When someone asks Chet Atkins what the Nashville Sound was, he reached into his pocket, shook his loose change, and said: “That’s what it is. It’s the sound of money.”
The Nashville Sound was the calculated commercial reinvention of country music in the late 1950s and early 1960s, designed to survive the arrival of rock and roll. It worked. It also permanently changed what country music was, split its audience, and left a debate that has never been resolved about what country music is actually supposed to sound like.
What Changed
Before the Nashville Sound, country music ran on fiddles, steel guitars, nasal vocals, and lyrical content about working-class problems – failed marriages, alcoholism, truck driving, hard living. This was honky tonk music. It was regional, rough around the edges, and commercially limited in a era when rock and roll was beginning to dominate radio.
Chet Atkins at RCA Victor and Owen Bradley at Decca decided to compete by making country music sound like something else. Specifically, they replaced the fiddles and steel guitars with string sections. They brought in sophisticated background vocal groups – primarily the Jordanaires and the Anita Kerr Quartet. They added soft piano, echo chambers, and reverb. They had artists croon rather than wail. The production was polished, radio-friendly, and deliberately aimed at pop audiences.
The first Nashville Sound records are generally dated to 1957: Jim Reeves’ “Four Walls” in February, then Chet Atkins’ production of Don Gibson’s “Oh Lonesome Me” later that year. Within five years, the style had defined Nashville’s entire commercial output.
The Artists It Made
The Nashville Sound made several careers. Jim Reeves developed a velvet baritone style perfectly suited to it. Eddy Arnold crossed over to pop audiences entirely. Don Gibson wrote and recorded in the format. The Sound’s most enduring product was Patsy Cline – “Crazy,” “I Fall to Pieces,” “Sweet Dreams” are all Nashville Sound productions, all made with Owen Bradley at Quonset Hut Studio on Music Row. Without Bradley’s production decisions, those recordings sound completely different.
The Jordanaires – Elvis Presley’s backup vocal group – were the same musicians providing backing vocals on country sessions throughout this period. Nashville’s A-Team session musicians played on nearly every record made in the city: guitarists Harold Bradley and Grady Martin, bassist Bob Moore, pianist Floyd Cramer, drummer Buddy Harman.
Why It Was Controversial
The Nashville Sound was called “countrypolitan” by its defenders and “not country” by its critics. The critique was that it smoothed out the rough edges that made country music honest. Honky tonk lyrics were about specific working-class experiences – Hank Williams writing about failed marriages was writing from life. The Nashville Sound replaced that with romanticized images of the American West and crossover ballads that could play on pop radio.
The most famous casualty of the formula was Willie Nelson. Chet Atkins produced Nelson’s early RCA sessions and could not get him a hit. Nelson’s voice and phrasing didn’t fit the Sound. He spent eight years in Nashville recording under it, charting 15 singles with only two breaking into the top 20. He eventually left Nashville entirely, moved to Texas, and built the outlaw country movement that was explicitly a reaction against the Nashville Sound’s commercial polish.
What Replaced It
The Nashville Sound’s dominance ran through approximately the mid-1970s. It was succeeded by the outlaw movement (Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson) and eventually by the New Traditionalists of the 1980s (George Strait, Randy Travis, Reba McEntire) who returned to more explicit country instrumentation. Modern country evolved from there into the bro-country era of the 2000s and 2010s, and then into the “country-adjacent” pop crossovers of the current era.
The Sound never entirely disappeared. The studio infrastructure it built – Music Row, the session musician economy, the producer-centered approach to recording – is still the foundation of Nashville’s commercial music industry.
Sources
- wikipedia.org – Nashville sound
- pbs.org – Nashville Sound, Ken Burns Country Music documentary
- tennesseeencyclopedia.net – Nashville Recording Industry
- historicmusicrow.com – Chet Atkins profile
- sites.dwrl.utexas.edu – The Nashville Sound (Country Music Project)