We’re talking about the legendary Bluebird Cafe, established in 1982 and still in its original location in Green Hills, 10 miles south of the neon sheen and tourist traffic of downtown Nashville’s bars and clubs on lower Broadway and the iconic Ryman Auditorium.

“People say that country artists have the Ryman, and songwriters have The Bluebird,” says Erika Wollam-Nichols, Chief Operating Officer and General Manager of the Bluebird. Erika started working at the Bluebird as a waitress while in college back in 1984, two years after founder Amy Kurland opened the place as a gourmet eatery that served lunch and dinner. Erika was there to experience the café’s transition from a restaurant that occasionally featured live music to a hallowed haven for country tunesmiths and listeners.

“Amy had a boyfriend who was a guitar player,” she recalls. “He asked her if she would put up a little stage, and he would bring his friends to play. So that’s how the music started. When I first started here, it was bands. It wasn’t a songwriter’s venue.”

But the small room proved to be no match for loud bands. One night the booking person put together a songwriter’s guitar pull instead, and the rest is history.

Erika Wollam-Nichols (Photo provided by the Gabe O’Brien)

“When Amy came in that night, the room was completely engaged in the songs,” Erika says. “She also saw that the cash register printed out more sales than ever before. “She was like, maybe the songwriter thing is something to look into.”

In many ways, the Bluebird’s homey, largely unchanged interior décor — with its weathered wooden chairs, vinyl table cloths, worn carpeting, drop-panel ceiling and wall of signed headshots of past performers — give it a quaint, throwback charm that underscores a lack of interest in chasing trendy styles. With a seating capacity of just under 90, and with performers often playing “in-the-round”-style sets, close enough to set their drink on a patron’s table, the venue has held true to its mission of honoring songwriters and their craft by providing an intimate environment for them to workshop their original material and connect with listeners.

“I’ve seen Vince Gill hand his guitar to a table sitting next to him,” Erika says.

Inside the Bluebird. Photo: Katie Kauss

If you’re interested in soaking up the rich history of the Bluebird and its important contributions to Nashville’s songwriting community, check out the excellent 2019 documentary Bluebird: An Accidental Landmark That Changed Music History. The film traces the café’s evolution into a songwriter-centric showcase room that helped launch the careers of countless writers and artists like Kathy Mattea, Garth Brooks, Faith Hill, Keith Urban, Taylor Swift and others. An array of songwriting hitmakers, performing artists, Bluebird staffers and others pepper the documentary with stories that reveal how the music club became a vital part of the musical ecosystem in Nashville.

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Watch the trailer for the Bluebird documentary

A Partnership with Taylor to Support Developing Songwriters

A few years ago, Taylor Guitars had the opportunity to begin a collaborative relationship with the Bluebird. Though the club is selective about its partnerships, Erika and Taylor’s Director of Artist Relations and Entertainment, Tim Godwin, recognized that both the Bluebird and Taylor share a passion for helping songwriters advance their craft.

“When we were looking at our partnership with Taylor,” Erika says, “we thought, what can we do together that will support both Taylor’s goals of bringing opportunity for performance to musicians and artists and songwriters, and our commitment to allowing people to develop their craft?”

As a former professional musician and a fan of great songcraft, Godwin says seeing performances at the Bluebird over the years has given him a deep appreciation for the nurturing environment the venue has cultivated.

“What I love about seeing shows there is how the lyrics really come alive,” he says. “When you listen to a record, you’re hearing all the production elements, but here, it’s the guitar and the lyric, and you feel like you really get inside the song. It’s a great experience for both the performers and the audience.”

“Songwriters are royalty here, and it’s our job to make sure that people realize that.”

Our partnership officially took flight in 2019 in the form of the Bluebird Golden Pick Contest, offering songwriters a path to earning a coveted performance slot at the Bluebird’s Monday Open Mic Night. Singer-songwriters from anywhere can post a video performance of their original song on Instagram for a chance to be selected to play two songs at the Bluebird. One winner is chosen by a Bluebird-assembled committee per month, and each winner also receives a Taylor American Dream guitar along with a free professional video recording of them performing their winning song at Taylor’s Nashville showroom at Soundcheck Studios. (You can find more details about the contest and view the full list of prizes here.)

This year marks the fourth year of the contest, so to kick off the new season, a few members of Taylor’s artist relations team, including Godwin, Artist and Community Relations Manager Lindsay Love-Bivens, and video producer Gabriel O’Brien, traveled to Nashville to talk with Erika and others about the Bluebird’s history. They also spoke with a couple of artists and veteran Bluebird performers who have hosted the club’s famed “In the Round” showcases — Marshall Altman, a songwriter, record producer and A&R executive in Nashville; and singer-songwriter Dave Barnes.

How the Bluebird Forged an Identity

One bit of context worth noting is that historically (and still to a large extent today), many performing artists don’t write all their songs. This has made songwriters an integral creative component of the industry in Nashville. But writers aren’t in the spotlight like the artists who’ve recorded their songs, so they typically aren’t known outside the industry. And years ago, there weren’t many venues for writers to showcase their material in a live setting.

Once the Bluebird began to cater to songwriters and became known as a listening room in the ’80s, it quickly became an important hub for discovering new songs and songwriting talent in Nashville.

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Erika talks about the history of the Bluebird Cafe

“A&R people and artists would come here to listen for songs, and artists could start building their career,” Erika says. “Kathy Mattea played here on a regular series and got a record deal. Once the songwriters started to claim this place as their home, that’s when Amy started the auditions, the Open Mic and the focus on not just the current songwriters with hits on the charts, but also the craft of songwriting.”

Similar to up-and-coming stand-up comedians who hone their craft by performing new bits in front of a live crowd, songwriters now had a live platform to play versions of their songs for listeners.

“If you’ve been in this room at all, you know that a good song is easy to spot, and a not-so-good song is the same, because you see the audience face to face, and the audience responds to the music,” Erika says. “So it was, and still is, a bit of a lab for songwriters to try out new material.”

