Some of the best live music occurs in spaces and places that aren’t show venues per se. Great public performances can pop up thanks to quixotic individuals who say yes and try stuff without high expectations, often with totally insufficient gear or infrastructure. They shouldn’t work but they do. They spark scenes that flare up and fade away. In that version of Music City history, the 12 South Taproom became legendary, especially to lovers of the guitar. But as of May 25, it’s over, because the 20-year-old restaurant and beer emporium is closing to make way for another boutique.
This one’s personal, a siege on my legendary optimism and forbearance with Nashville’s relentless growth. I’ve lived walking distance from 12th Ave. South since 2008, so I have countless memories of sitting on the Taproom’s famously anchor-weight bar stools with an IPA smile as I watched players’ players playing - Grammy Award winners, top-scale session cats, road dogs in the off season. It was exclusively on Monday nights, but that was great, because it was just so neighborhood. No tickets. No radius clauses. Conviviality and creativity in equal measure.
The story begins when Will Shuff opened the space as the 12 South Market and Deli in 2003 on a stretch of scrabbly urban corridor that had little but potential, plus the Frothy Monkey coffee house and Dolly Parton’s mission-style business headquarters. Three years later, Shuff and friends replaced the refrigerated beverage cases with a hand-made bar, launching the 12 South Taproom we’ve known ever since.
The music started in 2007, anchored by bass player Dave Pomeroy, one of the city’s most recorded musicians who was then on the eve of starting his long and ongoing tenure as president of the Nashville Musicians Association, AFM Local 257. Dave was planning a convention appearance with guitar masters Guthrie Trapp and Pat Berguson, and they obtained a corner of the room for some Monday night practice sets. Everyone had so much fun that it became a habit. The group’s mashup name - TRABERGEPOM - was ungainly. But the playing was silky, daring, free-ranging and hot.
Whether the drummer was Bryan Owings (Emmylou Harris) or Rick Lonow (June Carter Cash, Jamie Hartford), the band’s pocket was canyon deep. Trapp and Berguson brought fluency in country twang, hillbilly jazz, and soul-bearing blues. Other maestros came by to sit in, like dobro player Rob Ickes and saxophone mystic Jeff Coffin. Fortunately, Pomeroy recorded a number of those nights and curated some of the best jams into a double CD called The Taproom Tapes, which you can purchase through his Earwave website.
“The Monday night jam sessions were a staple for all of us when we were off the road and trying to figure out our next move as young musicians in Nashville,” Trapp wrote on Instagram this week. “The 12 South Taproom and its crew pioneered that neighborhood and I watched it all happen. Proud to be a part of it and part of the family.”
The next great era/epoch of Taproom Mondays carried the place into the 2010s with the Imperial Blues Hour, the still-extant trio featuring drummer Jeffrey Clemmens (veteran of 20 years with G. Love and Special Sauce), Dave Roe (the late great bass player who did years with Johnny Cash), and Kenny Vaughan, one of the most musical and tastefully twanging guitar players of the modern era. His decades with the hard-traveling Marty Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives prove it, but there he was - there they all were - with an audience of a couple dozen bobbing heads, jamming on deep cuts from the blues and country catalogs.
Other major leaguers had stints in the Taproom corner as well. Peter Hyrka’s Gypsy Hombres held court for a time. Bass player Viktor Krauss played his lush ambient jazz. I saw bluegrass flatpicker David Grier there on several occasions. Bluegrass has been the sound of 12 South for the past ten years, via the long-running residency of mandolinist and singer Chris Capozzoli. He’s a Vanderbilt grad who’d spent time at the Taproom as a patron and who wanted to find a regular outlet for his string band love. Kenny Vaughan was still playing Mondays, so they gave Tuesday nights to Chris, who then moved to Mondays when the blues trio moved on to other venues.
“(The gig) got me through some tough times as a musician,” Capozzoli told me, noting that the ten-year span was longer than any other commitment (home, wife, job) he’d ever had. ““The bigger thing was that it was free live music. One of the things that’s always bothered me about other venues is charging cover and having it be 21 and up. There isn’t a lot of family friendly music opportunity in Nashville now, and that's going to be a loss for the next generation.” And as for his picker friends, that mattered too. “We made the gig available to people who might not have a gig on Monday night.”
Capozzoli’s website brazenly insists that he fronts “The Greatest Bluegrass Band On Planet Earth.” And it might not be, but that’s okay. Nashville is ground zero for bluegrass, so it’s quite the achievement to lead a skilled, sincere, disciplined band with a longstanding residency. What’s clear is that Capazzoli is an accomplished network maker and scene enabler. His band now includes banjo player Taylor Shuck, fiddler Ellie Hakanson, bass player Amanda Accardi and Benjamin Richey on guitar, but over the years many stellar sit-ins have happened. One night late this winter brought out an absolute madhouse jam with banjo player Tray Wellington, mandolinist Frank Solivan, and Luke Black (guitar) and Drury Anderson (mandolin) of Mountain Grass Unit, one of the hottest bands on the circuit. Capozzoli’s energy now needs somewhere new to go. He’s looking.
Roots and string band musicians need to keep picking like sharks keep swimming, meaning that Nashville is and has been replete with obscure and intimate performances by non-obscure artists for little but love and tips. These days, I’m a regular at Urban Cowboy’s parlor in East Nashville, where Jack Silverman and others play weird jazz. The century-old Brown’s Diner is back to being a fully scheduled venue these days, but with about 20 seats in the bar, it feels like a secret living room.
But it’s easier to come up with a list of faded memories. When Guthrie Trapp was no longer a regular on 12 South, I saw him for a time at a place called The Pour House at 8th and Division, now an empty shell amid weeds. The once-upon-a-time Sportsman’s Grill in Hillsboro Village had a pool hall upstairs with the occasional far-out show. Country cat Jon Byrd had a great run at a shuttered antique diner called Charlie Bob’s on Dickerson Road. Rick Jobe played Western swing for years at Athens Family Restaurant (leveled for a condo), though he now posts up at 615 Chutney in West Meade. Friends and fans chimed in on a Facebook thread this week with recollections of in-the-corner performances at long-gone spaces like Bosco’s on 21st Ave., upstairs at Mad Donna’s in East Nashville, jams in the back of Cafe Coco, Guido’s pizzeria near Vanderbilt, the veggie restaurant Slice Of Life in Midtown, and the Perk & Cork in Riverside Village.
As micro-scenes go, the 12 South Taproom had a deeper commitment and a longer life than most, and I’ll miss it profoundly. That said, music-making can pop up at any time, like stray energy being kicked off of a complex and very kinetic system. Where there’s beer and booze (or coffee and sweet tea) and people gathering, music will grow like flowers in cracked pavement.
In their post this week confirming the building’s sale and the upcoming closure, Shuff and co-owner Jamy Borda singled out Monday night music as a point of pride. “Our little taproom will go down in history as some of the best live music ever in Nashville (for free). It was truly unbelievable, the musicians that showed up and blessed us with their presence.”
Chris Capozzoli and Friends plays three more Monday nights until the Taproom closes on May 25.
