RCA Studio B, 1611 Roy Acuff Place, Nashville, TN (2025)

11/21/2025

Grandpa Jones (born Lewis Marshall Jones) was a fixture on “Hee Haw” and the Grand Ole Opry, often punctuating skits with a witty remark or showing off his clawhammer banjo skills. Although he wasn't an RCA artist, he has a connection with RCA Studio B that involves his biggest hit record.

Grandpa Jones earned his paternal nickname decades earlier. As a young man in his twenties, Marshall Jones was a devotee of old-time music who often performed on country radio shows. At WBZ-Boston in 1935, singer Bradley Kincaid called him "Grandpa" because of his crotchety demeanor on their morning program. The name and the persona stuck.

Jones’s recording career began in the 1940s in Cincinnati when he and guitar ace Merle Travis recorded together as the Shepherd Brothers on what would be the first release by Syd Nathan’s influential King Records. By the 1950s, Jones and his talented wife Ramona were living in Nashville and making regular appearances on the Grand Ole Opry. He signed with Fred Foster’s startup Monument label in 1960 and scored one of his biggest singles with a version of Jimmie Rodgers’s classic “T for Texas.”

Sometimes known as “Blue Yodel No. 1,” the song was the breakthrough hit for Rodgers in 1928 and the first in his series of Blue Yodels. Jones’s version, recorded at RCA Studio B, gives it an update that makes use of 1960s Nashville studio finesse while retaining some of its raw edge. Despite its lyrical grimness, Jones sings it with a wink, adding an extra flourish to his yodels and then cracking up in laughter as he hits the final chorus. It reached No. 5 on the country chart in February 1963—six years before he joined the “Hee Haw” cast—and demonstrated his devotion to old-time music, a trait he continued to exhibit long after he’d finally grown into his nickname.

11/17/2025

By the mid-1950s, country music had a new challenge. With rock & roll siphoning off country's youth market and radio clout, Nashville began using pop-oriented country productions to attract the adult audience. The Nashville Sound was born.

In the studios, fiddles and steel guitars gave way to string sections and backing vocalists. The top producers, including RCA Studio B's Chet Atkins, relied on a small group of studio musicians, whose quick adaptability and creative input made them vital to the hit-making process.

In November of 1960, "Time" magazine reported that Nashville had "nosed out Hollywood as the nation's second biggest (after New York) record-producing center." The piece, a profile of country music focusing on the career of RCA recording artist Jim Reeves, was one of the earliest to use the term "Nashville Sound." (It first appeared in "Music Reporter" in 1958.)

Through the 1960s, the Nashville Sound referred to the special atmosphere that could be found in Nashville studios. "Even Bob Dylan and Buffy Sainte-Marie occasionally come to town in search of what is vaguely called 'the Nashville Sound,'" said journalist Paul Hemphill. By the mid-1970s scholars and journalists began to employ the term in a different fashion, using it to define a specific substyle of country music.

With his mellow baritone and polished stage presence, "Gentleman Jim" Reeves was the quintessential Nashville Sound singer. Reeves and Atkins helped steer country music in this new direction with lush, pop-influenced hits such as "Four Walls" and "He'll Have to Go," the latter recorded at RCA Studio B.

The 1960 “Time” account was accurate. The informal approach to arranging executed by a crack team of studio aces, combined with the artistic vision of a handful of producers, proved instrumental in helping establish Nashville’s reputation as Music City worldwide.

11/10/2025

Country Music Hall of Fame member Roger Miller had his first Top Ten hit with “When Two Worlds Collide.” He wrote it with his friend Bill Anderson (also now a Country Music Hall of Famer) on a road trip from Nashville to San Antonio and recorded it at RCA Studio B in February 1961 with producer Chet Atkins and engineer Bill Porter.

Anderson recalled, “There was a very famous science fiction movie in the 1950s called “When Worlds Collide.” Roger was enamored with that movie, and he kept wanting to write a song called ‘When Worlds Collide.’ He’d come to me, and I’d say, ‘Roger, we can’t steal the title of the movie, we can’t write a song called ‘Gone with the Wind,’ and we can’t write one called ‘When Worlds Collide.’