In some cases, the material might be very new — a song written that day, or even just a partially completed version of it.

In the Round

The Bluebird’s signature performance format is “in the round,” where, instead of performing from the stage, several songwriters sit circled together in the center of the room, surrounded by the audience, where they take turns playing their songs and sharing the stories behind them. In an already small club, the setup creates an even more intimate exchange between performers and listeners.

The format made its debut in 1985, when a group of seasoned songwriter friends and Bluebird regulars — Don Schlitz (“The Gambler”), Thom Schuyler (“Love Will Turn You Around”), Fred Knobloch (“A Lover Is Forever”) and Paul Overstreet (“When You Say Nothing At All”) noticed that when they performed on the stage, people were talking during the songs. One night, they came in and, determined to hold the crowd’s attention, Schlitz and Schuyler decided to set up in the middle of the room. The approach not only worked, it created a uniquely immersive experience both for the artists and listeners.

Maren Morris performs in the round

Another in-the-round performance

Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson

Sheryl Crow

“It fits the room so well,” Erika says. “It feels like you are in somebody’s living room. Everybody’s included, and even if you’re sitting 20 feet away at the farthest table, you still are a part of what’s happening. I think it really gives the audience a chance to feel like they’re experiencing what the music industry is here in Nashville.”

Over the years, the Bluebird has developed a hierarchy of different performance formats to support and advance artists at different levels of their development. Anyone can sign up for their Monday Open Mic Night. They also hold auditions four times a year for a chance to play their Sunday Writers Night series (six writers on stage, each playing three songs, giving them an opportunity to build up their material). And after performing in four Sunday night shows and making a favorable impression, they become eligible to apply for a Sunday Spotlight (band show) or an early in-the-round performance with two or three other writers.

“You might have a lackluster show from wonderful writers if they don’t know each other.“

Erika Wollam-Nichols

Erika says that arranging a compelling in-the-round lineup is an art form unto itself.

“Those shows are not put together casually; they really have a synergy and an intention behind them,” she explains.

The lead writer gets to pick the other artists that will play the show with them. This ensures that the writers already have a strong chemistry with each other, which makes a big difference.

“You might have a lackluster show from wonderful writers if they don’t know each other,” Erika says. “They would just sit and listen to each other. But when you have four writers together who have written together, who take their kids to school together, who have had the same publisher, walked the same walk, then you get something that you just can’t get anywhere else. Their stories are amplified by the connection they have together. And that’s what the audience feels when they’re in the room.”

Marshall Altman Sits In

From a songwriter’s perspective, playing the Bluebird can be both inspiring and daunting, especially the first time, says Marshall Altman, a songwriter (Frankie Ballard, Eric Paslay, Cheryl Cole), producer (Marc Broussard, Walker Hayes, Matt Nathanson), and A&R executive (Katy Perry, One Republic, Citizen Cope).

Marshall Altman

Despite a background as a gigging musician, Altman says the first time he played in the round at the Bluebird was nerve-racking — partly because he wasn’t actually scheduled to perform.

“My friend [songwriter] Rob Hatch was getting married that weekend, and there was a round for him,” Altman remembers. “I think it was Rob, Dallas Davidson, D. Vincent Williams and Lance Carpenter — four really huge songwriters. Rob had his bachelor party the night before and was still feeling a little unwell. I was sitting right at [a nearby] table with my wife, Lela, they’re playing this round, and it’s just like hit, hit, hit, hit.

“Dallas Davidson plays “Rain Is a Good Thing,” a huge Luke Bryan hit, one of my favorite country songs, [D. Vincent] plays “I’m Moving On,” (Rascal Flatts), which is one of my favorite country songs of all time, and then Rob looks at me and [whispers] ‘I’m gonna throw up. You need to come play.’ I had never played here before — I’d really written one country song at the time because I’m primarily a pop and rock writer and producer — and he gets up and goes to the bathroom and says, ‘Marshall’s gonna take my spot,’ and I play this song I wrote with a great writer named Andrew Dorf. I’ve not been that nervous to do anything in a very, very, very long time. I said no to playing here for years after that.”

Altman has since gone on to lead many in-the-round shows, but says every time he plays, it’s still special.

“Standing on the shoulders of all the writers who’ve been here before me is an incredibly powerful thing,” he says. “Every time I play here, I feel the energy of all the huge writers and the unknown writers who played this room.”

What also makes the Bluebird a special environment, he says, is that many of the songs he and his fellow songwriters create and play here have never been recorded and heard by the public.

“[For] every song that almost got cut and didn’t, it makes the sharp pain of those moments go away,” Altman says. “The openness and respect and love that the audience, the people surrounding you, feel for the craft is beautiful. I’m eternally grateful for this room, for the people that run it, for Erika. It’s an oasis where we get to share what we’ve spent our lives creating as writers.”

Dave Barnes

Singer-songwriter Dave Barnes, who moved to Nashville in 2001 and also has assembled and played a lot of in-the-round sets at the Bluebird over the years, says he still considers the venue hallowed ground whenever he arrives.

Dave Barnes

“Walking through the back, I feel so cool,” he says. “Ten minutes [ago] when I got here, I’m not kidding, I got a little bit of chills because it’s such a special place. It’s sort of ground zero for so much magic that happens in Nashville for songwriters and really anybody.

“I think this place is part of the special sauce of Nashville; you don’t get this in any other city across the world. I’m very proud to be a part of [it], even just playing shows or telling people about it because it’s a very necessary part of the ecosystem for Nashville.”

“We’re like a little whisper here. It doesn’t have to be a loud shout.“

Erika Wollam-Nichols

Faces in the Crowd

What also makes the club a special place is that you never know who might be sitting in the crowd and get invited up to play a song on a given night. It might be a writer who wrote a hit song, and whose original acoustic rendition magnifies the lyrical content in an entirely different, uniquely personal way than the recorded version everyone knows — revealing the essence of the song in a more emotionally resonant way.

