Pull open the door to the Blue Note Grill in Durham, and you’re likely to be met with wailing blues and the rich smell of barbecue. And friends. Some you know and some you’ve yet to meet, in a crowd so welcoming no one stays a stranger for long.
For 15 years now, the Blue Note Grill has been home to a mélange of dancers and musicians, both local and nationally touring. Guitarist Samantha Fish plays here when she’s on the East Coast. So do California’s Teresa James and the Rhythm Tramps, and guitarist Walter Trout. It’s the home of the Triangle Blues Society and host to competitions that send regional musicians to blues competitions and onward to the national road. But more than that, the grill is a gathering place. A home. A found family for musicians, dancers, and lovers of barbecue.
It’s a place of unselfconsciousness, of being yourself, whether that’s wailing on a mouth harp or hitting the dance floor for athletic swing or sultry blues, or maybe dancing more like the inflatable guy outside a used car store. It doesn’t matter, because here, you’re family.
The Blue Note Grill opened in May 2010 in a narrow 1,500-square-foot former restaurant on 15-501. Owners Bill and Andrea Whittington were working tedious corporate jobs, dreaming of one day opening a place where people would gather to have fun. The day came.
“We just jumped right in, not really knowing what we were doing,” Bill says. They began with food, then added music one night a week, then a second night. Their core family of customers came every day.
“There were days we didn’t know how we were going to pay the next bill,” says Andrea, “but they showed up.”
For five years, customers slid sideways between dancers and the band, around tables full of people with fingers sticky with barbecue sauce. Bands pressed themselves up against a stylized mural of Memphis’s Beale Street. Dancers spilled out onto the patio.
The Whittingtons needed more room. Ten years ago, they found that space in a 5,900-square-foot former machine shop and auto parts store that sits kitty-corner from the Historic Durham Athletic Park. The warehouses around it were mostly empty. The remains of a train trestle out back were covered with vines. The Whittingtons built a stage and a bar, planned seating and acoustics, and installed a kitchen. Then they put out a call for help, and their regulars showed up with a convoy of trucks and U-Hauls, and plenty of muscle and enthusiasm.
The regulars have been showing up ever since. For jam sessions of the area’s gifted musicians, for big touring acts, for weddings and celebrations of life, for barbecue and brisket and weekend Bloody Marys. For a sense of belonging.
“We have people come in all of the time and say, ‘We met at your place, we had our first kiss behind the dumpster.’”
“We have people come in all of the time and say, ‘We met at your place, we had our first kiss behind the dumpster,’” Bill says.
Susan and Ben Comfort met at the original Blue Note. They were friends and fellow music lovers until they found themselves taking care of an aging regular, and things grew from there. Bill got ordained so that he could marry them.
Another couple discovered their spark at a fundraiser at the Blue Note for drummer Chuck Cotton, whose house had been hit by a tornado. Dancer Ann Kirsch had wandered over to look at the silent auction options. Musician Dennis Beckwith joined her. “Want to dance?” Beckwith asked. Four years later, Bill married them at the Blue Note.
Durham’s fire chief, Robert J. Zoldos II, discovered the Blue Note when he was new to town and looking for fun things to do with his wife, Sherri.
“It’s opened a new chapter in my life,” Zoldos says. He initially came out just to listen, until someone suggested he give line dancing a try. Now he rarely leaves the dance floor.
“Something that always blows my mind is that we have a staunch group of regulars, but we have new people come in every week,” Zoldos continues. “The new people keep it fresh and fun. The musical talent there is ridiculous, the people who go up on the stage, you should be paying a lot of money to hear.”
On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, a rotating selection of musicians with day jobs jam on guitar and bass, saxophone and keyboard, mouth harp and drums.
“They can come here and entertain and do what they really love doing, and the people here appreciate it,” Bill says. “It’s not like places where it’s kind of background music. We have a crowd here who come for the music.”
It’s not like places where it’s kind of background music. We have a crowd here who come for the music.”
But the Blue Note is at risk. It had the best year ever right before COVID-19, and then everything shut down. No music. Carryout only for food. The grill had just begun to recover when neighboring business Irwin Oil sold its property in 2023, and with it the Blue Note’s parking and the trestle that had become an iconic location for album cover photos. The big apartment complex going up on that land will bring new customers (and a much-needed parking deck), but for now, the Blue Note is struggling.
Revenue is down about 30 percent, Bill says, and he and Andrea are working 14-hour days as managers, food runners, phone answerers, band bookers, and maintenance workers. It’s nonstop, the pair says.
Still: “Our worst day here is better than a good day working in the corporate world,” as Bill puts it.
“We love what we do,” Andrea adds. “We create a place where our customers, friends, [and] family feel happy. It brings joy to a lot of people, and that makes us happy. And first timers—I always tell them, you may not know anyone when you get here, but you’ll know a lot of people once you leave. They make friends, and they come back.”
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