In June 1923, a recording engineer from OKeh Records set up equipment at 152 Nassau Street in downtown Atlanta and pressed record. Fiddlin' John Carson played "The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane." It became country music's first major commercial hit — recorded before Nashville, before Memphis, before New Orleans had hosted a single session of the Southern recording trips that would define American popular music for the next century.
In January 2019, developers proposed demolishing the building to construct a Jimmy Buffett Margaritaville Resort.
The Irony
The irony was not lost on preservationists. Jimmy Buffett's own Atlanta connections were deep — his first live album was recorded at the Fox Theater, and Atlanta's Parrot Head clubs were among the first in the country. Tearing down a building where American music history was literally made, to build a resort themed around a musician, was the kind of contradiction that made the preservation fight feel personal.
The building at 152 Nassau had served multiple musical lives. After OKeh Records' pioneering sessions, it housed a "Gone With The Wind" museum. The site also carried a connection to Atlanta's current political leadership: Major Lance, father of then-Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, recorded for OKeh Records at the label's later sessions in the 1960s.
The Preservation Case
Kyle Kessler, a historic Atlanta architect, launched an online petition to save the building. Preservationists argued that the structure could be incorporated into the resort's design — the developers had a large parking lot where the hotel could be built while leaving the smaller historic building standing. "They have a large parking lot that they can put the hotel in and just leave this smaller building on the side," one advocate noted.
The zoning board delayed a vote on the proposal in January 2019, buying time for the preservation case to build public support.
Atlanta's Pattern
The fight over 152 Nassau Street was part of a larger pattern. Atlanta has historically neglected celebrating its blues, jazz, gospel, and country music heritage — the creative output that made the city a recording destination decades before Hollywood arrived. Buildings where that history was made have been demolished, repurposed, or allowed to decay without so much as a historical marker.
The Margaritaville proposal forced a question that Atlanta's development community rarely pauses to ask: when a building is the place where an entire genre of American music began, does its story outweigh its square footage?
Original reporting by GPB News, Georgia Public Broadcasting, January 12, 2019.