"Studio B holds a lot of great memories for me,” Grand Ole Opry veteran Jim Ed Brown said during a Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum program commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Historic RCA Studio B. Brown’s words were echoed throughout a ninety-minute panel discussion of the studio’s fundamental role in Nashville music history, before a rapt crowd in the museum’s Ford Theater on March 10.
“Hitmakers’ Workshop: RCA Studio B and the Rise of Music City” featured several Nashville record business veterans discussing the early years and heyday of the famed studio. Besides Brown, the panel featured Country Music Hall of Fame member and A-team session guitarist Harold Bradley; his nephew, record executive and producer Jerry Bradley; and veteran recording engineer Bill Harris. The panel was hosted by John Rumble, the museum’s senior historian, and included historic photographs and recordings going back to the studio’s first Billboard advertisement in October 1957 announcing its opening.
“Hitmakers’ Workshop” was the first of several programs that the Country Music Hall of Fame will present to honor Studio B’s golden anniversary.
The panel began with the sound of a classic country hit, Don Gibson’s “Oh Lonesome Me,” filling the theater. As Rumble explained, the song was recorded in December 1957 and ranks as one of the first major hits to emerge from the site. “The studio helped secure Nashville’s reputation as a center of American popular music,” Rumble said.
Harold Bradley, as Rumble said, has seen the Nashville recording industry develop firsthand. He’d played guitar on a recording session for the first time in 1946, in Chicago, with Country Music Hall of Fame member Pee Wee King. After that, the Tennessee native worked primarily in Nashville at such early recording studios as the Castle Recording Laboratory, initially located in the WSM radio studios and later in the Tulane Hotel.
Studio B, located on Seventeenth Avenue South, in midtown Nashville, had been the second studio to open within an area now known as Nashville’s Music Row. The first studio, the Bradley Film & Recording Studio, had opened in 1955 on Sixteenth Avenue South, and was co-owned by Harold Bradley and his brother Owen Bradley, a Country Music Hall of Fame member and father of Jerry Bradley.
Harold recalled how Decca Records tried to lure his brother Owen, a burgeoning record executive and producer, to Dallas to set up the label’s country music headquarters. But Dallas studio owner Jim Beck had died suddenly, and Owen had just bought a home in Nashville for his family. So, instead, Owen offered Decca Records a counter-proposal. He would put up $15,000, or half of the money needed to build a new recording center, and Harold would help him run it and “work for nothing,” as Harold joked, drawing laughter from the Ford Theater audience. Decca Records executive Paul Cohen approved the offer.
“The industry could’ve turned in a different direction if that hadn’t happened,” the guitarist noted.
Meanwhile, as Decca Records strengthened its foothold in Nashville, RCA Victor Records began hiring guitarist Chet Atkins to organize sessions using several Nashville studios, including sharing a space inside a building on McGavock Street owned by the Methodist TV, Radio and Film Commission. RCA had a contract that required it to use union engineers, and at the time the Bradley operation, which by now included a second studio built inside a surplus military Quonset hut, was not unionized. So RCA decided to build its own recording space in Nashville, choosing a corner of Seventeenth Avenue barely a block away from the studio that became known as the Quonset Hut.
“We welcomed having a new studio in the neighborhood,” Harold recalled. “It also made it easier for musicians, because the two main studios in town were now a block apart. We only had an hour between sessions, and we had to eat and pack up our gear. So being so close made it a lot easier to go between the two.”
Musicians liked working in the new studio, too, the guitarist said. “It was very comfortable, and the engineers had a good attitude,” Bradley explained. “It was real similar to what we were doing at the Quonset Hut.”
Jerry Bradley, who was seventeen when Studio B opened, remembered his first impressions of the RCA site. “When it opened, it was state of the art,” he said. “To us, it had a little different sound than the Quonset Hut. It had a little cleaner sound and a little clearer sound.”
Owen Bradley had designed the Quonset Hut to be a “dead room” and liked to use a lot of isolation of the instruments during a recording. “Studio B was a lot brisker and louder,” Jerry Bradley said. “It had a lot more highs in it. It was different, but it wasn’t that big of a deal. If you have a great song, you could record a hit in either room.”
Jim Ed Brown spoke of recording “The Three Bells,” the crossover hit that established his trio, The Browns, as stars. At the time, his partners—sisters Maxine and Bonnie—had both married and started families, and they were considering retiring from the music business. Jim Ed had begun helping his father manage the sawmill the family owned in southwestern Arkansas. “We’d already had some hits,” Brown said, “but music was a hobby for us.”
But Atkins, as the head of RCA’s Nashville operation, encouraged the Browns to record at least one more session before leaving the business. On the way to Nashville, Brown said he and his sisters began singing “The Three Bells” in the car; they’d previously sung the song, a hit for French vocalist Edith Piaf, in high school choirs. When they arrived at Studio B, Atkins suggested the trio record the tune, without knowing they had been singing it in the car together.
