The Blue Note

History

The Blue Note is the music venue at 17 North Ninth Street in downtown Columbia, a contributing property in the North Ninth Street Historic District. The building opened in 1927 as the Varsity Theater, built by Tom C. Hall, and showed movies until 1960. Richard King and Phil Costello opened The Blue Note on August 1, 1980, in a former bar on Business Loop 70 East that they nicknamed “The Dump”; King moved the club into the downtown theater around 1990. He sold it in October 2014 to Matt Gerding and Scott Leslie, and FPC Live now runs it with a listed capacity of about 800 (Wikipedia cites 835). The room has hosted R.E.M., the Pixies, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Hüsker Dü’s final show, and it is the club in the internet-naming case Bensusan Restaurant Corp. v. King. Sources: thebluenote.com/about-us; Wikipedia; COMO Magazine, Aug. 8, 2025.