Three Chords and a 4,400-Seat Room: The Truth Opens Its Season Book, and Its Whiskey Bar Explains the Name
Sometime in the 1950s or '60s, depending on who is telling it, a songwriter named Harlan Howard was asked to define country music. He said it was three chords and the truth. It is the most quoted sentence anyone has ever written about the genre, and it has survived seventy years of being printed on T-shirts without losing its edge.
This fall, Nashville gets a 4,400-capacity room called The Truth. Inside it will be a whiskey bar called Harlan's. You do not have to squint very hard.
What is being built
The venue occupies a 109,000-square-foot, four-story structure at 440 Chestnut Street in Wedgewood-Houston, part of Wedgewood Village, the eighteen-acre mixed-use district AJ Capital Partners has been assembling in the old industrial blocks south of downtown. It has now announced the first chapter of its grand opening season, with the opening headliner and the rest of the inaugural slate still to come. On-sale dates are being handled show by show.
The room itself was designed by Blueprint Studio around a flexible floor: three levels of audience stacked close to the stage, and a plan that can be run as a standing-room show or seated end to end. That is a deliberate piece of engineering. Nashville has been long on 1,200-seat theaters and long on 20,000-seat arenas, and conspicuously short on the middle — the size where an artist who has outgrown a club but cannot fill Bridgestone actually plays. That gap has sent a lot of touring acts to other cities on their way through the South.
Beyond the main room there is Vinyl Room, a listening lounge, and a Set List Studio, where letterpress posters unique to each night's set list will be pulled in partnership with Isle of Printing. Grant Lyman, who runs the promoter's East regions, and Sally Williams, its president of Nashville music and business strategy, are the names attached to the project.
The part that is not about the building
The more interesting commitments are the ones with no seats attached. The Nashville Songwriters Association International will hold its annual Songwriter Awards in the venue, and its emerging writers will get apprenticeship placements there. The W.O. Smith Music School — which for four decades has taught instruments to children from low-income Nashville families for fifty cents a lesson — is a partner, as is United Record Pressing, the plant that has been stamping vinyl in this city since 1949 and pressed some of the first Beatles singles sold in America.
That is not a coincidental set of names. Songwriters, a music school for kids who cannot pay, and a record plant older than most of the buildings around it: taken together, they are a fairly precise statement about which Nashville a new corporate venue wants to be associated with.
Why Wedgewood-Houston
Twenty years ago this was warehouses, small manufacturing and not much reason to drive over. The galleries came first, then the breweries, then the studios, then the apartments, in the order these things always happen. A 4,400-seat venue is the point at which a neighborhood stops being an emerging arts district and becomes a destination with traffic patterns.
Whether that is entirely good news depends on who you ask and how long they have rented there. But the room is coming, the middle of Nashville's venue ladder finally gets a rung, and the bar is named after the man who told everybody what the music was actually made of.
Related: the original announcement of The Truth in Wedgewood-Houston.