“So one night we’re going to Texas in his station wagon, and he said, ‘What if we called it “When Two Worlds Collide,”’ and I said, ‘Great!’ We were with a young singer named Johnny Seay, and Roger said, ‘Johnny, get up here and drive.’ Roger and I got his guitar out, got in the backseat, and we wrote that song somewhere between Nashville and San Antonio. Roger and I stayed awake all night long singing it to each other so we wouldn’t forget it. That’s the only way we had to remember it. We got to San Antonio about eight o’clock the next morning.”

Miller and Anderson had a friend in San Antonio named Neal Merritt, who worked at the country radio station. Miller called him to ask if he’d bring a tape recorder to the hotel. “He came over to the hotel, brought the tape recorder, we recorded it, and fell across the bed and probably slept for twelve hours,” Anderson said.

Roger Miller won a total of eleven Grammys during his career, five in 1964 and six in 1965. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1995, three years after his death at age fifty-six.

10/30/2025

In the era immediately following World War II, Steve Sholes led the push for Nashville’s growing importance as a music industry town. As head of RCA Victor’s Nashville division, Sholes had a hand in signing record deals with future Country Music Hall of Fame members Eddy Arnold, P*e Wee King, Hank Snow, Jim Reeves, and, in the mid-1950s, Elvis Presley. Sholes also recruited Chet Atkins to serve as his assistant before turning the reins over to him.

Several labels recorded their artists in Nashville starting in the late 1940s, though none of them had a permanent presence in the city until Sholes was at RCA Victor. He set up an office and studio where artists could record, eventually landing in a space on McGavock Street that was rented from the Television, Radio, and Film Commission (TRAFCO) of the Methodist Church. Hits recorded in that room include Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” and Jim Reeves’s “Four Walls.”

Sholes would later be instrumental in the construction of RCA Studio B on Music Row and therefore in the development of the Nashville Sound. “We see a bigger and better future for recording in Nashville, not only with a Nashville artist but with visiting artists who come in,” Sholes told the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in a February 1968 oral history interview. “It’s the one distinctive type of recording sound that I think’s been developed in this country.”

Though Sholes’s work ultimately carried him to executive posts in Los Angeles and New York, Nashville was always important to him. He served on the boards of the Country Music Association and the Country Music Foundation when the Country Music Hall of Fame honor was being created and the museum was being built on Music Row. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1967, mere months before his untimely death on April 22, 1968, at fifty-seven years old.

Pictured: singer Libby Horne with Steve Sholes (foreground) and an unidentified engineer at RCA’s TRAFCO studio.

10/24/2025

Country music singer and songwriter Dottie West enjoyed one of the longest hitmaking careers of any woman of her generation. Her self-penned song “Here Comes My Baby,” recorded in RCA Studio B in 1964, earned her the first Grammy ever awarded for Best Country Vocal Performance, Female.

West was also a modern country pioneer in writing advertising jingles (including Coca-Cola’s famous “Country Sunshine” campaign of the 1970s) and a wide-ranging duet singer who recorded with Don Gibson, Jimmy Dean, Kenny Rogers, and Jim Reeves.

Reeves had a No. 3 country hit with her composition “Is This Me?” in 1963. He brought her to the attention of RCA’s Chet Atkins, who signed her and produced “Here Comes My Baby.” West scored additional Top Ten singles with “Would You Hold It Against Me” (1966) and “Paper Mansions” (1967), as well as hit duets with Reeves (“Love Is No Excuse,” 1964) and Gibson (“Rings of Gold,” 1969).

She moved to United Artists Records in 1976 and later scored a pair of No. 1 country hits with “A Lesson in Leavin’” (1980) and “Are You Happy Baby?” (1980). A string of hit duets with Kenny Rogers included the No. 1 country hits “Every Time Two Fools Collide” (1978) and “What Are We Doin’ in Love” (1981), which also became a Top Twenty pop recording.