Or there might be a surprise appearance from an established artist like Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift, or someone nestled in the corner watching a show — like the night Dave Barnes was on stage and saw fingerstyle guitar legend Tommy Emmanuel in the crowd and invited him up.

“I said, ‘I don’t know if anybody knows, but that’s Tommy Emmanuel, who’s probably one of the greatest living guitar players alive,’” Barnes recalls. And he sits in and plays, and of course I was like, can we just call the round after that because anybody else who’s playing G, C, D, it’s kind of boring all of a sudden,” Barnes laughs.

A Golden Opportunity

The Bluebird’s Brand and Merchandise Manager, Liana Alpino, has a hand in many operational aspects of the venue, from marketing to social media to overseeing the website and working as the Bluebird’s partnership liaison. She has played an important role in coordinating the logistics behind the Golden Pick Contest the Bluebird and Taylor have run over the last several years. She says that what makes the contest appealing is that it gives developing songwriters from all over a chance to earn a prized performance slot and meet other artists.

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Erika and the Bluebird’s Liana Alpino talk about the Bluebird’s partnership with Taylor and the Golden Pick Contest

“We’ve had winners from all over the country and even one U.K. winner, and it’s been awesome to see the talent that lives outside of Nashville,” she says. “I’m fortunate because I get to meet all of these winners when they come for their performance, and they’ve all said how much this contest means to them. A lot of them have said, ‘This gives me a reason to write every day.’ A lot of these people submitting to the contest are not professional songwriters, they’re not full-time artists. They have everyday lives…. That can [make it] hard to be creative, but they’ve found that the contest is a good [reason] for them to continue to write every month.”

Investing in Tomorrow’s Songwriters

While the Bluebird has become a revered establishment within Nashville’s music community, founder Amy Kurland’s long-term vision included finding a way to preserve its future once she stepped aside. So, when she retired in 2008, Kurland sold the Bluebird to the nonprofit Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI), the world’s largest not-for-profit songwriters trade association. To her, NSAI’s mission “to educate, elevate and celebrate the songwriter and to act as a unifying force within the music community and the community at large” made the organization an ideal custodian for the venue’s operation.

Kurland also had the perfect person in mind to take over the operation: Erika, who had actually left the Bluebird and been working at NSAI as the Director of Development for the previous three years, and who agreed to return to the Bluebird as General Manager and COO.

The Bluebird Becomes a TV Celebrity

In 2011, Erika got a call about a TV development project for a drama series set in Nashville and based on storylines around several fictional country music stars. The creative team wanted to make the Nashville setting as authentic as possible, so they asked to shoot some scenes for a pilot episode at the Bluebird. Erika agreed, and the show, Nashville, was picked up by ABC. It would run for six seasons, from 2012 through 2018, on ABC and, later, CMT.

The Bluebird would become a featured setting throughout the series, but in order to do that, the production company (Lion’s Gate) built an exact replica of the club (exterior and interior) on the studio soundstage. It was designed with painstaking attention to detail to make it as accurate as possible. (The set designers went so far as to borrow all the photos of performers that hang on the wall in the actual Bluebird, scan them, and hang them on the walls of the set in exactly the same way.)

While the show turned the Bluebird into a globally recognized brand and a must-visit destination for many fans of the show, it also brought an overwhelming surge in tourist traffic that the small club struggled to manage.

“I think the most interesting part was that people responded to the celebrity of the Bluebird Cafe,” Erika says. “They didn’t know we did music…that we had two shows a night. They didn’t care. They just wanted their physical body in this place or maybe a picture. If you watch the documentary, you’ll get an eyeful of it because it’s astounding.”

The positive side of the attention, Erika says, was that it offered the Bluebird a bigger platform to showcase why songwriters are so important in Nashville.

“Songwriters are royalty here, and it’s our job to make sure that people realize that,” she says. “So it became our opportunity to say, we’re a music club, we do original music, we do songwriters, so that part worked out. But we still only have 86 seats.”

The success of the TV show also spawned more outside interest in making a documentary film about the Bluebird — a project that Erika had already been pursuing to chronicle its extensive history. She had met filmmakers Brian Loschivao and Jeff Molyneaux, who had worked on the TV show, and they jumped at the opportunity to bring the project to life.

Erika was thrilled with the end result, Bluebird.

“It couldn’t have been better,” she says. “You would laugh to watch the filming of the [performances] — the camera crew was under the tables, behind the poles, coming up between people’s feet, just to be able to capture what it feels like, the kind of closeness that’s in this room and the intimacy that creates between a person, a songwriter and a song.”

After celebrating the Bluebird’s 40th anniversary in 2022, Erika remains passionate about continuing to preserve the essence, and the heritage, of the venue in its current location — even as Nashville and its surrounding suburbs continue to experience major commercial and residential growth.

“We’ve got a 22-story building being put up next to us that’s going to make this super commercial around here,” she says. “You might look at this interior and go, this is old carpet, table cloths, all of that, but this room has an energy and I believe an inspiration to encourage people to make the best music they can. And we also are very aligned on the artists we work with and how we move forward in representing each other. That’s really, really important to me because we’re like a little whisper here. It doesn’t have to be a loud shout. It really needs to be very focused on who were are and what we do, and I think Taylor has that same commitment.”

“It takes me right back to where I come from,” she says. “I can hear all those traditional [Native American] songs. That’s Indian music, with a guitar.”

This interview sequence of no more than two minutes reconstructs generations of sound passed across cultures and down through lineage—indigenous American folk music, African-American roots blues and a classic rock ‘n’ roll rhythm—all unmistakably linked in a way that’s so obvious that even an uninitiated listener can’t help but appreciate it.

