Broadway & Music Row Walk

Welcome to the Ryman Auditorium, a 2,362-seat hall best known as home of the Grand Ole Opry from 1943 to 1974. It began as a church project. Thomas Ryman, a Nashville businessman with saloons and a fleet of riverboats, went to an 1885 tent revival by the preacher Samuel Porter Jones intending to heckle. Instead he was converted, and pledged to build a tabernacle so Nashville could hold big revivals indoors.

It opened in 1892 as the Union Gospel Tabernacle. Ryman refused to have it named after him, but at his memorial service in 1904, Jones proposed the name Ryman Auditorium, and the crowd approved. With the Opry and its church origins, it earned the nickname the Mother Church of Country Music. After the Opry left in 1974, a later renovation reopened it on June 4, 1994, with A Prairie Home Companion.

It became a National Historic Landmark in 2001.

This is Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, a honky-tonk with three stages and live music every night. It sits right behind the Ryman, which made it a natural hangout for Opry performers. Early customers included Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Roger Miller. According to the bar's own website, Nelson landed his first songwriting job after singing here.

The bar was called Mom's when Hattie Louise Bess, known as Tootsie, bought it in 1960. The new name came by accident: a painter, to her surprise, painted the outside purple, and it became Tootsie's Orchid Lounge. The outside is still that color. When she died in 1978, she was buried in an orchid gown, with an orchid in an orchid-colored casket.

After the Opry moved out of the Ryman in 1974, Tootsie's held on through lean years, and it was still here when Broadway came back to life in the 1990s.