How The Bluebird Café — an 86-Seat Room in a Strip Mall — Became Country’s Proving Ground

People have tried bribing their way into The Bluebird Cafe. For an independent venue tucked away in a Nashville strip mall, The Bluebird has folks trying to get in at all hours of the day just to get a peak at the storied space that has been instrumental in the careers of giants like Garth Brooks, Taylor Swift and many more.

“I would be counting money on a Sunday morning and people would be banging on the door having to get in,” says Bluebird Cafe COO and GM Erika Wollam Nichols. “When I wouldn’t let them in, they came around the back and started waiving $20 bills at me and I’m like, ‘No!’”

The enthusiasm would seem outsized for an 86-capacity club five miles outside of downtown Nashville that hasn’t seen much renovation beyond sound system upgrades and regularly changing the carpet. But – like many independent venues that have survived the turbulent live music industry for more than four decades – its allure is in the lore.

Before any stars graced the stage, The Bluebird Cafe was a 100-seat restaurant opened by Amy Kurland in a former drugstore turned poolhall in 1982. According to Wollam Nichols (who worked as a waitress at the cafe during her years at university), Kurland’s “goal was to make good food, but she also loved music.” Kurland’s father was an established violinist who created a group of string players for hire in Nashville and helped instill in Amy a love and appreciation for hardworking musicians.

The Bluebird’s small stage helped local artists be seen and, on the cafe’s first anniversary, the first musician who regularly appeared there secured a deal with Mercury Records. Originally, the artists were amplified by speakers until an acoustic set was booked and changed the course of the venue.

“Amy noticed that it just worked in the room – that acoustic music, everybody listened,” Wollam Nichols says. “And it was like, ‘wait a minute, something is going on here with this.’ The size of the room, the fact that people are sitting and listening and the way that the songwriters were really needing to be heard – that all factored into it. It was an organic recognition.”

Soon after that, The Bluebird moved to hosting simply acoustic shows – two shows a night, seven nights a week. By 1984, the venue began holding auditions for songwriters to perform on Sundays for the Writers’ Night and, a few months later, songwriters Don Schlitz (“The Gambler”) and Tom Schuyler (“16th Avenue”) decided the best way to make people listen would be to plant the writers themselves in the middle of the room surrounded by the audience. Wollam Nichols explains, “You wouldn’t be able to talk quite as easily if everybody is sitting at your elbow.” And the now legendary In The Round sessions began.

The In The Round format leaves nowhere to hide in the 2,100-sq. ft. space – for both the artists and the audience. “It is a room that is really built for very obvious feedback,” Wollam Nichols says. Everyone must be locked into the performance (audience chatter will be shushed). The songwriters must be compelling.

“I see people come into this room and have no idea what to expect, what’s happening. They’re confused. They are a little bit unnerved,” Wollam Nichols says. “They’ve booked a couple of seats. Maybe they are seated at a table with people they don’t know. The writers are sitting beside them. I’ve seen Vince Gill hand his guitar to somebody sitting next to him. They’ll put a drink on somebody’s table.

“Then the music starts, and they start to become drawn into that experience, and they walk out changed. People will say, ‘I’ve never heard music like this ever before. This is the greatest experience I’ve ever had at a show in my life.’ And that’s always really gratifying.”

That experience is expertly curated by The Bluebird staff that started hosting auditions back in 1984 to ensure only songwriters who could hold a crowd sat in the middle of the room. Auditions are held four times a year on a Sunday morning with roughly 60 songwriters who come to see a panel of judges including Bluebird staff, label folks, publishers, professional songwriters and theater people.

Songwriters have one minute to impress the panel.

“The structure of it was something that Amy created because she felt like after a minute of a song, if you didn’t like it, you would change the radio station. So, you need to get people’s attention within the first verse/chorus of a song,” Wollam Nichols explains. “It’s not the most perfect system, but it’s decent.”

The songwriters are evaluated: one to five on song, one to five on performance, and a notes section for additional thoughts. It takes about a month for the evaluations to be compiled and completed, and six to eight writers usually pass. Those writers become eligible to play on Sunday nights for the six-writer set and once they perform well at four of those nights (this usually takes two years), they can be booked for the 6pm In The Round sessions. Artists including Kenny Chesney, Carolyn Dawn Johnson and Dierks Bentley successfully passed their auditions.

The only other way onto the In The Round stage is by invitation. If an artist is invited to perform at the late show four times by the songwriters who have passed, that counts as four auditions. Taylor Swift made it onto the In The Round stage by invitation in 2004 and, as a young songwriter, “held her own” on a stage with three grown men, Wollam Nichols says.

The Bluebird has a reputation for welcoming talent early in their careers. Faith Hill, Trisha Yearwood, Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Janis Ian, The Indigo Girls and many more have showcased their talent at The Bluebird.

When Garth Brooks played The Bluebird in 1987, he had been passed on by every Nashville label. “A record executive, Lynn Schults (from Capitol Records), who had passed on him heard him play a set at the Bluebird – saw the impact he had on the room and took him into the kitchen and said, ‘I think we missed something,’” Wollam Nichols tells Billboard.

“Garth is top notch,” Wollam Nichols says. “He really is the best friend you can have in an industry. He never forgets. He honors what he’s been gifted.”

Vince Gill feels similarly. ““To this day, if I run into Vince, the last thing he always says to me is ‘let me know if you need me.’ That’s incredible loyalty that people have and it’s a loyalty that we don’t take for granted,” she adds.

Four years after Kurland transferred ownership of The Bluebird to the Nashville Songwriters Association International in 2008, the venue’s popularity skyrocketed with the hit ABC drama Nashville starring Connie Britton and Hayden Panettiere. Show creators made a replica of The Bluebird – going as far as taking the headshots off the wall of the original, scanning them and placing them in the same spots on the show version – and fans from across the globe made the original a tourist destination.

“We would have 300 people in the parking lot trying to get in. They wouldn’t leave,” says Wollam Nichols, who took over as GM when NSAI became stewards of the venue. “Then they would yell at us because ‘we weren’t managing things properly.’ And it’s like, ‘you’re the one standing in the middle of the road. I don’t know what you want me to do because you won’t leave and we can’t let you in because we are full.’”

The notoriety gave The Bluebird the ability to not only constantly fill seats, but also sell a lot more merch to keep the small venue – which remains a for-profit business run by a non-profit entity – afloat. Ticket sales go straight to the performers’ pockets, so the venue makes money from food and beverage, limited sponsorships and merchandise.

With seats often filled with mostly tourists, some songwriters felt the Bluebird had sold out. But Wollam Nichols argues that the ethos of the venue hasn’t changed. The Bluebird was created for songwriters to have their voices heard and now those songs are being heard by people from all walks of life.

“The intimacy that [The Bluebird] experience creates opens people up and they become maybe a little more friendly, a little more thoughtful,” Wollam Nichols says. “I have seen grown six-foot-three men in tears walking out of that room and that’s always best.”