Tootsies Orchid Lounge

About this audio guide

This guide to Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville follows Hattie Louise Tootsie Bess, who took over a scrappy Lower Broadway beer joint in nineteen sixty and picked up an accidental paint job that gave the bar its name. It traces the fourteen years the lounge spent pressed against the back wall of the Ryman Auditorium, when Grand Ole Opry performers and unpaid songwriters like Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Roger Miller treated it as a second green room. Look up at the wall of photographs while you listen, since most of the faces on it once ran a tab here.