Amy Kurland’s first business venture, the Bluebird Café, has evolved from a local listening room to a nationally recognized songwriter venue, featured on the ABC hit show Nashville. Lets take a look back at the café’s humble beginnings with a bird’s eye view of the business from Kurland herself.
During college, Kurland worked as a bookkeeper in a restaurant in Washington DC. This experience showed her the love and passion that can be found in private businesses, and inspired her. Kurland is a Nashville native who grew up around music, her father was a violinist. With a life-long love of cooking she moved back to Nashville intent on opening a restaurant. At the time, she was dating a guitar player. He and his friends convinced her to have live music at her new restaurant so they could have a place to play. She added the stage with “no other thought than it would give everyone some place to work.” She signed the lease in February/March of 1982 and opened on June 3rd, 1982. The Bluebird Café opened as a restaurant and listening room.
In the beginning, the Bluebird operated with a great lunch service and then would switch to a live music venue at night. “For a while, both things worked just fine…We had a nice lunch business. Chet Atkins, Minnie Pearl, and a lot of the Green Hills ladies would come in to have lunch…and in the evening we would have live music. But I couldn’t keep doing both, it was exhausting.” So, about 4 ½ years in, Kurland decided to stop trying to be everything. She looked at her business and asked herself “what would be more fun?” and chose the live music business. By that time, the venue had already been focusing on songwriter music. At the time, Kurland was taking a marketing class at Nashville State. Erika Wollam-Nichols, who is currently running the Bluebird, was taking a class at Belmont in marketing. They worked together to determine that more time slots were needed for up-and-coming writers to play, and music earlier in the evening was needed for the customers.
About ten years before the Bluebird opened, the Nashville Songwriters Association, who now owns the Bluebird, determined that they needed to make an effort to make songwriters better known and appreciated for their music. However, a customer going into the Bluebird and hearing songs that they have heard before, never thinking about where they came from—or never heard of, but that impact the listener and makes them think about their life, was much more powerful promotion for songwriters. As Kurland describes it, “The Bluebird is the public face, the impact, the connection for people about Nashville songwriters”
The Bluebird has remained in the same strip mall location for over 30 years. When asked if the venue would ever move, Kurland said, “I’d love that same location with an extra 35 seats. I don’t want it to be double the number of seats because we would lose the intimacy… but just a few seats would really be nice!” The closeness, both in proximity to other Bluebird customers, and in the immediate connection to the songwriters is “truly magical” because the customers get to feel as if they are just “one of the guys.”
The experience for the performers is just as magical: “For the songwriters, its so different than the experience of playing from the stage. Playing from the stage with a huge audience is great, but with the Bluebird, it’s the difference between performing for, and sharing with.” This closeness, Kurland suspects, may actually make songwriters share more personal songs. “Play that way, and people respond to it, and the songwriter can feel safe in becoming more vulnerable and saying ‘You know, I really need to play you a song about when my mother left’ or whatever it is. They are playing for people who love them.”
Kurland does not see the Bluebird as a venue that could be franchised in other cities, “Nashville is a small business, creative, entrepreneurial city—and this is where the talent is. We could try to replicate the Bluebird in another city but there wouldn’t be the kind of quality performance to fill every time slot.”
Kurland chose to donate the Bluebird to the Nashville Songwriter’s Association 25 years after she began the business. She felt tired and knew the Bluebird still had a lot of potential. She didn’t feel she had the knowledge, the background, the energy to do it. She thought about selling the café, or bringing someone in to help her run it, but, as she described it—“it came to me in a flash, give it to the Songwriter’s Association, they have infrastructure, they have the same mission statement. If I give it to them they will be able to create a situation where it can last forever, and grow.”
“At first,” she says, describing her feelings after donating the venue, “it just felt like leaving your baby with the babysitter for the first time. But it turns out the babysitter is a damn good parent.” She is very pleased that the Association has stayed true to her original goals for the Bluebird. For example the Bluebird still hosts free concerts in the mornings for senior citizens and continues to honors the writers who got the place off the ground.
Kurland is a very busy “retired” woman. She helps her husband, who makes and sells leather goods and saddles, with his website. She volunteers in alcohol and drug abuse recovery and is on the board of a facility and treatment center. Kurland also volunteers at a daycare center, goes to the gym, walks with her mother, bakes muffins, walks the dogs, travels and much more.
Thanks Amy for all you’ve done for our community.
~ This piece was written by Christina Weidel for The Nashville Experience.