed but was not a tourist attraction. Brown’s Diner, open since 1927, was where locals ate, not a destination for people who had read about it in a travel magazine. The musicians who played the honky-tonks were genuine songwriters, not performers hired to fill tourist hours.
None of that has completely disappeared. The Station Inn still operates. The local music scene outside Broadway still exists. But it requires finding now, in a way that it did not when the whole city was not organized around tourism. The city that visitors encounter on Lower Broadway today, with its bachelorette parties and celebrity-branded bars and $15 cocktails, is a product of the city that existed before it. It just is not quite that city anymore.
Sources
- Charlotte Maracina, Medium, “Why Nashville’s Artists Are Struggling More Than Ever Before,” December 2024 (quote from Ken Spring)
- Wandrly, “How Has Nashville Changed In The Last Few Generations?” (wandrly.app/blog)
- Slate, “How Nashville Has Transformed from Country Music Haven to Bachelorette Central,” June 2021
- Anne Helen Petersen, BuzzFeed News, “How Nashville Became One Big Bachelorette Party,” March 2018
- Tennessee Lookout, “Nashville is a City on the Move But Running in Place,” July 2025
- WHYY, “The Nashville Bachelorette Party Industrial Complex,” September 2024
- Nashville History, Preserve Nashville (preservenashville.com)