Nashville: Ryman Auditorium, Country Music Hall of Fame & Lower Broadway

Nashville is the only American city where you can spend a morning in the hall that launched country music, an afternoon in its preeminent museum, and an evening six feet from a fiddle player in a bar that has hosted every country legend since Hank Williams. The Ryman Auditorium — built as a gospel tabernacle in 1892 and converted to the Grand Ole Opry's home in 1943 — has acoustics that rank it among the great listening rooms in the world. The Country Music Hall of Fame on Demonbreun Street is the deepest archive of American commercial music history anywhere. And Lower Broadway's honky-tonks are the last functioning example of a live-music bar district operating continuously from early afternoon through late night in any major American city — free to enter, full bands every set, no DJ sets in between.