You’re singing in a honky-tonk cafe
Nobody’s hearing what you play
They’re too busy drinking anyway
You got to keep on smiling
Brother, keep on smiling”
—“Keep on Smiling,” Wet Willie Band
Obviously, the Bluebird Cafe wasn’t around when vocalist Jimmy Hall sang the words to this Wet Willie hit back in 1974. Doubtless, many singer-songwriters have shared the sentiment while playing in small clubs across America. So when Amy Kurland opened the Bluebird Cafe in June 1982, Nashville tunesmiths were delighted to find a club where they could try out original material on an audience who actually listened. Appropriately enough, Jimmy Hall was one of them.
Ironically, Kurland didn’t originally intend to have live music at the Bluebird, which celebrates two decades of existence this coming month. She admits that she just wanted to open a “little luncheonette for the Green Hills crowd.” The music was an afterthought. When she came back to Nashville after graduating from George Washington University in 1976 with a double major in American literature and American studies, she ended up like so many English majors: waiting tables. Kurland first worked at Dalts Grill and discovered a love for the culinary sciences. She even went to culinary school for a while, but dropped out. “I had this delusion that I could cook too,” she says. While working as a waitress and operating a small pushcart business on Second Avenue, she saved her money with the idea of opening her own cafe. When her grandmother died and left her a small inheritance, she was able to accelerate her plans, opening the Bluebird on June 3, 1982.
“We had a really good lunch crowd back then,” Kurland recalls. “I stole some of the recipes from Dalts. And every afternoon, we would pull the sound system out of the closet and assemble it, and the bands would come and play that night. The idea was to do jazz night on Thursday, and then have some rock bands on Friday and Saturday. Sometime that first summer, someone called and said they wanted to do a writers’ night as a benefit for the World Hunger Year organization. I didn’t really know what a writers’ night was, but I said OK.
“We had a great night of music, the place was packed, but it was drop-dead quiet in there. I walked in there the next day and said, 'We need to do more of those.’ It just felt like the right fit. The rock bands and the blues bands had been too loud. The jazz wasn’t drawing as well as we’d hoped, and there were always too many people on the small stage. Then we did the writers’ night, and it seemed like the room was made for it.”
As the club’s popularity grew, Kurland realized that she was now a full-fledged entrepreneur and would have to learn more about running a business. “About a year or so into it, I realized that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. All that naïveté that got me into this thing was gone, and I figured I’d better find out what I’m doing.” She then enrolled in some small-business management courses at Nashville Tech, which she says “were all really helpful.”
In 1985, songwriters Don Schlitz, Fred Knobloch, Paul Overstreet and Tom Schuyler came to Kurland with an idea they dubbed “Songwriters in the Round,” modeled after the dinner theater concept. The idea was to put several tunesmiths together in a circle with the dining tables set around them. The intimate setting would allow them to trade songs and guitar licks, and it lent itself well to audience interaction and participation. It was also the forerunner of MTV’s Unplugged. The first show went off well and became a trademark of the venue. In 1988, the first “Women in the Round” show was staged with Pam Tillis, Ashley Cleveland, Tricia Walker and Karen Staley participating. When Kurland, the daughter of a Nashville musician but admittedly not a proficient one herself, began auditioning new songwriters on Sunday nights, she unintentionally became one of the most powerful women in the music business. She also became famous for “shushing” rowdy patrons when they became too boisterous and distracted performers.
Over the course of the last 20 years, there have been many memorable evenings at the venue, such as the night in 1988 when a young singer from Oklahoma was put on the bill at the last minute and was offered a record deal by the same man (Capitol’s Lynn Schultz) who had just turned him down a week before. A decade later, Garth Brooks had sold more records than any other solo artist in American history. This and hundreds of other anecdotes about the club’s history are included in The Bluebird Scrapbook, which will be published by HarperCollins on June 18. Kurland thought of writing her own personal memoir of the Bluebird, but decided instead to contact many of the writers who have performed there regularly over the past 20 years, asking them to share their favorite memories.
The collection is a virtual who’s-who of country, pop and gospel songwriters, including Paul Williams, Michael McDonald, Ricky Skaggs, Jonell Mosser, Paul Overstreet, Bob DiPiero, Marshall Chapman, Marcus Hummon, Gary Burr, Hugh Prestwood and dozens of others. Other memories include the night Peter Jennings and Lauren Bacall dropped in together, the Indigo Girls’ debut, and performances by Carole King and Bill Monroe. There is the story of the feature on CBS’ 48 Hours that inspired an L.A. screenwriter to pen The Thing Called Love, the River Phoenix-Sandra Bullock vehicle that ended up being filmed at the Bluebird. The events leading up to the Turner South network’s weekly cable show Live From the Bluebird Cafe are also mentioned in the book. And yes, Amy actually did ask Garth Brooks to marry her after his original audition. “Some singers are willing to show their vulnerability to the audience, and there is something very appealing about that. I remember the first song that Garth sang was about worshipping a woman and putting her up on a pedestal,” Amy laughs, “which is also something that was very appealing to me.”
The Bluebird has a 20th anniversary show scheduled for June 3, which is the club’s official anniversary date, but Kurland says she can’t remember the actual date of the first writers’ night; it was probably in July. The June 3 show will feature Jay Patten, Jimmy Hall, T. Graham Brown and Jonell Mosser on the bill so far, with others yet to be confirmed. The Bluebird’s publicist, Mike Hyland, says one of the Turner shows has been nominated for a Southeast Regional Emmy, and the Cafe has also been named the Club of the Year by the Academy of Country Music. Not bad for a venue that started out as a little luncheonette.
