The Last Free Lunch of the Year Comes With a Songwriter Who Lives Here

<p>There is a particular kind of civic generosity in putting a stage in front of a city hall and then not charging anybody to stand near it. Murfreesboro has been doing exactly that all year, and on Friday, Oct. 16, it does it for the last time in 2026.</p>

<p><strong>Lunch on the Plaza</strong> runs from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on the Civic Plaza in front of City Hall at 111 West Vine Street. Food trucks park around the plaza. A band plays. You eat outside on a Friday in the middle of a workday, which is a small thing that turns out not to be a small thing at all.</p>

<h2>The musician is not an import</h2>

<p>The closing set belongs to <strong>Roland Justice</strong>, and the detail worth pausing on is that he is not being trucked in from somewhere more famous. He is a Murfreesboro singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who works the soulful end of rock, Americana and adult alternative — originals alongside the covers people call out for.</p>

<p>He has the hardware to go with it. He took first place at the Bell Buckle Tennessee Songwriter Festival in 2023, and won a competition round during Tennessee Songwriters Week in 2025. Those are not stadium credentials. They are the credentials of a working Middle Tennessee writer, which is a more interesting thing to be in a county that sits half an hour from the most competitive songwriting market on earth and still keeps its own scene alive.</p>

<p>That is the quiet argument this whole series makes. A city with a serious music economy next door could book background noise for its lunch hour. Murfreesboro books someone whose mail comes here.</p>

<h2>What the plaza is actually for</h2>

<p>Civic Plaza is the open apron in front of City Hall on West Vine, a few blocks off the courthouse square. Most of the year it is a place people walk across on the way to do something administrative — pay something, file something, sit through something. Six or seven Fridays a year it stops being a corridor and becomes a room.</p>

<p>There are tables set up if you want to stay. If you do not, the format is built to be raided: walk over, get something from a truck, take it back to your desk. The city runs the series on that assumption rather than pretending everyone downtown has two free hours.</p>

<p>Two practical notes. The food truck lineup for October had not been announced as of this writing, so treat the trucks as a pleasant unknown rather than a plan. And the event is weather-dependent — stormy conditions cancel it outright, which in mid-October in Middle Tennessee is a real possibility worth a glance at the forecast before you walk over.</p>

<h2>Why the last one matters more than the first</h2>

<p>Outdoor lunch series in this part of Tennessee live inside a narrow window. Start too early in spring and you are rained out. Run too far into summer and nobody wants to stand on open pavement in July at noon — and this September has been making that case loudly, with heat advisories and heat-index readings north of 100 well into the month.</p>

<p>Mid-October is the reward for waiting. It is the stretch where a Middle Tennessee afternoon is genuinely pleasant outdoors, the hardwoods around downtown start turning, and standing on concrete listening to a guitar is a good idea instead of an endurance test. Then it closes, and the next one is months away.</p>

<p>If you have been meaning to go all year and kept not going, this is the one. There is no ticket to buy, no reservation to make, and no second chance until spring.</p>

<h2>If you want more of this in October</h2>

<p>The plaza is not the only free thing on the calendar this month. <a href=”https://murfreesboro.com/cannonsburgh-harvest-days-2026-murfreesboro-october-24/”>Harvest Days at Cannonsburgh Village</a> marks its 50th year on Saturday, Oct. 24, with blacksmiths at the forge, clogging at the gazebo and free admission. And if the weather does cooperate, <a href=”https://murfreesboro.com/murfreesboro-greenway-guide-trailheads-stones-river-lytle-creek-fortress-rosecrans/”>the Murfreesboro Greenway</a> is the best free thing the city owns — eleven trailheads, all with parking, and a paved path that runs straight through the largest earthen fortification built during the Civil War.</p>

<p><strong>Lunch on the Plaza — Friday, Oct. 16, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Civic Plaza, City Hall, 111 West Vine Street. Live music from Roland Justice. Food trucks on site. Free. Cancelled in stormy weather.</strong></p>