That’s the power of the 2017 music documentary RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked the World, executive-produced by one Stevie Salas. Titled after the classic instrumental by Link Wray (Shawnee) and its thundering three-chord motif, RUMBLE is a rare film with a kind of restorative power, illuminating cultural threads once actively dismantled by the powers that be and bringing them into plain view for modern listeners. Awarded a handful of honors from independent film festivals upon its release, it’s an absolute must-watch for any fan of classic rock, blues or roots music of any kind.

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Stevie Salas: Hands of Excellence

Watching RUMBLE, it’s clear from the outset that the film is a labor of love, imbued with an authenticity that elevates it from standard public-television fare into heartfelt, inspired craft. With executive producer Stevie Salas at the helm, it’s no surprise the movie delivers on its promise of rocking your world.

Born in 1964 in Oceanside, California—serendipitously close to Taylor’s San Diego home—Salas is the kind of musician who, in a more just world, would be a household name. In rock circles, though, his credentials are bona fide. Though he picked up his first guitar around age fifteen, Salas wasted no time kicking off his rock ‘n’ roll dreams, joining up as a session and touring guitarist with funk legends George Clinton and Bootsy Collins starting in 1986. Growing up on the sounds of classic staples like Led Zeppelin, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown and others, Salas credits the influence of his stepfather, also a rock musician, with pulling him into the world of music. Soon, Salas’s name was circulating among some of the era’s biggest acts, and he began touring with Rod Stewart in 1988.

Stevie Salas on stage with Rod Stewart

Despite his stacked resume—which includes work with artists ranging from Mick Jagger, Ronnie Wood, Bernard Fowler and Steven Tyler to rapper TI and pop mainstays Justin Timberlake and Adam Lambert—Salas’s most recognizable sonic outing to many is an appearance in the cult-classic film Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Starring a young Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, the movie is a stoner magnum opus of the highest order, following two underachieving teens who, despite their dreams of hard-rock stardom, find themselves beset by mundane obstacles like high school and a total inability to play their instruments. Granted time-traveling powers by Rufus, a mysterious future-human played by George Carlin, the boys hop between eras in search of figures that might help them make the most epic history report of all time—which might just be enough to salvage their grades and keep their dreams of musical heroism alive.

With George Carlin on the Bill & Ted film set

Hijinks aside, Bill and Ted conclude their journey with an impromptu rock show fronted by Carlin’s Rufus, who plays a slick, if musically ludicrous, guitar solo to cap off the film. Seeking a bit of hard-rock authenticity, the producers hired Salas to perform the solo, and it’s his hands you’ll see on screen. To achieve the messy-yet-shreddy sound for the solo, Salas turned his guitar upside-down and played it left-handed while recording the audio.

An auspicious moment for a well-respected musician, Bill & Ted preceded a long career that brought Salas around the world to play with a laundry list of rock and funk greats. He kicked off his solo career with a project called Colorcode, which debuted with a self-titled album in 1990 produced by Bill Laswell. Salas followed by touring as an opener with Joe Satriani, and the album sold well globally. Salas went on to release six more studio albums as Colorcode, along with a pair of live albums.

I was never the guy that made my heritage a part of how I sold myself. The Native thing was who I was as a person in the background.

Stevie Salas

Salas has also recorded under his own name, and indigenous influence appears in much of his solo work. Apache by lineage, Salas acknowledges that for much of his career, his Native American heritage appeared in his work mostly filtered through non-indigenous players like Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, who themselves drew on Native sounds through the lens of American blues, a sound typically associated with the African American communities of the pre-Civil War and Reconstruction-era South.

“I was never the guy that made my heritage a part of how I sold myself,” Salas explains. “I wanted to be known as one of the greatest, and to work with the greatest, purely from what I was doing musically. The Native thing was who I was as a person in the background.”

Distant Thunder: How RUMBLE Came to Be

Salas recalls growing closer to his indigenous heritage when he began collaborating with Brian Wright-McLeod, a Dakota-Anishinaabe music journalist and radio host based in Toronto. Wright-McLeod exposed Salas to Jesse Ed Davis, a guitarist known for playing with Taj Mahal, Eric Clapton and John Lennon, among others. It was around that time that Salas decided to pursue cultural projects linking Native American musicians to the mainstream of popular music. Soon, Salas begun work with Tim Johnson (Mohawk), an associate director at Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution, where he developed an exhibit on the theme titled “Up Where We Belong: Natives in Popular Culture” before beginning work on RUMBLE.

“I needed to do something, in the position I’m in as a Native American person,” Salas says, “to give back to the Native American people, to leave something other than me being a monkey jumping around on stage with a guitar. I needed to do something more important.”

RUMBLE premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017, five years after Salas pitched the idea. It garnered immediate critical acclaim, netting the festival’s World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Masterful Storytelling. It also picked up awards at other indie fests, including Best Music Documentary at the Boulder International Film Festival and three Canadian Screen Awards in 2018.

An Interconnected Ecosystem of Music and History

In form, RUMBLE plays like most music documentaries, and its talking-head interviews interspersed with vintage and modern performance clips along with historical imagery dating back to the early 20th century will feel familiar to most audiences. Where the film truly breaks ground is in its remarkable commitment to unearthing connections between musical signposts that most people, regardless of their knowledge of music history going in, would likely have thought to be independent. RUMBLE carefully tracks features of musical styles from their conventionally understood originators back to hidden influences in American indigenous communities, like a biologist might discover invisible links between species in the long chain of evolution. The filmmakers manage to wring surprise and delight from stories many viewers may have thought they already knew.

The most potent illustration of those connections dives more than a hundred years back into the history of indigenous peoples, African American communities and the United States as a nation. Take Robert Johnson, the influential guitarist whose playing is commonly thought to have formed the foundation of the blues, and by extension, rock ‘n’ roll of all varieties. But the real story is more complicated, and though Johnson’s influence is real, RUMBLE points viewers toward a different originator of the blues sound.

Quoting a conversation with friend, neighbor and fellow guitar player Charlie Sexton, Stevie Salas sums up the true history behind the well-known myth.

