Club Baron

Doctor Jackson H. Brown built on Jefferson Street in 1951 for his pharmacy, and in 1955 spent seventy five thousand dollars turning the place into a skating rink, a dance hall and a club. The rink floor was the dance floor, and it was the only rink in the city open to Black skaters. The club drew the touring circuit that white Nashville venues would not book: Etta James, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Otis Redding, Muddy Waters and Jackie Wilson all played the room. Jefferson Street had a string of such places in those years, and the house bands in them were among the best working musicians in the South, which is why the street mattered far beyond its own neighbourhood. Nashville was a segregated city with a nationally famous radio station, and the two music economies on either side of that line barely acknowledged each other in public while their players knew each other well. A soldier posted to Fort Campbell, fifty miles north west, started coming down to the Jefferson Street clubs in 1962. His name was then Jimmy Hendrix, and when the army discharged him that June he moved to Nashville and played them full time. In August 1963 he challenged the local blues guitarist Johnny Jones to a cutting contest on the Club Baron stage, and Jones beat him. Jones took over the King Casuals, the band Hendrix had founded with Billy Cox, and cut his own Purple Haze in 1968. The Elks bought the building in 1966 and Lodge 1102 has it still, with the low wooden stage where it always was: the only stage left in Nashville that Hendrix played. It went on the National Register of Historic Places on 12 March 2026.