A Blogger Visits 'The Best of Nashville's Honky Tonk [sic] Scene'

On Monday, the Huffington Post re-ran a post from travel site We Blog the World titled "Your Guide To The Honky Tonk Music Scene in Nashville." WBtW's Renee Blodgett spent a few days getting to know Music City, or at least trying. She missed a few things.

Let's start from the beginning. "Along Nashville’s Division Street, we had our first experience with the type of music bar Nashville refers to as 'Honky Tonks.'" She's got the historical context right for honky-tonks, though I'm not sure why she emphasized and scare-quoted the phrase “working class cliente.”

Midtown has a helluva lot of bars, but Red Door, Loser's, Winner's and their ilk don't bill themselves as honky-tonks, and I've never heard anyone call them anything other than "bar." She's right that these places are light on live music, but here's where the pressure of writing an overwhelmingly positive travel article causes trouble: You can't point out that, from a music-lover's point of view, Midtown is a lightly-sanitized version of Lower Broadway.

I'm no sophisticate — even after nearly three decades living in the vicinity of Nashville, I still have a terrifying time finding sustenance in East Nashville —