Your next stop is Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, arguably Nashville's most legendary honky-tonk bar. Hattie Louise Tatum — known as Tootsie — opened this bar in 1960, and its back door sat directly across the alley from the Ryman Auditorium's stage entrance. That proximity was everything.
Grand Ole Opry performers would slip out the Ryman's back door between sets and into Tootsie's for a quick drink, a meal, and a conversation. The bar became an informal greenroom for the country music world, a place where Kris Kristofferson was working as a janitor and handing out demo tapes, where Willie Nelson sold his first songs, where Roger Miller, Faron Young, and Patsy Cline were regulars. Tootsie herself was known for her generosity — she ran tabs for musicians who were broke, fed people who were hungry, and kept a hatpin on her person for anyone who got too rowdy.
She is part of the founding mythology of country music not because she recorded a song but because she maintained the human infrastructure that made the music possible. The walls inside are covered floor to ceiling in signed photographs, a visual archive of sixty-plus years of who came through that door.