In the early 1960s, Patsy Cline was a mentor to Dottie West, and West, in turn, befriended other performers and songwriters, boosting the careers of Larry Gatlin, Jeannie Seely, and Steve Wariner. West died from injuries sustained in a car crash in 1991 at age fifty-eight.

Pictured: Dottie West and Jerry Bradly at RCA Studios, 1973

10/18/2025

When Floyd Cramer first visited Nashville in 1952, studio pianists were scarce.

Raised in the small community of Huttig, Arkansas, Cramer taught himself to play piano by ear. After graduating from high school in 1951, he moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, and joined the "Louisiana Hayride" house band. He began commuting to Nashville the following year, finally relocating there for good in 1955. “By 1956 and ’57, I was in day and night doing sessions,” Cramer recalled.

RCA’s Chet Atkins signed Cramer as an instrumental artist in 1958, but the slip-note style he became known for—a technique characterized by hitting a note and sliding, or slipping, almost immediately into the next, less forcefully attacked note—was something he picked up during another artist’s session.

On January 5, 1960, Cramer was in the studio to record with RCA artist Hank Locklin. The song was “Please Help Me, I’m Falling,” and one of the songwriters, Don Robertson, had sent a demo which featured him playing slip-note piano. Cramer incorporated the technique into his own playing, and it would soon define his career.

“It’s been done for a long time on the guitar by people like Maybelle Carter and by lots of people on the steel guitar,” Cramer said. “Half-tones are very common, but the style I use mainly is a whole-tone slur which gives more of a lonesome, cowboy sound.”

Though he was established as a member of Nashville’s A-Team, he also released music as a solo performer. Atkins suggested Cramer write a song to highlight the slip-note style, resulting in his fourth RCA single, “Last Date.” It soared to No. 2 on the pop chart, where it remained for four weeks, ironically kept from the top spot by Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” which included Cramer on piano.

A master of his craft and an integral part of the Nashville Sound, Floyd Cramer left an indelible mark on popular music. “Last Date” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2004. Cramer, who died December 31, 1997, was inducted into both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2003.

10/10/2025

Twang was central to guitarist Duane Eddy’s sound. So aware was Eddy of this that his album titles often included a jokey play on the word: “The Twangs the Thang,” “Twangin’ Up a Storm,” “The Biggest Twang of Them All,” “The Roaring Twangies.”

He had landed on that twang as a matter of trying to stand out. As a teenager in Tucson, Arizona, he started playing lead melodies on his bass strings and dousing them with his amplifier’s reverb, which added heft and a touch of danger. Eddy’s twang moved through raunchy rock & roll, rockabilly, country, and more, often with the help of his collaborator Lee Hazlewood. The guitarist earned hits with instrumental stompers like “Rebel Rouser” and “Peter Gunn” that in turn influenced other players of the era.

In 1963, Eddy and Hazlewood were in RCA Studio B with members of the A-team to record the album “‘Twang’ a Country Song,” featuring instrumental covers of standards like “Wildwood Flower” and “Peace in the Valley,” along with reworked Hank Williams and George Jones numbers. Among them is a version of “Crazy Arms,” with which Ray Price had forever altered the rhythm of honky-tonk music in 1956. Eddy’s version keeps the shuffling rhythm intact, but swaps out singing for rumbling electric guitar and pedal steel, with some soft backing vocals by the Jordanaires.

Eddy continued to twang for many decades after, popping up on all-star recording projects and soundtracks while touring sporadically. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. In 2000, Nashville’s then Mayor Bill Purcell bestowed him with the title “Titan of Twang.” Eddy died April 30, 2024, at the age of eighty-six.

Pictured: Junior Brown (left) and Duane Eddy

10/03/2025

"I have appreciated Chet Atkins as a musician since long before the tracks on this album were written; in fact, since I was the ripe young age of seventeen," said George Harrison in the liner notes of "Chet Atkins Picks on the Beatles.” "'I'll Cry Instead,' 'She's a Woman,' and 'Can't Buy Me Love,' having a country feeling about them, lend themselves perfectly to Chet's own style of picking, which has inspired so many guitarists throughout the world (myself included, but I didn't have enough fingers at the time)."

