Printer’s Alley is a single block of alleyway in downtown Nashville that runs between Union Street and Church Street, tucked between Third and Fourth Avenues. On a map it looks like nothing. In practice it is Nashville’s oldest nightlife district, a place where the city’s newspapers, whiskey bootleggers, jazz musicians, and career-launching country artists all occupied the same narrow space across different eras. The fact that it still exists, functioning, with neon signs and live music, after everything Nashville has done to its own downtown, is somewhat miraculous.
The Printing Industry Phase
The alley’s geographic origin dates to the 1780s, when Virginia businessman George Michael Deaderick gifted the land to the city. Printing businesses began clustering there around 1830. By 1915, the area around Printer’s Alley was home to two major newspapers (The Tennessean and the Nashville Banner), ten print shops, thirteen publishers, and at various counts as many as 36 publishing-related businesses. Nashville’s status as a regional center for religious publishing, educational materials, and general commercial printing made this concentration natural. Delivery trucks carrying enormous spools of newsprint could not make the turn into the alley, so workers rolled them by hand from the street.
The Men’s Quarter and Prohibition
The same press workers and printing tradesmen who worked in the alley needed somewhere to eat, drink, and gamble. Hotels, saloons, and restaurants grew up alongside the printing houses, and by the late 19th century the area had acquired the nickname “the Men’s Quarter.” When Tennessee enacted Prohibition in 1909, eleven years before national Prohibition, the establishments in Printer’s Alley largely ignored it. Alcohol continued to flow because politicians and law enforcement patronized the same establishments. Nashville’s mayor Hilary Howse, when asked if he was protecting the Alley’s bars, reportedly replied: “Protect them? I do better than that. I patronize them!”
Tennessee repealed Prohibition in 1937, four years after the national repeal, but with a catch: alcohol could not be sold by the glass. Printer’s Alley establishments responded by operating as “mixer bars,” where customers nominally brought their own bottles and paid only to have them mixed. This legal fiction persisted until 1968, when liquor sales in Nashville restaurants were fully legalized.
The Nightclub Era and Nashville Sound Connection
In the 1940s, the printing businesses began their long departure and nightclubs moved in. This is where Printer’s Alley’s musical significance begins. Performers who became legends started there: Chet Atkins, Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams, Boots Randolph, Dottie West, and Barbara Mandrell all played the alley’s clubs. Jimi Hendrix, stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, with the 101st Airborne Division, regularly traveled to Nashville and played Printer’s Alley clubs in the early 1960s before his career began in earnest.
Jimmy Hyde’s Carousel Club was a jazz venue where Nashville studio musicians gathered after their country recording sessions to play the music they actually wanted to play. The assembled regulars included Chet Atkins, Floyd Cramer, Boots Randolph, bassist Bob Moore, and drummer Buddy Harman, all central figures in the Nashville Sound. The creative cross-pollination between jazz and country happening in Printer’s Alley was not incidental to what happened in the nearby Music Row studios.
Skull Schulman and the Rainbow Room
The single most storied figure in Printer’s Alley history is David “Skull” Schulman, proprietor of the Rainbow Room. The Nashville City Council declared him “The Mayor of Printer’s Alley.” Schulman originally ran an exotic dance club that he converted to a country music venue in the 1990s. In 1998, he was murdered by robbers shortly before opening time. The club closed and sat dark for nearly 20 years, with Bourbon Street Blues & Boogie Bar using the space for storage. Employees refused to enter, reporting sounds and shapes they attributed to Schulman. Skull’s Rainbow Room reopened in June 2015 under businessman Phil Martin, with Schulman’s jackets framed on the wall and the original checkerboard stage still in use.
Why It Matters Historically
Three things make Printer’s Alley historically significant in ways that extend beyond its current use as a bar district. First, it was Nashville’s original entertainment district, preceding Broadway’s honky-tonk development by at least a decade and operating under more legally ambiguous conditions that gave it a genuinely different character. Second, it hosted the informal, after-hours musical culture of the Nashville studio community during the exact years when the Nashville Sound was being assembled, which means its influence on that period cannot be fully disentangled from what was being recorded nearby. Third, it is one of the few areas of downtown Nashville that still has pre-1960s commercial fabric intact.
Printer’s Alley was listed as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. The last printing company, Ambrose Printing, did not leave until 1977. The alley now has roughly half a dozen active venues including Skull’s Rainbow Room, Bourbon Street Blues and Boogie Bar, Alley Taps, Lonnie’s Western Room, Ms. Kelli’s, and Fleet Street Pub. Paul McCartney referenced Printer’s Alley by name in “Sally G,” released as the B-side of the 1974 Wings single “Junior’s Farm.”
Sources
- Printer’s Alley, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer’sAlley
- History of Printer’s Alley, Culture Trip: https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/tennessee/articles/a-brief-history-of-printers-alley-nashville
- Nashville Downtown Alliance, “What’s Happening in Printer’s Alley?”: https://nashvilledowntown.com/post/whats-happening-in-printers-alley
- PrintersAlley.com official site: http://printersalley.com/
- Nashville Go, Printer’s Alley guide: https://nashvillego.com/activities/guides/printers-alley-the-complete-guide
- The Franklin/Nashville Guide, Printer’s Alley history: https://franklin.thefuntimesguide.com/thehistory_of/
- Misfit Homes, Printer’s Alley history: https://www.misfithomes.com/blog/exploring-the-history-and-nightlife-of-printers-alley-in-nashville