RCA Studio B is a small, unassuming building at 1611 Roy Acuff Place on Nashville’s Music Row. From the outside it looks like a converted commercial property. From the inside, it is one of the most acoustically significant rooms in twentieth-century American music: the place where Elvis Presley recorded more than 240 songs, where the Nashville Sound was codified, and where somewhere between 1,000 and 47,000 recordings were made depending on how you count them. It is now owned by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and open for tours.
Origins: The McGavock Street Studio and Elvis’s Arrival
The story of Studio B actually begins a few blocks north, at 1525 McGavock Street, where RCA Victor set up a temporary recording facility inside the Methodist Television Radio and Film Commission building in 1954. It was there, in January 1956, that producer Steve Sholes and guitarist Chet Atkins recorded Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” his first gold record and the biggest-selling single of 1956. RCA went on to sell ten million Elvis singles that year alone. The McGavock Street building was demolished in 2006 for a parking lot.
Elvis’s commercial success gave Sholes the leverage to argue for a permanent Nashville studio. He and Atkins convinced RCA to build one. Engineer Bill Miltenburg drew the building plans on a dinner napkin. A local businessman, Dan Maddox, offered to construct it as an investment. The result was a one-and-two-story masonry building completed in 1957 on what was then called Music Square East, in the middle of what would become Nashville’s legendary Music Row.
The Nashville Sound: Atkins, Bradley, and Bill Porter
Chet Atkins, appointed RCA’s Nashville “musical director” in spring 1957 at age thirty-two, ran Studio B for its entire commercial life. He and producer Owen Bradley, working at nearby Bradley Studios, developed the Nashville Sound together: a production approach characterized by smooth background vocals, lush string arrangements, and sophisticated tempos that deliberately shifted country music away from the rougher edges of honky-tonk toward something closer to mainstream pop. The strategy worked. During the two decades RCA Studio B was in commercial operation, it produced 60 percent of Billboard’s Country chart hits.
The acoustics of the room were not initially ideal. Engineer Bill Porter arrived in early 1959 and made changes that transformed the studio’s sound. He bought acoustic ceiling tiles, cut them into triangles, and suspended them from the ceiling. These became known as “Porter Pyramids.” He then ran careful experiments to identify the room’s resonant modes and marked the spots of minimum resonance with X’s on the floor. Lead vocalists, background singers, and acoustic guitarists recorded standing directly over those marks. Elvis stood on one of them for most of his sessions. Porter also preferred the EMT 140 plate reverb to the echo chamber, keeping the plates chilled in the air conditioning to brighten their sound. After these changes, Don Gibson recorded his album “Girls, Guitars and Gibson” in the room, and the reaction to the sound was immediate.
An additional innovation happened at Studio B: Neal Matthews of the Jordanaires developed what became known as the Nashville Number System, a method of transcribing music using chord numerals rather than traditional notation. The system spread through the session musician community and is still used throughout the Nashville recording industry today.
What Was Recorded There
The partial list of recordings made at Studio B reads as a survey of mid-twentieth-century popular music. Elvis Presley recorded “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” “It’s Now or Never,” “Marie’s the Name (His Latest Flame),” “Return to Sender,” and hundreds more. For “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” Elvis asked for the studio lights to be turned off; the song was recorded in near-darkness. He frequently played the 1942 Steinway upright piano in the room, which had come to Studio B from NBC Studios. The piano remains in the studio today.
Other recordings include: Skeeter Davis’s “The End of the World,” Jim Reeves’s “He’ll Have to Go,” the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream” and “Cathy’s Clown,” Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely” and “In Dreams,” Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry,” Willie Nelson’s “Crazy,” Charley Pride’s “Kiss an Angel Good Morning,” Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” and “Coat of Many Colors,” Connie Smith’s “Once a Day,” and Porter Wagoner’s “Green, Green Grass of Home.” Producers from other labels also rented the facility, bringing a wider range of artists through. Tony Bennett, Perry Como, David Bowie, and Duane Eddy all recorded there at various points.
Dolly Parton’s first session at Studio B, in October 1967, shortly after signing with RCA Victor, is remembered for a specific reason: she was rushing to make the session on time and drove her car through the side wall of the building. The impact mark is still visible.
From Studio to Museum
RCA Studio B closed its commercial operations in 1977. The Country Music Hall of Fame made it available for tours almost immediately. In 1992, Dan and Margaret Maddox donated the building to the Hall of Fame. The Mike Curb Family Foundation purchased it in 2002 and leased it in perpetuity to the Hall of Fame, funding a renovation that restored the interior to its 1960s-era configuration.
Tours of Studio B depart from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and are available only in conjunction with museum admission; tickets start at $46. The studio is operational for educational sessions with students. The 1942 Steinway piano, the Porter Pyramids, the marks on the floor, Elvis’s kicked-in cupboard door that was never repaired, and Dolly Parton’s tire mark on the wall are all still there. Studio A, the larger facility RCA built next door in 1964, continues to operate as a commercial recording studio.
Sources
- Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, “About Historic RCA Studio B” (countrymusichalloffame.org)
- Wikipedia, “RCA Studio B” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCAStudioB)
- SAH Archipedia, “RCA Victor Studios,” Robbie D. Jones, 2012 (sah-archipedia.org)
- OnMilwaukee, “Urban Spelunking: Nashville’s Legendary RCA Studio B” (onmilwaukee.com)
- Vintage King Blog, “RCA Studio A and B: Creating the Nashville Sound” (vintageking.com)
- KRQE News 13, “Historic RCA Studio B: Go Inside This Time Capsule of ‘Nashville Sound'” (krqe.com)
- Visit Nashville TN, Historic RCA Studio B listing (visitmusiccity.com)
- Lonely Planet, Historic RCA Studio B entry (lonelyplanet.com)