It’s more professional-looking than tiny Sun Studio, the sonic temple where rock was born. But Sam Phillips opened Sun in Memphis seven years before Studio B was built by Nashville businessman Dave Maddox to accommodate RCA’s local recording interests and the label’s hot country producer, Chet Atkins. Whereas Sun looks like a glorified one-car garage, Studio B has the beveled walls and high ceilings that engineers had discovered help eliminate sonic pitfalls.
Not that there weren’t plenty in the big shoebox-shaped structure. “It’s not that remarkable a space,” says John Rumble, senior historian for the Hall of Fame and Museum. “It’s a concrete block building, so you have to give a lot of credit to the engineers. As Bill Porter, who was chief engineer from 1959 to 1963, explained to me, the building had a lot of standing waves on certain frequencies. If a wave comes out of a sound source, like an amplifier, bounces off a wall, and travels back, it has cancellation points, where the sound will drop out, and amplification points, where the volume will increase. Porter got acoustical ceiling tile, cut it into little pyramids, and hung them at different levels to break up the ceiling waves. They were called ‘Porter’s Pyramids’ by the session musicians who worked there.”
Rumble hasn’t been able to determine who the first artist to record at the studio was when it opened in November 1957. Ralph Stanley — the octogenarian bluegrass legend whose career got a supercharging in 2000 when he sang the riveting “O Death” in the soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou? — and the late Canadian singing cowboy Hank Snow were among the earliest. Then came Elvis Presley, who’d recorded “Heartbreak Hotel” in a downtown broadcasting building RCA used before Studio B opened. He cut “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” “It’s Now or Never,” “Little Sister,” “Good Luck Charm,” and many other hits at Studio B. Roy Orbison and the Everly Brothers made smashes there. And many Nashville stars ascended both the pop and the country charts with songs from Studio B, often under Atkins’s production. Eddy Arnold’s “What’s He Doing in My World?”, Bobby Bare’s “Detroit City,” Waylon Jennings’s “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line,” and Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” are all part of the legacy.
So are the session musicians, Atkins’s team of A-listers. Guitarist Hank Garland, bassist Bob Moore, pianist Floyd Cramer, drummer Buddy Harmon, and many more played on the 35,000 songs recoded at RCA Studio B during its 30-year-run. As Rumble explains, “What really made Studio B special was the players. These weren’t hillbillies who only knew three chords. They were highly skilled and could play jazz, whatever they wanted. Some were classically trained. Right from the start, they worked on getting the bugs out. On Sunday afternoons, when there were no sessions, they’d come down to the studio, get a couple of galvanized wash tubs full of beer, and jam while the engineers experimented. I’ve interviewed a lot of these players, and there was a genuine esprit de corps. They had a sense that they were creating something special in Nashville, a legacy that would be meaningful for the city.”
The studio was retired in 1977, when new technology and design outpaced its capabilities and labels lost the power to dictate where stars would record. But it’s still alive. Students at Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business in Belmont, Tennessee, learn recording there, and last year more than 38,000 tourists came to make personal contact with that legacy.
On the Web
A virtual tour of RCA Studio B: http://www.countrymusichalloffame.com
