Nashville is better known for making country music than dancing to country music. As great as our songwriters and pickers are, if we were up against Fort Worth, TX or Lafayette, LA in the Country Music Dancing Olympics, the Nashville I’ve known these past decades wouldn’t be in medal contention.
But in recent years, Music City's famously aloof and cerebral pondering of performers has been loosening up. The new(ish) music hall Skinny Dennis has been attracting eager dancing couples with its traditional country music lineup. Even more dancers are flocking a mile or two up Gallatin Road for Honky Tonk Tuesday Nights, a show and a scene that’s thriving well into its second decade.
Every week at 8 pm, a slate of swinging country bands takes the stage of the Eastside Bowl’s main room, and plays until after midnight, headlined by the longtime house band The Cowpokes. It’s one of the most joyful spaces I’ve experienced here in town. The motion of so many bodies leaves people vulnerable and exhilarated. Dancers laugh and shriek. They sweat. They bump into each other and it’s okay. It’s the most corporeal and least digitized gathering imaginable. It’s not live on the internet or broadcast on radio. You have to be there. It costs $10. And they give you a printed keepsake ticket with the names of the night’s performers on it.
Another ingredient in HTH’s special sauce is its 18 and up age policy. On my recent visits, I’ve been amazed to see so many young people at a roots music event, plus, I should mention, a noticeable contingent of non-white people among them. It’s genuinely all ages and all types. From the mezzanine that runs the entire length of the room, I watched the giant disco ball spraying photon rhinestones all over the crowd, couples practicing their moves in hideaway corners, a fella in overalls with a paunch and a waterfall beard, a femme fatale in a white feather boa coat with matching cowboy hat, plenty of western shirts, hairstyles that we called The Farrah Fawcett in the 70s, neckties, bolo ties, biker boots, ballcaps, a Guns N’ Roses t-shirt, and young ladies twirling around an axis of hooked elbows in a devil-may-care do-si-do.
As I say in the opening of String 355, music scenes thrive on long-running shows and residencies. They are anchoring statements about local cultural priorities and platforms for special genres and musicians. The Grand Ole Opry is Nashville’s OG, the reason we’re all here, cooking along nicely at 100 years old. Billy Block’s Western Beat was the preeminent Americana/roots show and community hotspot of the 2000s. While more genre specific than those, Honky Tonk Tuesday is Nashville’s most potent vessel for the traditional country music at its historic heart. It has been a stage that helped develop and launch some major roots music artists of the past decade, including Sierra Ferrell, Kelsey Waldon, Logan Ledger, Joshua Hedley, Brennen Leigh and Emily Nenni.
As Cowpokes bass player Brendan Malone tells us, this thing began in 2014 and 15 when a handful of musicians began patronizing the now-famous, then-hidden-away American Legion Post 82 at 3204 Gallatin Pike, the spine of East Nashville. It was a quasi-secret clubhouse with a country music jukebox, cheap beer, and indoor smoking. Malone says: “After like, five months of us hanging out there, the commander came up to me. And he was like, hey, Brendan, you know, you guys do us a really, really big help by just being here drinking. You guys are helping keep this place open. But we need something to bring a little bit more income through. And you guys are all musicians. Can you put together a music night?”
It took a few months for it to catch on. Malone and his friend Kevin Martin corralled the Cowpokes as the house band. By a year in, the place was packed to its capacity of 250 people and the dance floor was always full.
In this hour we also meet Laura Mae Socks, a musician who played HTH and made the scene. She’d lived in southwest Louisiana and, “about one year into the event, I was like, these people need to learn to dance!” So she started teaching, for tips and for fun, before every Tuesday night’s music started. It may be the single biggest catalyst for the country swing and two-step vortex that is now on the much larger Eastside Bowl dancefloor. She’s also built a community of her own.
“I have people that have met my class that are married now, people that came here (with) no friends in Nashville, and then they built this, like, beautiful friendship, or this community, and they'll send me Christmas cards with like 10 of them together that they all met in my class. So it's really sweet. It's not very many places that you go that are a community of all ages, from different cultural backgrounds, but they're all just dancing.”
I speak backstage with Emily Kidd, a Honky Tonk Tuesday guest artist who’s felt the energy of playing for a packed dance floor.
“We played for the first time I think in 2021. It just honestly was one of the coolest days of my Nashville time. And they have built such an amazing community. Because, you know, you go down on Broadway and you really don't hear honky tonk music. You don't hear the classic country. But when you come to Honky Tonk Tuesday, you know that you're going to hear it. And the way that Brendan and Kevin have built this community for all of us, it's very inclusive. It's supportive.”
As for Kevin Martin, the Cowpokes fiddler and lead singer, he’s the focus of the second half of this hour, recorded at WMOT’s East Nashville studio. He talks about his background on fiddle, his parallel life as the fiddler and the extremely successful Hogslop String Band, his fateful meeting with Brendan Malone, and the trajectory of the event, including its move to the Eastside Bowl once the crowds became impossible to manage at Post 82.
“Jim Lauderdale says the closest thing he's ever seen to the (famous North Hollywood country bar) Palomino club after the fact is Honky Tonk Tuesday,” Martin says. “And, you know, you just see anybody and everybody. It’s kind of that vibe. It's just fascinating that, you know, the legend of Tuesday night brought out all these people. But yeah, it did contribute to a lot of people honing their craft. And it was a launching pad for a lot of artists over the years.”
For more background on Honky Tonk Tuesday’s American Legion Years and the relationship between Kevin Martin and Brendan Malone, enjoy this 2018 documentary by filmmaker Josh Goleman.
