VIII.

The Nashville Sound and Country Pop

Soon after World War II, Nashville, Tennessee, became the recognized center for the production of country music. The “Nashville Barn Dance” was a country-music stage and radio show established by Nashville’s WSM radio station in 1925. By 1939 the show was named the Grand Ole Opry and had begun nationwide broadcasts. It drew to Nashville singers and musicians with hopes of having their music broadcast.

WSM employees founded one of the first Nashville recording studios, Castle Studios, about 1946. In 1949 another important label, Sun Records, built its studio in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1952 musicians Owen and Harold Bradley set up Bradley Recording, one of the first independent recording studios in downtown Nashville. The Bradley brothers recorded country stars Ernest Tubb, Kitty Wells, and Patsy Cline, and rock star Buddy Holly. The commercial success of the Bradleys helped convince international record companies, such as Decca Records (now MCA Records), to build studios in Nashville. By the late 1950s numerous country songwriters, singers, and studio musicians had relocated to Music City, USA, as Nashville came to be known. The Country Music Association (CMA) was chartered in Nashville in 1958 to promote country music. In 1961 the Country Music Hall of Fame was founded in Nashville to commemorate the people who have made the most important contributions to country music.

In the 1950s and 1960s Nashville executives and music producers Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins created the Nashville sound, a style that describes the music of such artists as Eddy Arnold, Patsy Cline, and Jim Reeves. With the popularity of rock and roll soaring at this time, the Nashville sound was an attempt to attract a broader audience by combining elements of pop, rock, and country music. Although it featured country songs performed by country stars, the Nashville sound was produced with the technology and sophistication of popular music of the period. For example, full orchestral string sections often replaced traditional guitar, mandolin, and fiddle ensembles to create a lush accompaniment. A chorus of backup singers filled out the vocal tracks of a song. The use of synthesizers, overdubbing, reverb effects, and other studio techniques helped create a fuller, slicker, more marketable sound.

The big-label, large-studio approach has remained part of the country music industry, as has the overall tendency to combine popular and country music into a style often referred to as country pop. During the 1970s many so-called crossover artists, including Conway Twitty, Kenny Rogers, and Dolly Parton, combined pop and country styles to achieve mainstream success, often through remakes of earlier pop hits. Conversely, several mainstream popular music artists, including John Denver, Olivia Newton-John, and Ray Charles, have made successful recordings of country songs over the years.