Musical Labor and the Nashville Studio System

Many of the most iconic recordings of the Nashville Sound era gained popularity not simply because of the recording artist whose name appeared on the labels of the singles and albums that contained them, but because of the contributions of Nashville’s session musicians who crafted arrangements and “hook” motifs. Yet, for the most part, these session musicians were never credited and received only a seemingly small one-time fee for their efforts. This chapter considers the creative impact of Nashville’s session musicians through a careful examination of several chart-topping Nashville Sound–era recordings, exploring the ways that the arrangements and “hook” motifs that they created shaped the works. Moreover, this chapter suggests that, although session musicians were seldom credited for their work, many of them presented clear artistic identities that are anonymously visible across a wide spectrum of recordings.

Musical Branding, Artist Identity, and the Nashville Sound

Many writers have treated the Nashville Sound as a single, monolithic style characterized by smooth background vocals, reverberant lead vocals, and sparing instrumental accompaniments. Yet, in a 1991 interview, prolific Nashville session guitarist Harold Bradley observed that “[w]hen people say the Nashville Sound, you know, singularly, I think they’re wrong, because it should be plural. Everybody that’s heavy has had their sound. . . .” Drawing upon Mark Samples’s (2012) work on musical branding, this chapter examines the ways that record producers, session musicians, and recording artists used the musical resources of Nashville’s recording studios to develop signature sounds that helped listeners identify their favorite singers on recordings and radio. Moreover, building upon recent work on the development of all-country radio during the 1960s, this chapter argues that musical brands may have played an essential role in maintaining listener attention, thereby ensuring the success of the new format.

Introduction

In the early 1950s, country music was a cottage industry in Nashville, supporting a handful of small recording studios, publishers, and managers, and Nashville was known primarily as the home of The Grand Ole Opry. By the mid-1960s, however, Nashville had become “Music City, USA,” a bustling town known around the world as the epicenter of country music production and dissemination. As Nashville underwent this transformation, popular music consumption in the United States also underwent a radical change, as disc jockey programs replaced live performance on radio stations across the United States. Drawing upon recent academic work in the musicology of recording, the Introduction considers how these changes affected the ways that audiences heard country music during the 1950s and 1960s. In its focus on recorded country music, the Nashville Sound era begs for a musicological inquiry examining the creative decisions of session musicians, recording engineers, and record producers and the impacts of those decisions on the listeners who engaged with their work.

The Musicianship of the Nashville Cats

At the height of the Nashville Sound era, the city’s session musicians were widely celebrated for their ability to hear new musical compositions, construct “head arrangements” of those songs, and execute improvised arrangements with great precision. This story—although certainly true in the broadest sense—obscures valuable detail about the musical backgrounds, abilities, and tastes of Nashville’s session musicians, in effect normalizing their diverse skill sets by treating them as interchangeable cogs in a record-production machine. This chapter examines the musicianship of Nashville Sound–era session musicians, following ethnomusicologist Henry Kingsbury’s (1988) observation that discourses about musicianship reveal the values and ideologies that a given music culture celebrates and replicates. This chapter, therefore, explores the myriad ways that Nashville Sound–era session musicians learned the fundamentals of music theory, utilized existing notional traditions and developed new ones, and negotiated work in recording sessions in which multiple kinds of musicianship were at play.

The Birth of the Nashville Recording Industry

Country music was recorded in Nashville as early as the 1920s, but it was not until the mid-1950s that the city became a significant center for the production of recorded country music. This chapter traces the development of Nashville’s recording studio infrastructure from ad hoc facilities used in the decade following the end of World War II to the mid-1970s, when the city was home to several state-of-the-art permanent recording facilities. This chapter not only explores the business of recording in Nashville, but also examines how new technologies that were deployed within the city’s recording studios changed the ways in which musicians created their work (Horning 2013). Finally, this chapter considers how trade publications, the mainstream press, and films promoted Nashville as both a state-of-the-art recording center and a relaxed, small-town alternative to urban recording industries in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Afterword

The Afterword briefly considers the impacts of the Nashville Sound era’s recording industry on the city’s role as a major center for the production of not only country music, but a wide range of commercial popular musics, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These impacts were felt not only as new generations of session musicians took the reins from the Nashville veterans, but as other emergent country music scenes—as well as the artists associated with the so-called “Outlaw country” movement—worked to distinguish themselves from the Nashville music industry. This chapter closes with a discussion of the value of engaging meaningfully with session musicians in the study of popular music, more generally.