Tootsie's Orchid Lounge

Tootsie's Orchid Lounge is the purple building that country music built, and the closest thing Nashville has to a shrine you can walk into and order a beer. Open since 1960 at 422 Broadway, painted a shade of orchid so loud it stops traffic, and standing just across the alley from the back door of the Ryman Auditorium, it is a genuine piece of country-music history that never stopped being a working bar. It is loud, crowded and unpretentious, a honky-tonk first and a listening room a distant second, and that is precisely why it earns its place near the foot of our list.

Most days it runs live country music from late morning until the small hours across three floors and three stages, a near-continuous stream of local bands and hopefuls playing for tips in the room where Willie Nelson, Roger Miller and Kris Kristofferson once did the same. The history is real, the music genuinely never stops, and no honest ranking of the world's live-music bars can leave Nashville's most storied one off the page. We rank it twenty-fourth among the best live music bars in the world, and this is why.

From Mom's to Tootsie's: the purple accident

The bar opened as a going concern in 1960, when Hattie Louise "Tootsie" Bess bought an existing Broadway tavern called Mom's and put her own name over the door. The now-legendary colour was not a branding decision but an accident. A painter hired to freshen up the building turned up and, without instruction, coated the exterior in a bright orchid purple. Bess decided she liked it, kept it, and renamed the place the Orchid Lounge in its honour. More than sixty years later the building is still that same defiant shade, one of the most photographed facades in Tennessee and an unmissable landmark on a strip of otherwise interchangeable neon.

Bess herself became as much a part of the legend as the paint. She ran the lounge until her death in 1978 and presided over it as a den mother to the struggling songwriters and pickers who drifted in from the Opry and the publishing houses. The most-told story about her is the cigar box she kept behind the counter, stuffed with IOUs from hungry writers she had fed and watered on credit. As the tale goes, at the end of each year a group of established Opry performers would quietly clear the box, paying off the tabs of the unknowns so that Tootsie would not be left out of pocket. When she died, Nashville turned out for her: Tom T. Hall, Roy Acuff and Faron Young were among the mourners, and she was buried, fittingly, in an orchid gown.

Across the alley from the Opry

Tootsie's owes its history to a quirk of geography. Its back door opens onto the alley that runs directly behind the Ryman Auditorium, which was home to the Grand Ole Opry from 1943 to 1974. For those three decades the biggest names in country music were performing a few dozen steps away, and between sets they slipped out the Ryman's rear door, crossed the alley and ducked into Tootsie's for a drink they could not get inside the Opry house. Willie Nelson immortalised the walk in a line that Nashville still repeats: "It's 17 steps to Tootsies and 34 steps back." The number doubles on the return, the joke goes, because of what you had while you were there.

That short walk turned the lounge into an unofficial green room for the Opry and a working office for its songwriters. Nelson, Roger Miller, Kris Kristofferson, Harlan Howard and Merle Kilgore were all regulars, drinking, writing and pitching songs in the back booths. By local lore Nelson landed one of his first songwriting jobs off the back of singing here. When the Opry decamped for its purpose-built house at Opryland in 1974, Tootsie's lost its captive audience of stars but kept its legend, and the walls of every floor are still papered with photographs of the singers and writers who passed through.

The room

Inside, Tootsie's is not one bar but three, stacked on top of each other and connected by narrow staircases. Each floor has its own stage and its own band, so on a busy night three acts play at once and the music changes character as you climb. The ground-floor room is the historic heart, low-ceilinged, dim and plastered with decades of memorabilia, autographed portraits, faded flyers and framed relics of the Opry years. Upper floors are rowdier and more modern, and a rooftop level looks out over the Broadway neon. It is cramped, worn and thoroughly unglamorous, and that is the point: this is a honky-tonk, not a supper club, and it wears its history as grime rather than polish.

Expect crowds. Broadway is now one of the busiest tourist strips in America, and Tootsie's sits at the centre of it, so the rooms fill fast and stay full, especially on weekends, bachelorette nights and any evening with an event in town. The atmosphere is boisterous and communal rather than reverent. People talk, drink, sing along and shout requests, and the bands play over and into all of it. If you come expecting a hushed listening room, you will be disappointed. If you come for a rowdy, unfiltered slice of Nashville, you will get exactly what you paid for.

The music

The programming model is the classic Broadway honky-tonk one: no cover charge, no ticketed shows, and bands that play for tips in rotating sets from late morning until close. The music is overwhelmingly country, classic covers, contemporary hits, western swing and the occasional original, played by working musicians who make their living on this strip. Turnover is constant, so the act on stage when you arrive may well have changed by the time you finish a drink, and the quality ranges from competent bar bands to genuinely gifted players biding their time between bigger things.

