We left our jobs and home in St. Petersburg and came to Old Town to open a music store. We had no idea how long it would last – a month, maybe?  We had to go with a slightly larger unit and worried that we’d never be able to fill it up.  Our first customer,  Ricky Dolan,  stopped by when we were still cleaning and organizing the store.  He bought a used  drum head for five dollars and said he’d be back.  We still have that five-dollar bill (although there were plenty of times I looked at it and thought about buying some groceries with it).  We opened our doors in October of 1991 with a few used guitars, some sets of strings, a couple used amps and lots of weird stuff that Bob had stashed away over the years. 

By January of 1992 we had expanded to the office space next to us. We brought in Crate amplifiers as our first amp line and Ibanez guitars soon followed. Pretty soon we were stepping over each other trying to find enough space for inventory. As it turns out, Old Town was a perfect location for a music store. We were drawing people from the tri-county area, as well as from the gulfside communities of Steinhatchee, Horseshoe Beach, and Cedar Key. Thanks to our loyal customer base we were able to continue expanding our inventory and our inventory lines and Dixie Music Center was starting to look like a real music store.

By the summer of 1997 we were finally able to convince Fender to come take a look at us. Alan, our rep, was impressed and signed us up.  At that point we were still in two units and quickly running out of room. It was time to expand again, and we did, taking on a third unit.  We added an extra teaching studio at that time, enabling us to offer more lessons on more instruments.  A couple of years later we took on the fourth and final unit and we’re still looking for more room. To that end, we’ve purchased the property next door and hope to eventually build our own store.

Being in a small community allows us to get to know our customers and their families, and to genuinely care about our service to them.  It also allows us to give back to the community when we can. We actively support the band programs in the area and are members of the Chamber of Commerce in Dixie County. Community is important to us and we make donations to worthy causes whenever possible. We try to provide live music once a year, which has become easier since acquiring the property next door. Families can bring their lawn chairs and listen to everything from gospel, to blues and rock, to country and Latino.  Music is the universal language and we feel a responsibility to share that with others.

We look back through the years and are constantly amazed at the passage of time. Has it really been 11 years that we’ve been in business here? That concept becomes tangible when we see customers that started guitar lessons as middle school students and have since graduated high school and college and are now performing in bands of their own. We still laugh about how we’d take the strings off of a guitar in for a restring and put them on one of our guitars so we could get it up on the wall to sell. We’ve come a long way since Ricky Dolan first walked through our door, and we thank our customers for that. We’ve made many true friends in our many years here and look forward to many more years to come!