Matthew Burnette, Staff Writer

When The Caverns’ founder Todd Mayo stepped into a cave nearly twenty years ago, there was no way to predict that one day he would be the owner of a unique destination music venue or the economic impact that venue would have on its community.

According to recent reporting, over the seven years that the Caverns has been in Grundy County it has generated $87.8 million in visitor spending, created and supported 146 jobs resulting in over $1 million in direct local wages across five counties and welcomed 493,167 total visitors.

“We get a lot of great response from people that are business owners and even entrepreneurs that are renting their places out and just the general community of just having pride that the Caverns is rooted here,” said Mayo. “People are coming from all over the world and they see how beautiful it is and all the great hiking and waterfalls and the local places like Simply Southern or the Dutch Bakery and just all the unique, interesting and cool things that are here.”

The statistic that he says is the one that “blows his mind” is that 73% of the visitors at The Caverns come from outside of Tennessee.

“Fans of every show come from all over the country and even all over the world, so that really is a huge driver of our economic impact because you know those people come and they spend money in Grundy County and they spend money in all the surrounding counties,” he explained. “I’m really proud of the fact that we bring people in from all over the country.”

The Caverns is Mayo’s brainchild that grew from the very first time he set foot in Cumberland Caverns back in 2008. It instantly captured his imagination and struck him as an amazing place to have a music venue, despite coming from an advertising background and having no experience in the music business.

“I just kind of really had this vision and just started doing it without any experience,” he recalled. “Sometimes in life, as they say, ignorance is bliss. You don’t know anything, so you just do it and find out.”

In August of 2008, Mayo started a radio broadcast called Bluegrass Underground in partnership with WSM that ran before the Grand Ole Opry. He then met an interviewer from NPR named Todd Jarrell who also happened to be a producer at PBS.

Bluegrass Underground became a TV series under the production company Todd Squared, operated by the two Todds.

“It’s like you never know what can happen when you walk into a cave,” explained Mayo. “A man walks into a cave one man and comes out another.”

The show eventually outgrew Cumberland Caverns and moved to an unmapped cave in Pelham known as Big Mouth Cave where it was rebranded as The Caverns Sessions. The new venue experienced success in 2018 and 2019, but like many, almost went out of business during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“You hear the cliche that necessity is the mother of invention, and I would add to that that desperation is the father,” said Mayo. “When you’re desperate to do something and you need something, you do it.”

That COVID desperation led to the construction of an outdoor amphitheater that could accommodate any restrictions that the venue faced during the pandemic. While it may have looked bleak at the time, Mayo says that period actually created a lot of growth for the venue.

“I was just happy having the magic cave venue, but you look at post-COVID and we’ve got an amphitheater that now holds over 6,000 people, we’ve got campgrounds, we’ve got a show cave, we’ve got a yurt village and now we’ve got a children’s camp,” he explained. “The whole vision of everything has sort of grown and a lot of it grew out of those dark COVID times.”

The Caverns, often described as Red Rocks Amphitheater meets Ruby Falls, now thrives and hosts around 100 shows a year of varying genres from Christian to folk and bluegrass to hard rock.

“Every kind of music we want to have is because we want to reach as diverse a segment of the American population and even around the world as we can because it just brings in different demographics of music lovers,” Mayo explained. “You’ll have a standing room crowd and it’s an average age of 25 and then you’ll have a seated show and it’s an average age of 65. They’re all great because of the joy that all of the patrons bring.”

“It’s just a pure joy to be in the business of providing people an experience that was one of the highlights of their year,” he added.

While Mayo says the best marketing they get is word-of-mouth by patrons, over $1.5 million in national and regional marketing has also been invested in by The Caverns since opening in 2018 to get the word out about what the venue has to offer.

“You can have magic cave but if people don’t see it or hear it or know about it, they’re not gonna come so we invest heavily in our marketing every single show” explained Mayo. “It’s why from a booking standpoint it’s very important for us to be very musically diverse in terms of genre because you want to reach everyone.”

In addition to the economic impact that The Caverns has, it also aims to have an impact on those in the community who are in need.

“We try to impact the community not just in the dollars that flow into the county but also into local programs and people that are doing good, so that’s something that we are proud of,” said Mayo. “We take a dollar out of every ticket that we sell and have contributed to all sorts of things. One of the main ones that we do is the South Cumberland Community Fund and that funds music in schools.”

The Caverns also contributes to several local faith-based drug rehab programs like Blue Monarch and The Mosaic Center. Mayo explained that Fentanyl has been a big issue in the area, particularly this summer.

“There’s a lot of good people that have come on hard times through getting into trouble with drugs and things of that nature and so we sponsor a lot of those programs and give money to those programs,” he said.

Mayo also noted that a lot of Grundy County and Pelham residents take pride in the fact that the venue hosts a lot of big name acts in their small community. Just this year, The Caverns has hosted The Oak Ridge Boys, Jo Dee Messina, Josh Turner, Buckethead and Macy Gray.

“We get a lot of great feedback from locals,” he said. “What I hear a lot from people is it makes them feel proud to be from Grundy County or to be from Pelham that these famous musicians are coming from all over the world to their community.”