Hatch Show Print

Two brothers, Charles and Herbert Hatch, opened a print shop in Nashville in April 1879. Their father was a printer who had brought the family from Wisconsin four years earlier. The first job off the press was a handbill six inches by nine advertising a lecture by the preacher Henry Ward Beecher, and it already had the things a Hatch poster would always have: big wood type, a letterpress bite you can feel with a thumb, and a layout built to be read from across a street. Everything a Hatch poster does follows from the medium. Wood type comes in a few sizes, so the design is a stack of lines fitted to a rectangle; ink is expensive, so the colours are flat and few; and the sheet has to survive a fence in the weather, so nothing is delicate. The look that now reads as nostalgia was a set of constraints nobody could get around. For the next century the shop printed the South's entertainment: vaudeville bills, circuses, tent revivals, medicine shows, then the Opry, Hank Williams and Elvis Presley. The image blocks were hand carved from maple and basswood and never thrown away, so a poster printed today can be pulled from blocks that advertised shows a century ago. Offset printing should have finished it. After Will T. Hatch died in 1952 the shop went through lean years, and what carried it was not the archive but the clients: country performers kept ordering the posters they always had. Gaylord Entertainment bought the shop in 1986 and handed it to the Country Music Foundation in 1992, and in 2013 it moved into the expanded Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, where the press floor sits behind eighty feet of glass in view of the museum hallway.