Three levels of honky tonk rise ahead of you at the Wild Horse Saloon, a Nashville institution that opened in 1994 and helped define the city as a country music tourism destination. The Wild Horse is a large-format honky tonk — three levels, a main floor dance floor that holds hundreds of line dancers, live music every night, and free line dancing instruction that has become a rite of passage for visitors who arrive with no country music background and leave knowing at least the rudiments of the Boot Scootin' Boogie. The bar opened during Nashville's early emergence as a tourism destination, when the city was building the infrastructure to host visitors who came for music culture rather than just a convention.
Its scale positioned it as a destination rather than a neighborhood bar, and the Wild Horse has anchored Lower Broadway ever since. Line dancing evolved from country and western social dancing in the 1970s and 1980s, became a mainstream phenomenon in the early 1990s with artists like Billy Ray Cyrus, and entered Nashville's tourism economy as a participatory cultural experience. The Wild Horse teaches it without apology.