Club owners can be a mixed bag. There are those who consider musicians a necessary evil, the only way to get people into your bar. To them, musicians rank somewhere below the weekend janitor on the scale of who deserves their respect. At least when the janitor is done, the place is clean.
But then there are those club owners who revere the musicians who play to the people who crowd into their bars and nightclubs. My nomination for the best of all time was an Auburn grad named Joe Gilchrist, an “uncommon Joe,” as I wrote about him in my novel, The Musician. Joe idolized the people who brought their guitars into his Flora-Bama to sing country songs, including many of them over the decades he built that one-room bar and liquor store into an internationally famous night (and day) club with multiple decks and stages who weren’t exactly of star quality. Their love of playing and desire to play for an audience was enough for Joe to give virtually anyone who asked a chance on one of his stages. And you didn’t have to be a country singer or a singer-songwriter, the genre the Flora-Bama became best known for, including an annual singer-songwriter festival that gained its own measure of fame.
Joe cultivated a number of events other than music that advanced the Flora-Bama’s fame, including the Interstate Mullet Toss and flyovers by the nearby naval base’s Blue Angels. But the one constant was Joe in the main bar at the end of the night sipping a Coors Light and beaming with pride over that night’s performer. I was one of those performers, from the time Joe bought resurrected that building to initiate its celebrity career. While my partner and I were playing the folk rock tunes of the era in the ’70s, when I returned a few years later I brought my jazz funk band from New Orleans, because Joe even had nights for us.
Joe was synonymous with the Flora-Bama, even when he sold off his ownership, and the music what was most important to Joe. It was and still is what makes the Flora-Bama the wonderful experience it is.