The Bluebird Café founder Amy Kurland will be inducted into the Nashville Entrepreneur Center’s 2022 … [+]
The Bluebird Café has been Nashville’s premiere listening room for 40 years. What started out as a gourmet restaurant with occasional live music has transformed into an internationally revered venue that welcomes more than 70,000 guests annually.
On any night of the week, newcomers and award-winning songwriters can be heard in the round. It’s the place Garth Brooks and Taylor Swift were famously discovered and celebrities like Bono and Tom Hanks have visited to take in its magic.
Celebrated for uplifting the songwriting community and her long-standing and meaningful career in Nashville, the Bluebird Café founder Amy Kurland will be inducted into the Nashville Entrepreneur Center’s 2022 Entrepreneurs’ Hall of Fame class tonight. She joins previous inductees Dolly Parton and Trisha Yearwood.
“For somebody to consider me to be a business icon is really crazy because, heck, I wasn’t all that good a businessperson,” Kurland tells me. “I think my family has had an impact on how Nashville is today and I’m glad to be part of it, too.”
While Kurland says the television drama Nashville and 1993 film The Thing Called Love helped propel the Bluebird Café into the national spotlight, the venue had long been known for its writers nights. Kurland credits Songwriters Hall of Famer Don Schlitz and Mississippi Musicians Hall of Famer Fred Knobloch for suggesting the songwriters perform in the middle of the room. She recalls the writers describing it as a guitar pull in the living room.
“Though I did not invent people playing guitar in a circle, I did invent charging money for a ticket for that,” she says, “and the Bluebird has been famous and really is the epicenter of in the round writers for the last 40 years.”
Kurland admits she lacked business acumen in the early ’80s when the doors of the famed listening room first opened. In fact, the initial idea for what would become the Bluebird came from her boyfriend at the time. She wanted to be in the restaurant business, and he suggested she build a stage so he and his friends could play. Kurland’s then-boyfriend and his friends helped transform the former game room into a restaurant and venue.
While many of her friends and family pitched in to help, Kurland says the early years as owner weren’t easy.
“I was thrown into the deep end and I’m going to tell you I was drowning,” Kurland admits. “The only thing that was working was people were coming in the door. We had customers, we had good food, but boy were we not making money.”
Kurland enrolled in a local community college and at the National Restaurant Association to take small business classes. “Somebody told me that there was no shame in not knowing how to run your business, even once you’ve started it,” she says. “The only shame would be not figuring it out.”
It wasn’t until she took a marketing class four years in that something clicked. Kurland’s marketing class taught her to pick what she’s good at and what she wants to do. It convinced her to quit the lunch business and that’s the moment where she stopped losing money.
“It was absolutely revolutionary,” she says.
The Bluebird Cafe Founder Amy Kurland
Kurland also learned to lean on her strengths: she could recognize a good song and she had relationships with everyone who played at the venue. She didn’t focus on one genre of music, and instead all were welcome to perform at the Bluebird.
“I provided a place for the newest person in town to get off the bus and come right over and play and for the songwriter who just won a Grammy or CMA Award to celebrate that in a wonderful atmosphere,” she says.
One of those future award-winning singer-songwriters was Garth Brooks. He also is one of Kurland’s favorite success stories.
“I don’t know what it is about Garth that has this wave of charisma and vulnerability, but it’s obvious to me and I was a fan from the very first minute,” she says. “It was lovely to experience that as the judge at his first audition and then to invite him back to play and have that reinforced by the fact that he got a standing ovation in the middle of a song. That doesn’t happen very often.”
Capitol Records’ Lynn Schultz , who previously passed on Brooks, was in attendance for another Bluebird showcase where the singer performed. Kurland says the record label executive “went white” when he realized he had already turned Brooks down.
“He blocked everybody else trying to get to him after the show to say, ‘You’re going to be mine. You come see me in the office first thing in the morning,’” Kurland recalls. “One of the reasons I’m very fond of Garth and that story is because he has been so supportive ever since. He is a man who does not forget who helped him along the way.”
Just like Brooks hasn’t forgotten his early supporters, Kurland hasn’t lost sight of the importance of songwriters and of helping the Nashville community through benefit concerts. She estimates the venue has raised more than $1 million with its annual Alive Hospice benefit shows.
In 2008, Kurland reached her breaking point. She was burned out and didn’t want the venue to fail. She says a voice told her to “give it to the songwriter’s association.” Rather than sell the famed venue to an investor, Kurland transferred ownership of the Bluebird Café to the Nashville Songwriters Association International later that year.
“The Association said, ‘We will not let you give it to us. We will take it at a reduced price, and we will pay you a royalty,’” Kurland says. “Their business is to make sure that people who create things get royalties, so I get a small payment out of profits.”
Former Bluebird employee Erika Wollam Nichols was working at NSAI at the time and helped Kurland go through the process. Wollam Nichols now serves as president and general manager of the Bluebird and Kurland credits her former colleague’s business experience and ability to find sponsorships and market Bluebird merchandise and events for helping the venue’s growth and popularity.
“They’re making a lot of money and turns out that if you’re really a businessperson that is a good business,” she says.
While Kurland continues to be involved with the Bluebird Café from a distance, she never stopped championing songwriters and giving them a safe space to share their music and to be heard.
“What people want more than anything is to be listened to and appreciated,” she says. “For me, the biggest message is that it is the songwriters, and it is the musicians, that make the Bluebird.”
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/anniereuter/2022/10/24/the-bluebird-cafs-amy-kurland-honored-by-nashville-entrepreneur-center/