The Nashville Sound

By the late 1950s rock and roll had taken country music's audience and its radio slots, and the men who ran the Nashville studios made a commercial decision that still divides people. Chet Atkins at RCA and Owen Bradley at Decca began stripping the fiddle and the pedal steel out of records and putting in string sections, smooth background vocals from the Jordanaires and the Anita Kerr Quartet, and a crooned lead instead of a nasal one. The result crossed over to pop radio and sold in numbers country records had never reached. It also stopped sounding like the music it came from, and traditionalists have called it the ruin of the genre ever since. Both things are true at once, which is why the argument has never resolved: the records that saved the business are the records that changed what the business was. It worked because the same dozen or so first call session players made nearly all of it, on three sessions a day, with arrangements worked out in the room rather than written in advance. That is also why it is a sound and not a style: it is the sound of one small group of musicians who knew each other's playing. Asked what the Nashville Sound actually was, Atkins is supposed to have jingled the loose change in his pocket and said that was what it was: the sound of money. A bronze of Owen Bradley sitting at a grand piano stands in the small park at the north end of Music Row.