The Commodore Grill in Nashville isn’t as world famous as the Bluebird Café but for a visiting performing songwriter, It’s found it to be an easier place to get to play. Turn up before nine, give your name to Debbie Champion and you’ll get to play that night. The sound is second to none and, as the open mic immediately follows the ‘Writer’s Night’ showcase, you’ll possibly have a ‘Legend’ or two warming up the crowd for you. The only drawback is that ‘the crowd’ shrinks noticeably once the Legends have left the stage.
The Bluebird by way of contrast has the Legends playing after the open mic and a lot more people turn up to play. Barbara Cloyd, who runs this Monday night event, has devised a very fair system of deciding who plays. There are two baskets and songwriters without a ‘stamp’ put their name on a piece of paper into basket number 2. Basket number 1 is for people with a stamp to put their name into. Everybody in this basket gets to play. Names are drawn out to decide the playing order. The gig runs from 6-9 and, if there aren’t enough stamp people there, basket number 2 comes into play.
On Monday night, not having a stamp, I put my name into basket 2 and just before kick off, Barbara announced that, as there were 23 people in basket 1, there was only a slim chance of anybody from basket 2 getting to play and those people with names in that basket, would be able to retrieve their stamped name at the end of the show and bring it back for basket 1 any Monday night in the future. I will.
Debbie’s open mic runs Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and, if she likes what you do, you can play all three.
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