Two buildings make the serious argument: the Quonset Hut at 34 Music Square East (originally 804 16th Avenue South) and RCA Studio B at 1611 Roy Acuff Place. They were built three years apart by competing producers working on opposite sides of the same street, and together they produced the Nashville Sound that saved country music from irrelevance in the 1950s. Choosing between them requires making a decision about what kind of historical significance matters more.
The Quonset Hut: Where Music Row Was Born
In 1954, brothers Owen and Harold Bradley purchased a rooming house at 804 16th Avenue South for $7,500. Owen had been working for Decca Records since 1947 and needed a proper recording space. They gutted the first floor and turned the basement into a 30 by 35-foot recording studio, which they initially called Music City Recordings. This was the first recording studio in what became Music Row. That move is where the neighborhood begins.
The first song recorded at the studio was “Be-Bop-a-Lula” by Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps. The Bradleys then bought a $7,800 Army surplus Quonset hut and attached it to the back of the house to serve as a larger sound stage, eventually converting it into Studio B. The Quonset hut’s larger footprint allowed for string sections and orchestras, which were fundamental to the Nashville Sound. Patsy Cline recorded “Crazy” there in 1961. Brenda Lee recorded “I’m Sorry” there. “I Fall to Pieces” was cut there. Marty Robbins recorded “El Paso” there.
The Bradleys sold the complex to Columbia Records in January 1962 for $300,000. Columbia continued using the Quonset hut for recording until 1982. Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Simon and Garfunkel, and the Beach Boys all recorded there under Columbia’s ownership. After sitting unused as office space for years, music businessman Mike Curb purchased the property in 2005 and had the hut restored. It reopened in 2009 as a recording classroom for Belmont University’s Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business. The Quonset hut is now a National Register of Historic Places property.
The argument for the Quonset hut: without it, there is no Music Row. It was the first building, the first commercial studio, the geographic anchor around which everything else assembled. By the early 1960s, the Bradley operation was hosting 700 sessions annually and had been joined by enough neighboring businesses that the district had developed its own name.
RCA Studio B: The Room That Built the Nashville Sound
In 1957, Nashville businessman Dan Maddox built a flat-roof, concrete-block structure at 1611 Roy Acuff Place for $37,515. RCA Records took out a long-term lease and installed its recording equipment under the management of Chet Atkins, who ran RCA’s Nashville operation from 1957 to 1973. The building is plain to the point of deliberate austerity: almost no windows, minimal exterior decoration, a facade that communicates nothing about what happened inside.
What happened inside: over approximately 35,000 recording sessions during the studio’s 20 years of RCA operation, the studio produced more than 1,000 hit records. Elvis Presley recorded more than 250 songs there, including “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” “Little Sister,” and “Return to Sender.” Don Gibson’s “Oh Lonesome Me” was the first Nashville Sound recording made there in 1957, the studio’s opening year. Dolly Parton recorded “I Will Always Love You” there in 1973. Waylon Jennings cut “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line” there in 1968. Roy Orbison, the Everly Brothers, Jim Reeves, Charley Pride, Willie Nelson, Eddy Arnold, Bobby Bare, and Fats Domino all recorded there. The blue X painted on the studio floor marks the spot where hundreds of lead vocal performances were recorded.
The Nashville Number System, the chord-notation shorthand still used by Nashville session musicians today, was developed at Studio B. Chet Atkins managed the room for 16 years, and the consistency of his presence helped create a house style that defined an entire genre. RCA closed the studio in 1977. The Country Music Hall of Fame acquired it, and the Mike Curb Family Foundation donated it to the Museum in 1992, leasing it back to the museum for $1 per year. The museum runs public tours of Studio B daily; it is also still occasionally used for recording sessions.
The Verdict
RCA Studio B is the more historically significant building, and it is not particularly close. The Quonset Hut is historically prior, the origin point, and deserves full credit for founding Music Row as a geographic concept. But Studio B is where the Nashville Sound was codified, concentrated, and distributed to a mass audience. The volume of hit records produced there, the diversity of artists it hosted, the longevity and consistency of its operation, and the fact that it remains physically intact and publicly accessible in its original condition all make it the more important building.
The Quonset Hut was where Music Row started. Studio B is where Music Row mattered.
Sources
- Country Music Hall of Fame, “About Studio B”: https://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/experiences/studio-b/about-studio-b
- RCA Studio B, Library of Congress Historic Buildings Survey: https://www.loc.gov/item/tn0437/
- RCA Victor Studios, SAH Archipedia: https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/TN-01-037-0001
- Quonset Hut Studio, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuonsetHutStudio
- Quonset Hut, Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/tn0436/
- Owen Bradley, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Bradley
- Owen Bradley, Country Music Hall of Fame: https://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/hall-of-fame/owen-bradley
- Music Row, Tennessee Encyclopedia: https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/music-row-nashville/
- Bradley Studios / Quonset Hut history, Tape Op Magazine: https://tapeop.com/interviews/115/bradley-studios-quonset-hut-and-nashville-sound-bonus