Only in Nashville.
It’s CMA Fest here in Nashville, which means you never know who’s going to show up.
But Eric Church didn’t play the festival this year, instead opting to spend his time playing to his loyal fans at his To Beat the Devil residency at his new bar, Chief’s. (Much better use of time, honestly).
Church is wrapping up his residency with the last of 19 shows tonight, and at this point I’d venture to say that he’s already spent more time in his downtown Nashville bar than almost any of the artists with their own venues on Broadway. And after his residency show on Friday, he didn’t head straight for the door, instead deciding to stick around and hang out with fans in the first floor honky tonk.
And of course he had to treat them to a special performance, hopping up on stage with the band to sing his 2011 hit “Springsteen.”
@whiskeyriff @Eric Church singing “Springsteen” // whiskeyriff.com #whiskeyriff #ericchurch #nashville ♬ original sound – Whiskey Riff
Church is one of the few artists who actually own their bar on Broadway (with most of them just licensing their name to hospitality companies), with every inch of the venue carefully planned by Chief himself. And he made it clear when he opened Chief’s he wanted it to not only be a place for his fans to call home, but for him to be able to spend time in too.
He’s also talked about the irony in now owning a bar on Broadway after moving to Nashville and not being able to get a gig in the honky tonks, because he didn’t want to play cover songs:
“I did what a lot of dreamers do. You pack your car…you put a guitar in it, and you go to the center of what Nashville is, which is Broadway.
And I couldn’t get a gig on Broadway. Nothing. I couldn’t even bartend on Broadway.
They didn’t want original music. They wanted you to play whatever the songs were at the time. I didn’t really do that. I was a songwriter.”
And while he couldn’t find a home on Broadway, he found one just a few blocks away:
“I found a place not far from here over in Printer’s Alley, which is a seedy kind of area. But I found my tribe there, because that’s where all the people that also got kicked off Broadway all ended up.
So I ended up with those guys. And what I found with those guys was, these were all old-dog songwriters that had written for George Jones and Waylon Jennings and Conway Twitty. And that’s where I learned. I learned the craft of songwriting from the same guys that came to town and had the same thing happen to them that happened to me.”
But now that Eric is not only on Broadway with his own bar (which, by the way, encourages artists to sing their own songs and not just play covers), he calls it a redemptive moment in his long career:
“I was just drawn here. And then I got here, and it wasn’t exactly what I thought. So it’s fun to be back here now… feels good, feels redemptive.
I mean, it’s one of those things where I think about it a lot, it’s just a redemptive thing to look at what this is and the care that we put into this place to make it feel that way. I started here, you know. They didn’t want me here, I’m here. They can’t kick me out now.”
Those bars on Broadway may not have wanted Eric Church to sing his own songs in them back then…but now that all of those bars would kill to have him singing his own songs on their stage, Church his own bar among them.