“Everybody talks about Robert Johnson because he had the sexy story,” referring to the crossroads legend of Johnson selling his soul to the devil in exchange for his musical talents. “But anybody who knows, knows that it was really Charley Patton.”

Charley Patton

Likely born in 1891, Patton grew up in central and northwest Mississippi, close to territory inhabited by Choctaw indigenous Americans. He is thought to have Choctaw ancestry in addition to his African American heritage, a combination that was both quite common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and entangled with the racial politics of the time. As RUMBLE takes care to point out, Black and indigenous communities were often intertwined as a result of escaped enslaved people seeking refuge among tribal populations, among other causes. Native villages and communities often welcomed fugitive slaves and became integral parts of the famous Underground Railroad.

Charley Patton was immersed in these integrated Black and American indigenous communities, soaking up the musical styles of both peoples.

After the Civil War and the end of slavery in the United States, relationships between Black and Native peoples grew more complex. In particular, the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Creek tribes possessed significant percentages of people with Black heritage. To Reconstruction-era governments in the American South, this intermixing was often viewed as a threat, and racial discrimination continued. Often, African Americans descended from freed slaves and Native peoples had the full complexity of their lineages suppressed by the government of the time; mixed-race individuals were categorized as Black, and not Native, in order to deny their rights to land ownership. Likewise, lawmakers at the time sought to use this racial intermixing as a tool for eliminating tax exemptions for Native American communities.

Politics aside, Patton was immersed in these integrated communities, soaking up the musical styles of both peoples. Famously flamboyant in his showmanship, Patton was known for tricks like playing his guitar behind his head, a bit of flair that Jimi Hendrix would later adopt. Patton’s influence on rock music cannot be overstated—blues legend Howlin’ Wolf identified him as a primary influence, and Howlin’ Wolf himself was a font of inspiration for European musicians, the most well-known of which were none other than the Rolling Stones.

Stevie Salas describes this chain of influence as being hidden in plain sight.

“Once you started to look, all the information was there,” he says. “But none of us ever saw it.”

RUMBLE’s history lessons are wide-ranging in scope, covering the spread of musical concepts across an entire continent.

“We used the music to tell the story of how North America was developed,” Salas says.

Link Wray

Buffy Sainte-Marie

Randy Castillo

Mildred Bailey

Personal Bonds Across the Landscape of Rock

The film’s directors (Catherine Bainbridge, Alfonso Maiorana) and subject matter experts draw out the plot points in that story with great care. Illustrating Native American heritage and inspiration from Link Wray to Jimi Hendrix to Johnny Cash (who fought a protracted battle with his record label to release a collection of songs inspired by Native American culture), RUMBLE transforms sounds likely already well-known by fans of classic and blues rock into crossroads where ideas collided and grew into bedrock musical concepts. The film also explores the careers and influence of lesser-known musicians such as Jesse Ed Davis, whose bluesy solo on Jackson Browne’s “Doctor, My Eyes” turned him into a sought-after touring player; Redbone, whose 1974 hit “Come and Get Your Love” found a new audience four decades later after being featured in the 2014 Marvel film Guardians of the Galaxy; all the way up to Randy Castillo, hard-hitting drummer for Ozzy Osbourne and Mötley Crüe.

Castillo’s story has all the hallmarks of classic rock ‘n’ roll folklore: an unmistakable musical aesthetic that set him apart from other drummers of the time, a larger-than-life persona, a tragic ending. As RUMBLE draws to its conclusion, Stevie Salas himself steps in to tell Randy’s story alongside Native American poet and activist John Trudell (Santee-Dakota). Salas credits Castillo with bringing him closer to his own indigenous heritage in the 1980s, at a time when Salas was himself neck-deep in the rock-star life.

“I’m on a private jet,” Salas recalls. “I’m making tons of money, I’ve got all these women, but pretty soon, I don’t know who I am anymore. Randy Castillo befriended me knowing I was a Native American. He met me right when I was finishing the Rod Stewart tour. I was going deeper and deeper into alcohol and partying…and he could tell I was losing my mind. He said to me, ‘I’m gonna take you to New Mexico.’”

Jamming with Billy Gibbons (left) and Steve Stevens (right)

On stage with Steven Tyler

Salas says that for much of his career, he didn’t think of his Native ancestry as being a defining characteristic of who he was as a musician, or how he identified himself to the rest of the music world. But connecting with Castillo helped him connect with his roots.

“[Randy] goes, ‘I need to take you to Indian country,’” Salas says. “I’d never really heard that phrase, Indian country.”

A common thread throughout RUMBLE is the idea that there’s something musical shared between people of Native ancestry, a different way of approaching sound that let them carve out roles in the mainstream culture—and spread their influence down through the family tree of rock music.

“My Native American sense of rhythm, it’s in my DNA,” Salas says. “It’s a sense of how we hear the downbeat.”

The sentiment is echoed by the experts the RUMBLE producers chose to speak in the film, ranging from music industry insiders like Quincy Jones and Steven Van Zandt to well-known musicians like George Clinton and Taj Mahal to cultural scribes like Martin Scorsese and John Trudell.

Referring to Castillo’s time with Ozzy Osbourne, bassist Robert Trujillo recalls in the film how Ozzy sought out musicians who brought the distinctively “indigenous” approach to how they made music.

“Ozzy always said he loved working with indigenous people, Hispanic people. He had a connection with them,” Trujillo says. “He felt that they had better rhythm. He always mentioned Randy as being a direct connection to that indigenous energy and that rhythm that he loved.”

More than anything, Salas wanted to make a film that illustrated those connections between Native musicians and the now-universal understanding of rock as a genre. He says he was deliberate about not making RUMBLE a “race film,” instead wanting to make a film about heroes—the individuals who carried those sounds in their DNA and lovingly delivered them through generations of music.

In a recent Taylor Primetime interview with Salas hosted by the Taylor content team, he laid out his vision for the movie.

