The Quonset Hut

In 1954 the bandleader and producer Owen Bradley and his brother Harold, a guitarist, paid 7,500 dollars for a two storey house at 804 16th Avenue South and built a recording studio in the basement. The street was residential and there was no music business on it. They were there because Decca had threatened to move its country division to Dallas, and they could buy there because Nashville had rezoned those residential avenues for commercial use. That basement was the first recording room on what became Music Row. In 1955 they added a Quonset hut, a corrugated steel half cylinder bought as a kit and attached to the back of the house, meaning to film musical performances in it for television. The demand turned out to be for audio, the hut was converted, and it is the room everyone remembers. What came out of it is much of what people mean by early Nashville records. Patsy Cline cut I Fall to Pieces and Crazy there, and Brenda Lee, Marty Robbins, Johnny Cash, Red Foley and Conway Twitty all worked in it. Columbia Records bought the property in January 1962, pulled the house down in 1965 for a three storey wing, and kept using the hut until 1982. Bob Dylan cut thirteen of the fourteen tracks on Blonde on Blonde in that new wing, Columbia Studio A, over February and March 1966. Sixteenth Avenue South became Music Square East in 1975. Mike Curb's family foundation bought and restored the complex in 2005 and leased it to Belmont University, whose students record in it. The hut's steel shell is still in there, swallowed by later building and visible only as a curve of roof from the car park behind.