Lower Broadway is the neon corridor Nashville's visitors bureau calls the Honky Tonk Highway, and you are walking right through it. The term packages something that is actually more complicated: the relationship between country music as a commercial product and country music as a living folk tradition. The bars on this stretch generally feature live music seven days a week, often all day, performed by musicians who are paid little or nothing and rely on tips and exposure.
Many of them moved to Nashville to make it in the music industry. Many of them are genuinely excellent. The songs you are hearing through those open doors represent an enormous range of skill and ambition, from working musicians playing covers to support their families to aspiring songwriters hoping a producer is in the crowd.
Nashville has always had this quality — a city where the dream economy is so large and so visible that it shapes everyday life. The neon and the cowboy boots and the rooftop bars are the surface. Under them, the city is still, at some level, a place people come because they believe in the music.