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“RUMBLE was about people who changed the world,” he says. “What it was really about was how the people who taught all of us about rock ‘n’ roll learned from these [Native American] guys. If I told you Jesse Ed Davis was one of the greatest guitar players of the seventies, you might say, eh, he was alright. But if Eric Clapton says it, you say, maybe I better think about this.”

Even with its somber recollections of historical wrongs and reckoning with the challenges faced by Salas’s ancestors, RUMBLE is unquestionably a rock documentary of the best kind. Drawing together disparate threads of history and culture into a tight, compelling timeline, RUMBLE makes explicit the lines of influence previously known only to music historians and the handful of players who actually worked with these Native American heroes of rock. Much more than a niche documentary, RUMBLE is essential viewing for any musician or listener who wants to understand how rock became what it is today.

Taboo (Shoshone) of the pop band the Black Eyed Peas sums up the message near the end of RUMBLE.

“When you’re surrounded by beautiful people that come from the Nations and they’re proud of their heritage, it just inspires everybody.”

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Above (L-R): Taylor’s Jim Kirlin and Scott Paul with WCA’s Mike Palat as he demonstrates their ArborAccess software

Palat, a VP at WCA with 20 years of service there, is a board-certified master arborist with utility and municipal specialties, and he oversees WCA’s operations in the Southern California, southwest region, including San Diego County. He’s a walking Wikipedia of tree knowledge, and he’s happy to educate us non-arborists on some of the many considerations that go into urban forest planning and management.

The conversation ranges from the basics of what a municipal tree maintenance contractor does for cities to why WCA’s expertise has been so crucial to the collaborative urban wood initiative Taylor and WCA are forging together.

Our group includes Scott Paul, our in-house Sustainability expert, who knows Palat well and talks with him frequently. (Palat is Scott’s primary contact at WCA, and both sit on the Board of Directors for Tree San Diego, a non-profit committed to enhancing the quality of San Diego’s urban forest.) Throughout the demo, Scott peppers Palat with questions to help guide the conversation.

How Cities Manage Their Tree Populations

West Coast Arborists — By the Numbers

+1100 employees
+12 locations in CA and AZ
+ 675K trees trimmed annually
+ 46K trees removed annually
+ 18.5K trees planted annually
+ 300K trees inventoried annually

West Coast Arborists — By the Numbers

West Coast Arborists — By the Numbers

Palat starts by explaining how cities create and maintain their urban tree inventories. Within a city, he says, various agencies or departments may manage different classifications of trees that make up their public tree population. For example, in San Diego, the city’s Street Division oversees the maintenance of street trees. The Park & Recreation Department oversees trees in public parks. Trees near utilities (power lines) might be overseen by San Diego Gas & Electric. Together, all these trees comprise the urban canopy of city and suburban areas — trees that, for many of us, are hiding in plain sight, blending into the landscape alongside streets and buildings, but that actually are purposefully planted, documented and maintained.

“A lot of city asset management programs manage potholes, street lights, irrigation valve boxes — and also, trees,” Palat says. “Our software is very much their dedicated outlet for trees, and it’s specifically for cities. Cities have GIS — Geographic Information Systems — departments. For cities under contract with WCA, it doesn’t cost them any money to have their tree inventory housed in this program, and it’s dedicated toward the management of their tree population.”

A city that contracts with WCA might receive a range of management and maintenance services depending on their own departmental resources.

“Part of what we do is go out and collect the tree inventory for a city,” Palat says. “The cities  own that data, and they can house it in a variety of ways. Our software, ArborAccess, is a web-based program that comes with a mobile app, so in essence what we do charge for is the data collection — sending out an arborist to go collect this information — but we don’t charge when it comes to the permissions of this program when an agency is under contract with WCA.”

If a city has a maintenance contract with WCA, ArborAccess enables all the work history to be documented. As he talks, Palat pulls up a map of San Diego with GPS integration showing all the WCA crews that are currently working.

“You can see all the dots,” he says. “Those are GPS on the crew, these are all GPS vehicles, real time, where they’re working, where they’re parked, what time they got there, how their speed is — all that stuff is part of the program.”

Whether a city or WCA handles the documentation of the city’s tree inventory, a pre-qualified list is created and housed in the database, including maintenance recommendations on every single tree.

“Subsequent to that, if our crews are out performing tree-trimming work, if they see something, they update the data to inform cities that these trees have changed,” Palat says. “Trees are biological, so they’re always changing. So, that is one means of communicating the potentially risky trees to a city.”

While WCA is responsible for documenting the condition of trees and providing that information to the city, it’s ultimately up to the city to issue the service instructions. And when it comes to removing trees due to age, decay, safety risk, etc., that’s entirely the city’s decision. Scott underscores this point to make it clear that WCA — or Taylor — isn’t out scouting for trees to cut down.

“No, not at all,” Palat says. “We’ll give them recommendations based on our observations, but it’s ultimately their decision as to what trees come down.”

The conversation turns to the two urban wood species Taylor is currently sourcing from WCA — Shamel ash and now red ironbark — so Palat does an inventory search of both tree species in Taylor’s home-base city of El Cajon (a client of WCA’s) to demonstrate the usefulness of their system.

“There are 54 Shamel ash in the city of El Cajon, and if I want know where they are, I’ll map them, and here you go. I can turn on aerial imagery, and as you can see, when I click on a tree, it tells you what it is, gives you the details, the last time it was trimmed… you can see information about it — routine prune recommendation, no maintenance issues, and there is an overhead utility, so we can note that, which is not a good thing for a Shamel ash to be under.”

Right Tree, Right Place

This last point speaks to what has become a mantra for arborists everywhere: “right tree, right place.” In other words, from a planning and planting perspective, it’s important to plant species of trees with properties that are compatible with their specific location, and that serve their intended purpose, whether providing shade, sound breaks, wind breaks or other benefits, without being prone to causing problems. As in too being close to a sidewalk or street, where the root systems of certain species are likely to rip up the pavement or sewer lines. Or eventually growing to a size that will interfere with power lines. It often amounts to a geometry exercise, projecting what the tree may look like at maturity and how it ultimately will fill in the space where it will be planted.

