Line Dancing Is Back, and This Time It Brought the TikTok Generation

On any given night along Nashville's Honky Tonk Highway, the floor of a Broadway bar can fill with people doing the same dance. Not approximately the same dance; the exact same dance, every footfall in sync, strangers moving as one organism to the sound of the house band. Many of them learned the steps on their phone.

Line dancing has been part of country music culture since the 1970s. It peaked commercially in the early 1990s alongside the genre's mainstream crossover boom, then retreated as country drifted toward stadium rock. Now it is back, and the vector of its return is the same platform that has transformed so many other cultural phenomena: TikTok.

Tutorial accounts teaching specific dances to specific songs have built large followings. When a new country track drops with the right tempo, a corresponding line dance choreography typically appears within days.

Country music has always understood that the body wants to move. It just needed a new way to teach people how.