Rock guitar history is filled with hundreds of guitarists who drew from Atkins's musical fountainhead. His impact on rockabilly, in particular, was immeasurable. Scotty Moore, Elvis Presley's original guitarist, played fingerstyle, and Atkins's use of the EchoSonic amp inspired Moore to purchase his own. Carl Perkins alternated blues-inspired single-string work with fingerstyle, while Cliff Gallup, Gene Vincent's guitarist, was also an Atkins fan.

Singer-guitarist and rockabilly icon Eddie Cochran was a fingerstylist, and his use of the Gretsch 6120 Atkins guitar made it the instrument of choice for many rockabilly pickers, including Brian Setzer. Rockabillies constitute only a portion of Atkins-influenced rockers. Duane Eddy, known for his twangy sound, was a proficient fingerstyle player (and 6120 user). Mark Knopfler and John Fogerty learned from Atkins, and even Ted Nugent claimed him as an inspiration.

During the Beatles' peak years, Harrison played Gretsch's Atkins Country Gentleman and Tennessean models; his solos on the band's "She's a Woman," "I'm a Loser," "I Feel Fine," and "What Goes On" all invoked Atkins. The admiration was mutual. "Chet Atkins Picks on the Beatles," recorded in RCA Studio B, was released in 1965. The album, which interprets a selection of Beatles songs, showcases Atkins’s appreciation for the architecture of their songwriting.

By blending country fingerpicking with pop and early rock sensibilities, Atkins left a lasting impact on contemporaries and successors alike, proving that artistry, precision, and a distinctive personal sound can resonate across generations and genres.

09/26/2025

On January 30, 1968, Bobby Goldsboro recorded “Honey” at RCA Studio B, creating a massive hit. Though a global smash at the time, its sentimental lyrics now divide listeners. That's because the song's story of deep love and loss—told from the man's point of view—presents a picture of his wife as being childlike and dependent.

Goldsboro co-produced “Honey” alongside Bob Montgomery, head of A&R for United Artists Records’ country division. Together, they crafted an emotional soundscape defined by ethereal background vocals and Don Tweedy’s lush string arrangement. The first performance was flawless.

Montgomery told "Billboard," “We cut it perfectly on the very first take. Everyone looked at each other as if to say, ‘Is that it? Did we miss something?’” There was excitement in the room. Pianist Larry Butler recalled, “All of us who played that night knew that ‘Honey’ was going to be a huge record. In fact, most of us called our wives at home so we could play it for them over the phone.” The magic they felt in the studio foreshadowed the song’s immense public connection.

Released in February 1968, “Honey" became a massive crossover success, selling over a million copies in its first three weeks and becoming the best-selling record of the year. It spent five weeks at No. 1 on "Billboard’s" Hot 100 and three weeks at No. 1 on the Hot Country Singles chart.

“Honey” was named the Country Music Association’s Song of the Year. Goldsboro received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Pop Vocal Performance, Male, and songwriter Bobby Russell earned two nominations for the song: Best Country Song and Song of the Year. In a fascinating twist, Russell lost both awards to himself, as another of his hits, “Little Green Apples,” received the trophy in both categories.

Pictured: Bobby Goldsboro receives an award from the Music Operators of America honoring "Honey" as Record of the Year, October 1968.

09/22/2025

There wasn’t much call for honky-tonk sounds in 1970s Nashville, with the country industry having shifted toward the polished productions of Billy Sherrill, Jerry Kennedy, and Owen Bradley for the time being. And yet Kentucky-born, Florida-raised Gary Stewart helped stage a honky-tonk and rockabilly revival that resulted in a handful of signature hits and one classic album.

With 1974’s “Drinkin’ Thing,” Stewart found his way into the country Top Ten after years of playing the barrooms of southern Florida. The title track fared even better, reaching No. 4. Roy Dea produced Stewart’s debut album “Out of Hand,” a 1975 release that garnered positive reviews for its raw, back-to-basics approach to country music. “Stewart has a fine voice, capable of cutting through the smoke and pinning you to the wall with its unashamed emotion and energy,” wrote one critic in the "Houston Post."