“Wrong” trees planted in the wrong space eventually “become candidates for removal,” Palat says. “In fact, San Diego Gas & Electric has a whole program trying to rid these problematic trees, what they call cycle busters. They’re spending a lot of money doing vegetation clearance away from power lines, and a lot of times they’ll hit up agencies and basically say, we’ll give you free trees if you let us remove these.”

As cities look to plant more trees to bolster their urban canopies, they also have vacant locations mapped and designated as suitable planting sites. Palat zooms out on the map, showing an array of gray dots that depict those sites.

“If we’re doing vacant site analysis, part of that might be to measure a parkway width,” he says. “If there are overhead utility lines, all that plays into that decision-making too.”

The average life span of an urban tree is eight years.

Depending on the location, one of the challenges of cultivating a tree, Palat says, is determining who will water it. “Right now [in Southern California], that is the biggest struggle,” he adds. “Even if cities are willing to give trees away, nobody’s taking them. There’s contract watering, but that costs money. Or you might get a renter who says, I’ll take it on, but then they move and the new person doesn’t care. That’s a big reason why the average life span of an urban tree is eight years.”

There is also a large misconception about the cost of watering a tree, Palat says.

“Some people believe it costs thousands of dollars per year to establish a young tree,” he elaborates. “The reality is that it costs about 10 dollars per year to establish it. The gallons of water needed can be used in a strategic manner to maximize what is needed for establishment.”

It costs about ten dollars per year to establish a young tree.

A lot of a city’s tree planting decisions obviously need to consider long-term impact of the environments in which they live and grow. One increasingly vital forecasting consideration is how the effects of climate change are forcing cities to rethink the viability of their tree populations for the decades ahead.

To that end, WCA has worked with other tree experts in California to combine data and create an even more detailed statewide database with tree profiles and planting recommendations. One partner is Matt Ritter, a professor in the Biology Department at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, a horticulture expert, author and one of the world’s foremost authorities on eucalyptus. Matt’s online database, SelecTree, is a great resource for selecting appropriate species in California.

“The program we did with Matt brought in trees that nobody has heard of in an effort to gain some momentum on species that should be brought in for future success,” Palat says.

To show some of the other capabilities of their software, Palat pulls up the tree data for the city of El Cajon (where Taylor is headquartered) to give us a tree inventory overview. We can see, statistically, the top 10 most planted species by percentage of the tree population — crape myrtle leads the pack at 12.7%, followed by the queen palm at 12.2%. This data helps guide healthy diversification of the species planted.

“You really never want to have one species dominate more than 10% of your tree population, especially here in California,” Palat says. “Species diversity is important. The reason is new pests are introduced to California every 40 days, which makes your tree population vulnerable if it’s more than that.”

Age diversity is another important statistical consideration for evaluating the health of a city’s tree population, Palat says as he looks at the tree sizes to approximate the age of El Cajon’s trees.

“The fact that they have only .55% trees over 31 inches in diameter, it would be nice to have the age diversity be better spread,” he explains. “Typically when trees get into this large range, they become targets for removals — there are a variety of things that happen as the trees mature, everything from disease and pests to decay and not being an appropriate species for where the tree was planted.”

In talking about California’s tree inventory, one factor that has made the state such a hub of tree diversity is its Mediterranean climate (and micro-climates from coastal areas to inland valleys to the mountains), which can accommodate a wide range of species. And Palat points out that a lot of California, especially central and southern portions of the state, originally were essentially “blank canvasses” without a lot of tree cover, which is why many of the species are not native. (As an example, see Scott Paul’s Sustainability column this issue, where he talks about California’s history with eucalyptus.)

The conversation turns back to the urban tree species Taylor is working with, and Palat pulls up the location of some red ironbark trees in the area. We were hoping to shoot some photos of mature ironbark and Shamel ash trees somewhere nearby, and he’s scouted a couple of locations — one is a median strip along a road featuring several large ironbark trees; the other is a park that has both ironbark and Shamel ash.

Without WCA’s data analysis, Taylor wouldn’t be able to commit to using these urban woods on dedicated models.

Scott makes the point that WCA’s tree software made it possible for Taylor to commit to using ash and ironbark on dedicated models in our line.

“The big question for Taylor, beyond if the wood had suitable properties for guitar making, was whether or not there would be a supply over time, into the future,” he says. “The WCA database was able to show us that there are large numbers of the trees that we were interested in across the state, that they’re still being planted today, and based on the average lifespan of these species, WCA can give us a pretty good estimate of annual removal rates. It will ebb and flow each year, of course, but it gave us the confidence to move forward. If not for WCA’s ability to do that, we would never have been able to commit to using those woods as a regular part of our lineup.”

Since entering into this sourcing partnership in 2020, Taylor and WCA have continued to invest in processes and infrastructure that improve WCA’s operational capabilities with wood from removed trees.

“Now, we have a mechanism so when an agency issues a request to remove a Shamel ash tree, my phone buzzes, so we can make sure we communicate with the removal crew,” Palat says. “That reminds us to be extra careful in the way we take it down, and it ensures that it gets taken to our sort yard in Ontario [California].”

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In this video segment — part of a longer discussion about sourcing urban wood — Taylor content producer Jay Parkin talks with Taylor Director of Natural of Natural Resource Sustainability Scott Paul, chief guitar designer Andy Powers, and master arborist Mike Palat from West Coast Arborists. The four discuss what an urban forest is, the factors that make sourcing urban wood harder and more expensive than one might think, and what prompted West Coast Arborists to begin to create the infrastructure to support this new sourcing model.

Taylor has also worked closely with WCA to properly preserve and cut logs in a way that’s appropriate for guitars.

“We’ve definitelylearned a lot from you guys,” Palat says. “We’ve built more shade structures, we’re now keeping wood wet — that was not a big requirement of us until we started working with you. And we’re now cutting in the manner that you’ve helped us establish.”

