Drive the mile of Southland Drive between Nicholasville Road and Rosemont Garden and you will pass a barbershop that has cut hair since 1955, a bowling alley with a mid-century sign shaped like an actual bowl, and five different stores that sell musical instruments. That last detail is not an accident of retail rent. In 2010, then-Mayor Jim Newberry formally declared Southland Drive "Lexington's Music Row," and the corridor has spent the sixteen years since proving the name was description, not marketing.
The Title Nobody Had To Renew
A city can name a street after almost anything. What makes Southland Drive's designation hold up is that the cluster it describes is still doing business. Doo Wop Shop, The Drum Center, Don Wilson Music, DW Sound, and Willcutt Guitars all operate along the same stretch, which means a Lexington musician can buy strings, rent a rehearsal amp, and pick up a new instrument without leaving one mile of pavement. Most cities have a music store or two scattered across town. Southland Drive has enough of them concentrated in one place that a mayor felt the need to put a name on it, and enough of them still there today that the name still fits.
What The Old Culinary Corridor Actually Left Behind
Southland Drive used to be known for something else entirely. Longtime residents remember it as a dining strip anchored by names that have since disappeared: Lum's, Jerry's, Ponderosa, Leo's Oyster Bar, and Ireland, which was a regular stop for the University of Kentucky men's basketball team. The corridor was also home to the first Long John Silver's location ever opened. None of those restaurants are still standing.
Two other mid-century businesses survived the turnover. Southland Barber Shop opened in 1955 and is now run by second-generation barbers. Down the street, the bowling center that opened in 1960 as Collins Bowling Center still operates today as Southland Lanes, and its "Bowl" sign remains one of the most recognizable pieces of mid-century signage left in Lexington.
The restaurant gap didn't stay empty. Taziki's Mediterranean Cafe put its first-ever Lexington location on Southland Drive, and the corridor now includes Winchell's Brothers sandwich shop, Caribbean spot Irie Flavors, Old KY Chocolates, and coffee shop Southland Perk. The names changed. The pattern of a street full of small, independently run food businesses did not.
The Sunday Market And The Fair That Moved Seasons
Southland Drive runs two recurring events that shape the neighborhood's calendar. The Southland Farmers' Market sets up on Sundays from April through October, giving the corridor a weekly rhythm most of the year.
The bigger annual event is the Southland Street Fair, and it has quietly shifted seasons. Older coverage of the fair described it as a May tradition, part of the corridor's spring calendar. But the two most recent fairs both landed in late September: September 28 for the 2025 event and September 27 for 2026. If you remember attending a Southland fair in the spring, you're not misremembering. The event has moved.
This year's fair is curated for the second year running by Tahlsound Music Festival, whose name is an anagram of "Southland" and whose organizers built the festival specifically to spotlight the area's music community. The 2026 lineup includes The Magpies, The Off Daze, Moose Loon, Mystic Squid, Jessie Laine Powell performing with Brandon Scott Coleman, Casa de la Cultura de Ky, Pete Wallace's Melodic Handpan and Beats, and a Lexington Bounce House setup for kids, spread across more than 100 vendors. One performer bridges both years. Waffle Therrod played the 2025 fair and returned for 2026, one of the few constants in a lineup that otherwise turns over.
The Bluegrass Series Trying To Come Home
Southland Drive's musical identity runs deeper than instrument shops and one big September weekend. The Southland Jamboree started as a free weekly bluegrass concert series right on the corridor, but the series relocated to MoonDance Amphitheater at Beaumont Centre in 2015. Organizers behind the Jamboree have been working to bring the series back to Southland Drive itself, according to reporting from Smiley Pete Publishing, which would put the neighborhood's own bluegrass tradition back on the street that gave it a name in the first place.
That effort says something about how the corridor sees itself. A concert series that left for a bigger, more polished venue is the kind of thing that usually stays gone. The push to bring it back to a strip of independently owned shops and a bowling alley from 1960 suggests the people running Southland's events think the street itself is part of what made the Jamboree work.
What This Adds Up To On A Given Sunday
None of this requires a special occasion to see. Walk the corridor on an ordinary Sunday between April and October and you'll find the farmers' market running its usual stretch of vendors. Walk it on a weekday and you can still stop into Willcutt Guitars, get a haircut at Southland Barber Shop, and grab lunch at Winchell's Brothers, three businesses that represent three different decades of the same one-mile street. The restaurants that made Southland Drive famous in the 1960s and 70s are gone. The businesses built around music, the ones that earned the corridor its name, are still the reason people keep showing up.
If you've got your own Southland Drive memory, a band you first heard at the fair, a guitar you bought at one of the shops along the strip, or a decades-old order at Southland Barber Shop, I'd genuinely like to hear it. Reach out anytime through Jess Noto.
