Artist-Owned Nashville Bar Up For Sale Just Months After Announcing Partnership With Shania Twain

Well that don’t impress me much…

A few months ago, it was reported that Shania Twain was partnering with pop singer Gavin DeGraw and his brother, Joey DeGraw, in their bar downtown Nashville bar, Nashville Underground.

The DeGraw brothers have owned the bar, located near the end of Broadway beside Acme Feed & Seed, since 2018. The five-story venue has recently been less of a “honky tonk” or country bar and has been more of a nightclub with rap and pop music (though they still had a mechanical bull the last time I was there, which was quite a while ago).

No details were given about Shania’s involvement at the time, but it’s a safe bet that plans were for her name to be on the bar somehow, whether it was a licensing agreement for a Shania-branded bar or actual ownership in the venue.

But it sounds like those plans might not be happening after all.

The Nashville Business Journal reports that the bar is now on the market, with a listing from Stream Realty advertising the space as a “rare plug and play purchase opportunity” with no lease in place.

The building was bought by the current owners, the DeGraw brothers, in 2023 after opening the bar in 2017, and according to the listing it recently underwent a $14 million investment. The bar is advertised as offering “the largest possible capacity of any single facility or honky tonk along the coveted strip” and features 7 floors including two kitchens, a two-level rooftop, and a potential capacity of over 3,000 people.

There’s no word yet on what the sale means for the future of the bar, or Shania’s involvement in the business. But from the sound of the listing, the building and the bar both are being sold and the new owners will be free to do what they please with the venue (which likely means another celebrity is going to swoop in and open up their own bar in the prime real estate).

Of course it’s really no wonder that the DeGraws would be eager to cash in on Nashville’s record-setting real estate prices. Just last year, the building that houses Margaritaville on Broadway sold for a whopping $75 million to billionaire Raising Cane’s founder Todd Graves, who paid a record $2,870 per square foot for the real estate – meaning the 54,825 square foot building housing Nashville Underground could fetch over $150,000,000 on today’s market.

Yeah, I’d sell it too.

If future plans for the building don’t include Shania, that would leave Broadway with only two bars named after female country singers, with Miranda Lambert’s Casa Rosa and Lainey Wilson’s Bell Bottoms Up (which isn’t technically on Broadway) being the only bars owned by female artists.

But there’s obviously no shortage of artist-owned bars downtown. (And yes, I know that mosts artists don’t technically “own” their bars. They’re owned by giant hospitality corporations and the artists license their name for the bars, with a few exceptions like Eric Church’s Chiefs, Alan Jackson’s AJ’s Good Time Bar, Garth Brooks’ Friends in Low Places and John Rich’s Redneck Riviera).

In just the past couple of years, Luke Combs, Morgan Wallen, Hank Williams Jr. and even Jon Bon Jovi have opened up their own bars on Broadway, joining the list of artists like Blake Shelton, Dierks Bentley, Jason Aldean, Luke Bryan and Kid Rock who have their own spaces on what’s become a popular tourist destination as it moves away from the small locally-owned honky tonks.

But the growth on Broadway isn’t likely to slow down any time soon. A new concert venue, The Pinnacle, recently opened downtown to draw even more visitors to Nashville and to Broadway, and with the ongoing development on the east bank with the new Tennessee Titans stadium, there’s only going to be more reason for visitors to come to Music City and hit up Broadway.

So if you’re disappointed that Shania may not be getting her downtown bar after all, don’t worry. My guess is that we haven’t seen the last of the artist bars downtown, so I’m sure another one will be going in soon enough.