That is both the charm and the ceiling. Nashville's honky-tonks are a proving ground, and Tootsie's has launched careers, but on any given afternoon you are hearing capable local talent rather than marquee headliners. The value is in the volume and the continuity: the music quite literally never stops, from opening to last call, seven days a week. Few rooms anywhere offer that much live performance for the price of a beer and a folded bill in the tip jar, and that relentless, unbroken live music is a large part of why the room stays on this list at all.

Why we rank it No. 24

Tootsie's lands at twenty-four because it is a bar first and a music room second. Almost everything above it on our 25 best live music bars ranking, from the Village Vanguard at No. 1 down through the great jazz and blues clubs, is a room where the band on the stand is the entire reason to come and the audience treats it that way. Tootsie's is not that. It is a party, a landmark and a piece of living history where the music, near-constant and genuinely live, is the soundtrack rather than the sole event. Our methodology rewards how central live performance is to the night, and here it shares the billing with the crowd, the neon and the legend.

But it fills a gap the rest of the list had left open. Nashville is the beating heart of American country music, and a global live-music ranking that ignored it would be incomplete. Tootsie's is the most storied honky-tonk on Broadway, its history is unimpeachable, and its live music genuinely runs from open to close. That combination of real heritage and never-ending performance earns it a place, just not a high one. It sits one rung above Bar Music in Tokyo at No. 25, the listening bar that plays records rather than hosting live players, and comfortably below dedicated dancehalls like Austin's Broken Spoke (No. 8), where the country tradition is preserved with less tourism and more focus.

Getting in and what to expect

Getting in is simple: you walk up and walk in, usually with no cover charge and no reservation. That accessibility is a virtue and a warning. Because it is free, central and famous, Tootsie's is one of the most crowded bars in Nashville, and at peak times you may queue on the sidewalk or find every floor packed shoulder to shoulder. Come early in the day, or on a weekday, for something closer to breathing room and a better shot at the historic ground-floor bar. Come at night on a weekend and you are joining a scrum, albeit a good-natured one.

Tootsie's keeps long honky-tonk hours, opening late morning and running deep into the night, roughly until the small hours that Nashville's licensing allows, seven days a week. Exact opening and closing times shift with the day, the season and the city's events calendar, so check the current listing before a special trip. Tipping the band is expected rather than optional: a jar or bucket circulates, and a few dollars per set is the honky-tonk custom that keeps the music free and the players paid.

Drinks and food

This is a straightforward American bar, and the drinks match. Expect cold domestic and regional beer, well liquor, a short list of simple cocktails and the kind of pricing that reflects a tourist strip rather than a craft-cocktail den. Nobody comes to Tootsie's for mixology, and that is fine; you come for a beer in your hand while a band plays classic country a few feet away. Our $$ rating reflects an affordable, no-frills honky-tonk where the real cost of a good night is the tips you leave, not the tab you run.

There is bar food to soak it up, casual Southern and American plates in the honky-tonk idiom, though the kitchen is a supporting act rather than a destination. If you want to build an evening around Broadway, Tootsie's works best as a stop on a crawl: a drink, a set or two, a photograph of that purple facade, and on to the next room. Explore the wider strip and the rest of the city in our Live Music Bars in Nashville guide.

Who it's for

Tootsie's is for anyone who wants the real, rowdy, tourist-thronged Nashville honky-tonk experience with a genuine layer of history underneath it. It is ideal for a Broadway night out, a bachelorette or bachelor party, a first-time visitor ticking off the landmarks, or a country-music fan who wants to stand in the room where Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson once wrote. Its free entry and long hours make it welcoming and spontaneous in a way that ticketed clubs are not.

It is not the place for a quiet, seated evening of attentive listening, for a first date built around conversation, or for anyone who wants to hear a specific headliner in comfort. For that, Nashville has listening rooms and theatres, and this list has its dedicated clubs. But for a loud, celebratory, history-soaked few hours with live country ringing off every wall, few bars on earth deliver the fantasy of Nashville more completely. Compare it with the rest of the field on our full live music ranking, and browse the city in the Nashville Bar Guide.

The verdict

Tootsie's Orchid Lounge is not the best-sounding, best-behaved or most serious live-music room in the world, and it does not pretend to be. It is something rarer: a working honky-tonk that has kept live country playing across three floors, seven days a week, in the exact spot where modern Nashville's songwriting culture was half-invented across an alley from the Opry. The purple paint, the cigar box of IOUs, the 17 steps, all of it is true, and all of it is still there behind the crowds. As a listening destination it ranks low. As a landmark where live music genuinely never stops, it is irreplaceable, and that is why it makes our twenty-five.

What to order

• 01

  A cold domestic beer

  The honky-tonk default; grab one and find a spot near a stage.

• 02

  A whiskey, neat or on the rocks

  Tennessee is bourbon and whiskey country; keep it simple.

• 03

  Cash for the tip jar

  The bands play for tips; a few dollars a set is the custom that keeps the music free.