The biggest single from “Out of Hand” was also the biggest of Stewart’s career. In 1975, RCA issued “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles),” a Wayne Carson song that Stewart recorded at RCA Studio B. A barroom weeper that Stewart sings with urgency and palpable frustration, it became the sole No. 1 hit of his career.

Years later, Stewart’s influence was still felt. Historian Bill Malone called him “one of the finest young honky-tonk singers of the modern period” in his book “Country Music USA,” while Dwight Yoakam had applied Stewart’s lessons to his own career. “Gary Stewart was a very bright spot for honky-tonk music about ’74 or ’75, ’76,” he told the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in an oral history interview. “There was an element of youth in that. There was an element of recklessness in the approach. There was an austerity of production. See, that’s the key in honky-tonk music.”

09/12/2025

At one time or another, virtually every top session player or background vocalist in Nashville recorded in RCA Studio B, creating lasting memories—and music—in the process. "I cut my first Nashville session there backing up Ann-Margret," said Country Music Hall of Fame member Charlie McCoy, "and the first big hit I played on, Roy Orbison's 'Candy Man,' was recorded there, too."

With his harmonica and other instruments, McCoy has graced the recordings of a broad range of artists, from ELVIS PRESLEY and Bob Dylan to Waylon Jennings and Loretta Lynn. His trademark harmonica style, distinguished by its speed, precision, clarity, and unerring phrasing, was radically different from the down-home approach of his predecessors and re-established the mouth organ as a voice in country music.

As a young musician, and at the encouragement of rising country star Mel Tillis, McCoy moved to Nashville in 1960 and recorded several sides as a rock & roll singer and guitarist, but it wasn't until he played harmonica on "Candy Man" in 1961 that his luck began to change. “It got Roy another hit and me a career,” McCoy said. The calls for session work came flooding in.

In the ensuing decades, McCoy worked thousands of sessions, often as many as four hundred in a single year. He can be heard on recordings by a virtual who’s who of country music: “500 Miles Away from Home” (Bobby Bare), “Orange Blossom Special” (Johnny Cash), “Old Dogs, Children, and Watermelon Wine” (Tom T. Hall), “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line” (Waylon Jennings), “He Stopped Loving Her Today” (George Jones), “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me)” (Jerry Lee Lewis), “My Tennessee Mountain Home” (Dolly Parton), “Take This Job and Shove It” (Johnny Paycheck), and “Delta Dawn” (Tanya Tucker).

09/02/2025

Gillian Welch & David Rawlings first attempted to record Welch’s third album, "Time (The Revelator)," in Los Angeles, but they couldn’t find the vibe they were looking for. Returning to Nashville, Rawlings, who produced the album, began searching for a studio space and found RCA Studio B. The studio had ceased its operations for RCA over twenty years earlier, in 1977, though it was subsequently reopened by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum for public tours and occasional recording projects.

“One day, I drove by Studio B, and the door was open. I thought, ‘Oh, my God, that’s Studio B. I’ve never been in there.’ I walked in, heard my footsteps on the floor, and knew that I liked the sound of the room.”

It proved to be the perfect place to record an album filled with songs that are richly layered examinations of time, truth, myth, music, and even references to Johnny Cash and ELVIS PRESLEY, who famously recorded more than 200 songs at Studio B. The historical significance would add another layer of meaning to the sessions.

Performing without other musicians, the duo created raw and intimate tracks with no overdubs and “a tremendous number of first takes,” according to Welch.

“Dave just said, ‘Play “Revelator,”’ and we used the mic test,” she recalled, giving an example of their instinctive approach. Rawlings added, “We played it once and it was great because we hadn’t played it in months. We got that first take feeling.”

An acoustic album with rock & roll sensibilities, "Time (The Revelator)" features ten songs that are musically sparse and sometimes dissonant yet lyrically hefty and expansive, culminating with the nearly fifteen-minute “I Dream a Highway.” Encompassing the themes of the preceding nine songs, it’s at once a plaintive coda as well as a gorgeously rambling open ending.

RCA Studio B

11/21/2025

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