Nashville Number System

Nashville session players write chord charts in numbers rather than letters, and the reason is the working day. In the late 1950s Neal Matthews Junior, who arranged the vocals for the Jordanaires, was singing on several sessions a day and could not memorise everything. He got there from shape note singing, the gospel quartet notation he had grown up with, and swapped the shapes for numbers: number one is whichever chord the key is built on, and every other chord is counted up from it. A chart written that way is key independent, so when a singer arrives and wants the song a tone lower than the demo, nothing has to be rewritten and nobody has to transpose in their head. Everyone plays the same numbers in a different key. On a session booked for three hours and three songs, that is the difference between finishing and not. In the early 1960s the bass player and harmonica player Charlie McCoy adapted the idea for the rhythm section, and it spread through every studio in town. A Nashville number chart can be scribbled on whatever paper is nearest while the demo plays once, and it will carry the form, the chord changes, the pushes and the stops. Numbering the degrees of a scale is centuries old, so the idea is not Nashville's; what is Nashville's is a disposable notation invented on a studio floor rather than in a conservatory, and it is still how sessions are run. McCoy's union, Local 257 of the American Federation of Musicians, was chartered here on 11 December 1902, the second musicians' local organised in the country, and it is still the union hall for the players on Music Row.