This infrastructure will ideally create the foundation for a circular economy around this wood, and hopefully serve as a model for making other high-value products.

Along with the other criteria that help determine what trees to plant in urban environments in the future, with any luck, maybe end-of-life value will become another consideration.

Co-founders Bob Taylor and Kurt Listug — now former President and CEO respectively — proudly delivered the news to Taylor’s employee-owners in a pre-recorded video with Andy that was released a day before the public announcement. Bob and Kurt also shared that they are continuing their involvement with the company as senior advisors and co-chairmen of the Taylor Guitars board, which was established as part of the company’s transition to 100-percent employee ownership.

The announcement came just days before the NAMM Show in Anaheim, California — a newsworthy event of its own after finally returning after a COVID-induced hiatus.

The following week, back on the Taylor campus in El Cajon, we held our mid-year all-hands ESOP event, where Andy had the opportunity to talk to employee-owners in person about his new role and our path forward as a guitar company. But not before kicking things off with a few songs.

And with that, Jason Mraz, a longtime friend of Andy’s, took the stage to play a few songs, with Andy joining him on guitar.

It was a full-circle moment, considering that Mraz’s performance on the Taylor stage at NAMM back in 2010, with Andy as his sideman, had brought Andy and Bob Taylor together. Conversations ensued. Bob made his pitch. Andy joined the company in January of 2011, and the rest is history — history that continues to unfold with Andy now formally at the helm.

A Smooth Transition

Given the progression of events at Taylor over the last several years, Andy’s elevated role didn’t come as a huge surprise to many of us here at the company. Rather, it seemed a logical continuation of the succession plan that Bob and Kurt had set in motion. In 2019, Andy became an ownership partner, a testament to Bob and Kurt’s confidence in him along with their desire to keep guitar design as a central focus at Taylor for the long-term future.

“Andy has the vision and the talent to continue to take guitar making forward at Taylor. He’s vital to the company’s future.”

Bob Taylor

That commitment was reinforced when the company announced its transition to 100-percent employee ownership in 2021, a move that Bob, Kurt and Andy all felt was the best arrangement to preserve the culture of creativity and guitar innovation that has fueled Taylor’s growth and success. Andy’s creative vision, player-centric guitar designs and thoughtful leadership at Taylor, together with his career commitment to the company, were important factors in that decision, giving Bob and Kurt the reassurance to choose that path.

“Andy has the vision and the talent to continue to take guitar-making forward at Taylor,” Bob says. “He’s vital to the company’s future.”

Learning From Kurt

While the passing of the torch from Bob to Andy was evident from the start, filling Kurt’s role wasn’t part of the original plan for Andy. But Kurt says that right away, Andy showed both the interest and aptitude for the business side of Taylor’s operation, and understood how all the pieces need to fit together holistically to maintain a healthy company.

“Andy has worked closely with sales, marketing, finance, human resources — all the departments under my leadership — since he joined us in 2011, and he understands their functions deeply,” Kurt said during the announcement to Taylor’s employee-owners.

Over the past several years, Kurt has spent a lot of time mentoring Andy, discussing financial budgeting, reviewing financial statements and talking about the business management philosophy that has guided the decisions he has made over the years. He says he realized that Andy was the right person to also wear the CEO hat during a period in 2020 when they were laying the groundwork to prepare for the transition to an ESOP structure.

Kurt also points out that it’s more feasible for one person to oversee both the guitar-making and business sides of the company now because Taylor is well established and has a strong and experienced executive team with many decades of Taylor experience to support him.

“It would have been impossible for either Bob or me alone to create and establish the company,” he reflects. “Bob was 19 and I was 21 when we started. We didn’t have any experience. It took each of us focusing on the things we were interested in and becoming good at them the more we worked on them. The company is much different now.”

And Andy has been the beneficiary of what each of them has learned. “It’s been fun to work with Kurt and look at things from one direction, and work on it from the other direction with Bob,” he says. “I’m hugely fortunate to get to work with both of them and appreciate their perspectives.”

Staying the Same: Embracing Change

As part of the public reveal of Andy’s new role, we recorded a special edition of our streaming video show Taylor Primetime, hosted by Taylor content producer Jay Parkin. Bob, Kurt and Andy were the special guests and shared their thoughts on why this is good for the company and its stakeholders moving forward. One question Jay posed to Andy was how he envisions his role changing.

“I’m so fortunate because we have amazing people that I get to work with all the time.”

Andy Powers

“Honestly, my role doesn’t change much,” he says. “In a lot of ways, it’s business as usual…. Frankly, it’s because we have such an amazing team of people working here that allows me to spend most of my time working on guitars. The groundwork that Bob laid with our production and product development teams, our building and machine maintenance teams, and with wood sourcing, and the work Kurt’s done building our sales, marketing, finance and human resources teams — I’m so fortunate because we have amazing people that I get to work with all the time. We have industry veterans, we have people who are at the top of their game in their field, and that makes what you might call the more typical parts of operating a business really easy. Don’t get me wrong — it’s a huge amount of work every day. But the folks we get to work with are such professionals, and they’re so good at what they do, it makes it a joy.”

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While Andy’s role may not change in dramatic ways, Bob, Kurt and Andy agree that in true Taylor fashion, our guitars will, and must, continue to evolve. Bob shares with Andy a nugget of wisdom he learned over the years.

“Anytime I’ve done anything to a guitar, people go, ‘Is that going to change it?’ And what they’re really trying to say is, ‘Will that make it worse?’ This has happened to me a million times…. So feel free to change things, Andy. Make them better.”

Andy understands that it’s now part of his broader responsibility to lead the company in ways that make the overall business better as well. The bigger question, he says, is better for whom?

“In our case, we can make it better for the musicians we serve, the suppliers we buy material from, the people who sell our guitars, and our employees. So when we make a change for the better, that’s who benefits.”