At the Cock of the Walk Restaurant, hidden around the corner and alongside the highway behind the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, that finally changed.
It's worth the hunt to find this Nashville restaurant.
Cock of the Walk is a huge restaurant with winding, wood-paneled hallways leading to various eating nooks and dining rooms.
The spacious front lobby features walls of photos showing the southern celebrities who have dined there throughout the years. Rows of large, wooden rocking chairs seat guests who are waiting for a table to open up.
Once we were seated, the waitress explained how the family-style dining worked. We ordered the sampler meal so we could try southern-fried catfish, chicken and shrimp. They were each great, and depending on one's tastes, any one of the three might be a favorite.
What'll it be? Fried chicken? Fried shrimp? Fried catfish?
The main course was served with tin cups and small, cast-iron skillets of side dishes. We helped ourselves family-style to unlimited coleslaw, cornbread, hushpuppies, onions and beans.
The staff was friendly. We ate at Cock of the Walk twice, and they kept the food coming and the sweet tea filled both times, and they were also just generally polite and fun to talk to.
Courtesy of Pinterest, a typical meal at Cock of the Walk.
We got the sense that Cock of the Walk was a favorite destination for Nashville locals, and that's a bigger recommendation than anything I could write here.
Want to find one of Tennessee's best, authentic southern dining experiences? Grab a seat in one of the rocking chairs, and order some fried chicken at Nashville's Cock of the Walk.
All I'd heard of Nashville is what you might hear on the national country music stations: it's the heart of country music!
Navigating past the bars and crowds of Nashville
But, what we found in downtown Nashville was more like a giant, suburban house party that spilled out and took over a handful of city blocks.
Countless bachelorette parties were parading through the streets like drunken ducks in a row. Some pedaled open-air bars through the streets, others cheered from inside party buses, and others navigated through the crowded streets to hop from bar to bar the old-fashioned way.
Typical day in Nashville with Hot Wing Festival cameo
As you might expect, every bar along this cliched, pop-country version of Times Square offered a live musical act. From the street, all of this Music City noise blended together to create a cacophony of cymbals, guitar chords and people shouting over each other to be heard.
This was Tennessee as we'd never seen it before, and all the crowds, the noise, the drinking - it didn't appeal to us.
We ducked into a two-level souvenir shop, and I waited in line at a crowded coffee shop, but it wasn't long after we arrived in downtown Nashville that we walked ourselves back to our parking garage and got out of there.
Joe's Crab Shack in Nashville, Tennessee
Nashville still had a few great surprises in store for us, including the Grand Ole Opry and our first homecooking-style southern meal, but those surprises wouldn't be found in this crowded downtown area.
The Tennessee Titans play just over the river from downtown Nashville
Later the next day, we popped in a second time, wandered around and checked out the bridge that led to the Tennessee Titans football stadium, but on the list of places we visited in Tennessee, downtown Nashville is at the bottom - and that part of the list is soaked in the tequila spilled from some bachelorette party's last round of shots.
Our journey took us next to Nashville, Tennessee, and our very first stop was the Johnny Cash Museum.
Actually, the absurdly expensive nearby parking lot was our first stop, and that offered our first true taste of downtown Nashville. More interesting than the jacked up parking rates, we also saw the first of many drunkenbachelorette parties. This one was climbing onto the stools of a mobile bar that they could power through the city by pedaling as they partied.
We later found it's better to hunt for an actual garage, since they can afford to offer a more reasonable rate thanks to the larger number of customers they can accommodate.
"Hello. I'm [the] Johnny Cash [Museum]."
As a fan of Johnny Cash, the museum was an experience I'd been anticipating. My wife isn't that much of a fan, and this contrast eventually helped shape my overall impression of the museum.
We picked up our tickets at a line between a cafe and the gift shop. Guests were shown into the museum in intervals to keep the small exhibit rooms from getting too crowded. While we waited, we looked around to see Johnny Cash pictured on all kinds of souvenirs and listened to some of his lesser-known songs over the speakers in the room.
This combination of listening and looking turned out to be an accurate prelude for what was to come.
Five decades of Johnny Cash.
Inside, the main hall featured exhibits along one wall, and listening stations along another.
It was crowded, so it took some patience to wait for headphones to become available, but I was able to listen to full Cash songs representing music from the 1960s through 2000s. In the space of that first hour, I enjoyed five decades of Johnny Cash.
The exhibits offered a lot of history, plus some really cool pieces such as a hand-written letter from Johnny Cash to his friend and former Air Force buddy Ted Freeman.
It began, "Friend, you've been cussin me for weeks now, but I've been on the road for weeks and I ain't had time to write.
"I've been to Beaumont, Galveston, San Antonio, Wichita Falls, Amarillo, Lubbock, Abilene and San Angelo, Texas..."
Through the rest of the museum, we found movie screenings; listening stations for artists Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins; audio comparing the quality of Cash tunes produced through the years on records, cassettes, discs and digital devices; and other cool exhibits, including the mixing board used to record Cash's final records.
The mixing board used for Cash's last albums under the American Recordings label.
Overall, there were hours of music to enjoy and lots of interesting things to learn. I mentioned earlier that my wife wasn't a big Johnny Cash fan, and that led to a lot of killing time for her while I listened to another song and tried to take in the whole experience.
Because of all the listening stations, the Johnny Cash Museum is better suited for one person than it is a pair of visitors. Had each audio exhibit offered a couple sets of headphones, it would've been a better overall experience for the two of us together.
As it was, though, I had a great time as a Johnny Cash fan, and would definitely recommend the museum to any fans who will take the time to really enjoy the music, for it's those decades of songs that are the museum's greatest treasure.
