Nashville is known for its “honkytonks” — the popular country music bars on Lower Broadway in downtown. The origin of the term is disputed — but a recently digitized interview with a Tennessee folk musician shows the impact that early honkytonks had on traditional music.
To hear Johnson Swafford tell it, the advent of these kinds of bars was the “greatest tragedy there ever was.”
“Late ’40s and early ’50s, these ‘honky tonks’ they called them back then, began to take over,” said Swafford, of Bledsoe County.
He was a traditional musician who made banjos out of cheese boxes and fiddles out of gourds in Summer City, Tenn., north of Chattanooga. In the recording from Fall Creek Falls in 1980, he recalled wholesome dances and ice cream socials being replaced by booze and jukeboxes.
“The young people got to associatin’ with them, and so that done away with the old-time way of life and the recreation we had back then and the square dances,” he said. “Nothing else in the world but the honky tonks to blame.”
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