I’m Emily Young taking over Nashville Public Radio’s What Where When-sday with a love letter to the beloved East Nashville bar Duke’s. Nestled in the heart of Five Points, Duke’s has become a mainstay for the local music community. I’ve fallen in love in this bar, had my heart broken, made business deals, commiserated and celebrated everything along the way. With a decade under their belt, many Nashvillians can say the same.
Duke’s is celebrating their 10 year anniversary with a parking lot blowout this Saturday featuring music from some of Old Nashville’s finest including William Tyler, Be Your Own Pet and Heavy Cream. Ahead of the celebration, I sat down with co-owner Sara Nelson to talk about the bar’s impact on the city.
Sara Nelson: We just wanted a normal, normal bar. And we didn’t want to do live music. We love live music. We go see live music all the time, but we just wanted something that was always the same. You know, a place where you can go at noon, you can go at 1pm, you can go at 3am, and you know, you can kind of set your watch by us.
And we have. You’ll find all sorts of folks at Duke’s, but you’re guaranteed to find musicians lining the bar. Something that was intentional when Sara opened the bar with her partner Joseph Plunklet.
SN: Well, I think the main thing, I would say, at least initially, was Joseph, who had been down here, worked at Foobar, Three Crow, Stone Fox (R.I.P.), and he said when he moved down here, he had a really hard time finding a bartending job because people would ask him, “Oh, are you going to go on tour with your band?” And he’d say, “Yes, probably.” And they’d be like, we’re not hiring musicians. We don’t want to hire musicians because it’s annoying. Because they leave town for a month at a time, or three months at a time, or a week or two — it’s all last minute stuff. And so it wasn’t any kind of grand plan, but that’s just the world we came from is being in bands and going on tour, so we really wanted to have a place where you can be a bass player and leave town for three weeks, and when you come back, you have a job.
When talking about the next 10 years, Sara says their goal is to outlast New Nashville development.
SN: I’m not even joking, just holding on to our lease, that’s it. We would love to be one of those bars that’s here for 50 years, and like, “Oh, I remember back when the two owners lived here, they used to play shows, or I would see them drinking a beer in the corner.” Like, we’d be long gone, just be the old lady at the end of the bar, talking stories about the 10 year anniversary party. I just tell people, make the bar that you want to hang out in and be passionate about it.
In addition to Duke’s 10-year anniversary party this Saturday, you can see Ben Kweller tonight at Basement East, Fust and Styrofoam Winos Thursday at The Blue Room plus Jack White Friday and Saturday at The Pinnacle. For more, visit wnxp.org/events.
