Lainey Wilson May Not Be The Only Artist With A New Nashville Bar In The Works As Rumors Fly About Who’s Next

At this point it would probably be easier to just name the artists who DON'T have their own bar in Nashville. Over the past decade or so, downtown Music City has exploded with bars named after major country stars. It all started when Alan Jackson opened AJ's Good Time Bar in 2017. Then Florida Georgia Line followed suit shortly thereafter with FGL House, Blake Shelton jumped in with Ole Red, Jason Aldean opened his Kitchen & Rooftop Bar, Luke Bryan has Luke's 32 Bridge, Dierks Bentley has Whiskey Row, Miranda Lambert opened Casa Rosa, and there are also John Rich's Redneck Riviera, Kid Rock's Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock & Roll Steakhouse, Garth Brooks' Friends in Low Places, Hank Williams Jr.'s Boogie Bar, and most recently, Eric Church's Chiefs. Oh, and Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs and Jon Bon Jovi all have bars that will be opening at some point soon. Did I miss anybody? I probably did at this point. By my count that's 15 artist bars, not counting the Johnny Cash museum which also features a bar. So long story short, it's a lot. Now, most of these artists don't actually own their own bars. Alan Jackson, John Rich, Garth Brooks and Eric Church are (as far as I know) the only artists who actually own the bars with their names on them. The others simply license their name to hospitality corporations for the venues (although there may be some sort of partial ownership involved too). Of course the artists also have input in the bars themselves. Miranda's bar features nods to her native Texas in the food and drink menu, and Morgan Wallen's bar will reportedly highlight the food and drink of his home in East Tennessee. But as we learned this week, the names on the door of most of these bars are pretty interchangeable. FGL House became the first artist bar to close since they began popping up nearly a decade ago, which isn't entirely surprising considering Florida Georgia Line broke up in 2022. I'm assuming that the reason the bar closed was because the licensing agreement for the name expired and FGL or the hospitality corporation behind the bar, TC Restaurant Group, or both, decided not to continue on with the theme now that the duo have gone their separate ways. But that created an opportunity to partner with a new artist, which TC Restaurant Group has done when it was announced that Lainey Wilson would be taking over the former FGL House with her new Bell Bottoms Up bar , opening later this summer. So basically, they're just rebranding Florida Georgia Line's bar with a new artist, but the management is staying the same. TC Restaurant Group also owns the bars bearing the names of Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean, Miranda Lambert, and the upcoming Morgan Wallen bar, all of which are presumably operated under the same structure of licensing the artists' name. And while Lainey is just the latest artist to announce her new bar downtown, she might not be the only one with a new project in the works. Both Shania Twain and Jelly Roll are reportedly working on concepts for downtown Nashville, though it's not clear what they have up their sleeves and nothing has been officially announced. Rumors are that Jelly Roll is working to rebrand a venue located near Lainey Wilson's future bar, and the speculation that Shania has had a bar in the works has been swirling for quite some time. It's pretty clear that the trend of these artist-owned (or in most cases, artist-branded) bars on Broadway isn't going to be going away any time soon. The only real question these days is, who's going to be next?