They recorded it in June 1959, Brown said. When the session ended, Atkins told them, “You may be thinking about retiring, but after this record, I don’t think you’re going to be able to.” Atkins took the song to New York City and told the company that if they didn’t fully promote it as a single, he’d quit. RCA put it out, Brown said, and within two weeks, it was selling a remarkable 38,000 copies a day.
“That record is timeless,” Harold Bradley commented.
In 1967, the Browns disbanded, with Maxine and Bonnie returning to their families in Arkansas. Jim Ed already had started a solo career by then, and in one of his first sessions after the trio ended, he recorded the top hit “Pop a Top” at RCA Studio B. The song initially had been released as a single in Texas by its writer, Nat Stuckey. But when it failed to become a national hit, Brown told Atkins he’d like to record it.
Brown remembered working with producer Felton Jarvis, who also had recorded hits with Elvis Presley at Studio B, to record the distinctive pop of a can opening at the beginning of the song. Brown and an engineer had walked to a nearby market to buy a six-pack of beer, But they worried the beer would get warm while they tried to capture the right popping sound on tape. So they decided to purchase a cheaper six-pack of Dr. Pepper instead.
“Felton opened the first can of Dr. Pepper, and it really worked well,” Brown said. “Then the guys in the band were really mad that we didn’t buy the beer.”
The Ford Theater audience then heard the recorded pop-and-fizz sound of the opening of the can over the theater’s loudspeakers as Brown’s original version of “Pop a Top” was played.
Harold Bradley also spoke of recording with Roy Orbison in Studio B, pulling his 1953 Stromberg guitar onto his lap and playing the opening chords of “Running Scared.” The recorded version of the song also was played, as was an Elvis Presley song, “Indescribably Blue,” which featured a jazzy, gut-string solo by Bradley. The guitarist said producer Jarvis wanted the gut-string sound on the record after hearing Marty Robbins’s “El Paso.”
Harold’s nephew Jerry Bradley described how he had been working for a publishing company when he had a dinner with Chet Atkins. He told Atkins he’d be interested in working for RCA if an A&R or production position opened up. Not long afterward, when Jarvis and RCA producer Danny Davis left the label, Atkins hired Bradley.
Bradley told of his laid-back relationship with artists, including Waylon Jennings. When Bradley succeeded Atkins as RCA’s Nashville division chief, Jennings was selling around a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand copies of his albums. Bradley knew that Jennings’s wife, Jessi Colter, had sold a million copies of her I’m Jessi Colter album, which included the crossover hit, “I’m Not Lisa.” Also, Jennings’s friend Willie Nelson had sold a million copies of his album Red Headed Stranger. “We were spending a lot of money promoting Waylon, and I felt he should be able to sell a million albums, too,” Bradley said.
Bradley also recalled that Colter and Nelson both had recorded for RCA in the past. So he brainstormed an idea to use older tracks by Nelson and Colter and combine them with songs by Jennings. Jennings insisted Tompall Glaser become a fourth artist on the album, which was to be called Wanted! The Outlaws. It became the first country album to be certified as a million-seller by the Recording Industry Association of America. One of the album’s tracks took two versions of “Good Hearted Woman,” one by Nelson and one by Jennings, and pieced them together into a duet that became a top country hit.
“A lot of people didn’t want to put it out,” Bradley said. “But it was a monster hit.”
Bill Harris became a top RCA Studio B engineer in 1974, and his work on Wanted! The Outlaws made him a favorite of Jerry Bradley’s. Harris talked about Studio B’s special sound qualities while recalling work with several artists, including one of his favorites, the late Gary Stewart. “He was wonderful,” Harris said of Stewart. “He had a lot of energy, and he put so much soul into it.”
By 1977, many major country artists began recording outside
of Nashville, going to new studios in Colorado and Muscle Shoals, Alabama,
among other places. RCA had built a second studio in Nashville, but the label
felt that, with all the competition, they were ready to move out of the studio
business. RCA had rented Studio B from Nashville businessman Dan Maddox, and in
1977 Owen and Jerry Bradley took over the lease with RCA’s blessings. The
Bradleys later facilitated transferring the Studio B lease to the Country Music
Hall of Fame and Museum to operate as a museum during the daytime while the Bradleys continued to hold evening sessions there for a time. Subsequently, other recording entrepreneurs used the facility at night, also renting it from Maddox.
In 1992, the Maddox Foundation donated the studio to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. In 2002, the Mike Curb Foundation bought Studio B and leased it back to the museum for an annual fee of $1 while making it a teaching facility for Belmont University.
Rumble encouraged everyone to visit Historic RCA Studio B to learn more about the legendary studio. “The sense of history is palpable,” Rumble said. Added Jim Ed Brown, “It’s one of my favorite places in the world.”
--Michael McCall