Alan Jackson has a museum in Nashville, and the odd part of the story is how quietly it arrived. The Alan Jackson Silverbelly Whiskey Distillery and Museum sits at 121 3rd Avenue South in the Lower Broadway corridor, close to the Johnny Cash Museum, and opened at the end of June. Saving Country Music, which covers this beat closely, reported it two months later after realising nobody had told them.
The timing explains some of that. Jackson played his last full-length concert at Nissan Stadium on June 27 to an over-capacity crowd, with the show relayed to screens along Lower Broadway, and a run of guest performers came out to mark it, including two duets with George Strait. A retirement show that size absorbs the week's attention.
The venue is two businesses in one building, and the whiskey is the one with top billing. Visitors can watch the spirit go from barrel to bottle, blended, proofed, bottled and labelled on site, with whiskey flights, cocktails, bottles for sale and a bottle-your-own option. Saving Country Music argued the naming buries the lede, and that Jackson himself is the bigger draw, but that a business a few steps off Broadway probably needs a stronger commercial hook than a display case.
The museum half is a substantial collection. Hundreds of photographs, memorabilia, instruments, stage outfits, awards show clothes belonging to Jackson and his wife, and a boot collection. The centrepiece is a baby blue 1958 Harley-Davidson Panhead he bought after signing his first record deal, parked next to a trike and a bicycle he owned growing up, and the same machine that appears on the cover of A Lot About Livin' (And a Little 'Bout Love).
The Chattahoochee video is represented too, with the ripped jeans, boots and water skis he wore in it. There is also space set aside for live music, which matters in a district where most rooms sell drinks first and book bands second.
Jackson already has a second venue up the street. AJ's Good Time Bar has been open around a decade and is, alongside Robert's Western World across the road, one of the few places on Lower Broadway where the music is still actually country. Whether two Jackson-branded venues on the same strip compete with each other is the open question, and one commenters on Saving Country Music raised immediately.
The other question is durability. Readers of the piece listed Nashville artist museums that have already closed, for Hank Williams Jr, George Jones, Charlie Daniels, Glen Campbell, Patsy Cline and Willie Nelson, and put it down to the real estate maths on Lower Broadway. The distillery is the hedge against that. Tickets are available through the museum's own site, and MusicSuey has been following Jackson's year, including the RIAA certification he picked up in Nashville and the way Robert's Western World is expanding into the new stadium. More country venue news follows the same corridor.
The facts
- The site is at 121 3rd Avenue South in Nashville's Lower Broadway corridor.
- It is called the Alan Jackson Silverbelly Whiskey Distillery and Museum.
- It opened at the end of June and sits near the Johnny Cash Museum.
- Jackson played his final full-length concert at Nissan Stadium on June 27.
- George Strait joined him for two duets at that show.
- The collection includes a 1958 Harley-Davidson Panhead from the A Lot About Livin' cover.
- Clothing from the Chattahoochee video is also on display.
- Jackson also owns AJ's Good Time Bar further up the street.
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