RCA Studio B, Nashville, TN (2025)

07/09/2025

Born to a poor farming family near Wellston, Oklahoma, Norma Jean Beasler would become a popular recording artist and television star of the 1960s. Known primarily for her role on "The Porter Wagoner Show," she starred opposite Wagoner for six years before returning home to Oklahoma, passing the mantle to Dolly Parton in 1967.

With the encouragement of her aunt, Norma Jean learned to play guitar and made her radio debut at the age of twelve. The promising young singer looked to Kitty Wells as a source of musical inspiration as well as a model for a successful career in country music. While still in school, Norma Jean had three weekly radio spots on Oklahoma City’s KLPR and toured with several western swing bands.

Norma Jean's big break came in 1958 when she joined the cast of ABC-TV's "Ozark Jubilee," where she met Wagoner during an early guest appearance. She moved to Nashville and joined Wagoner in 1961 on his syndicated TV show, billed as Pretty Miss Norma Jean. In 1963, she began recording for RCA. Her first hit, "Let's Go All the Way," was recorded in RCA Studio B and reached No. 11 on the country charts in 1964.

Though they only occasionally recorded as a duo, Wagoner functioned as her producer on most of Norma Jean's recordings. Of her twenty-two chart records, her highest was "The Game of Triangles" (No. 5), recorded with Bobby Bare and Liz Anderson. Norma Jean had her last RCA chart record in 1971 with “The Kind of Needin’ I Need.” In a full-circle moment, she scored her last chart hit in 1982 with "Let's Go All the Way" once again, this time in a duet with Claude Gray.

Pictured: Norma Jean and Chet Atkins, 1967

07/02/2025

"The musicians in this town will cut you a hit if you don’t get in their way too much,” producer and guitarist Chet Atkins was fond of saying. What a perfect way to describe the intuitive magic Nashville’s studio professionals applied to their work.

Upright bass player Bob Moore, a key component of the Nashville Sound and core member of Nashville’s A-Team, played on an estimated 17,000 sessions during his career. A sizable portion of them took place at RCA’s Studio B.

“We didn’t know what songs we were going to do. They’d present us with a demo and a good song, and a lot of them would go into the control room and leave us alone, and we’d work the song out and knock on the glass and say, ‘Let’s cut.’ Every now and then, you just know that it’s going to be a hit,” Moore recalled.

Moore played on hundreds of hits at Studio B, including Floyd Cramer’s “Last Date,” the Browns’ “The Three Bells,” and Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight.” For “Crying” by Roy Orbison, Moore also served as musical director.

Moore, a Nashville native, began playing the upright bass as a teenager and worked with Country Music Hall of Fame members Little Jimmy Dickens, Flatt & Scruggs, Eddy Arnold, Red Foley, and Marty Robbins before becoming a first-call studio musician.

Pictured: on the left, Moore plays a session at Owen Bradley’s studio; on the right, Moore is with Flatt & Scruggs for a WSM radio show.

06/25/2025

During the twenty years when Studio B was an active recording center for RCA Records, session musicians were assembled by a producer like Chet Atkins to bring the magic to an artist’s potential hit songs. Sometimes they didn’t even need a lead singer: a handful of instrumental compositions from some of the key players became hits that highlighted the exemplary musicianship present in Nashville.

Pianist Floyd Cramer’s calling card was his slip-note technique, picked up from composer Don Robertson, in which Cramer added playful grace notes to recordings like Hank Locklin’s “Please Help Me, I’m Falling.” Cramer was signed to RCA Victor as an artist, and his lilting 1960 single, “Last Date,” reached No. 2 on the pop charts, held from the top spot by Elvis Presley's "Are You Lonesome Tonight," recorded at a session that Cramer had participated in.

Saxophone player Boots Randolph was an unlikely presence in country music circles where horns weren’t always welcome, but his playing showed up on pop hits like “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and Elvis Presley's "Return to Sender." In RCA Studio B, he recorded the first version of his whimsical “Yakety Sax” for RCA Victor; a re-recorded version for Monument would become a hit in 1963. Later on, it became synonymous with slapstick comedy after it was used as the theme music for “The Benny Hill Show.”

Chet Atkins was not only a formidable presence as a producer and label executive, but also as a brilliant guitar innovator. His nimble, hard-to-categorize playing blended styles together and often combined rhythmic and lead voices. His biggest instrumental hit was “Yakety Axe,” a guitar-centric remake of Randolph’s hit that went to No. 4 on the country chart, though he also cut versions of songs by the Beatles, Bobbie Gentry, and Simon & Garfunkel.

Atkins, Randolph, and Cramer didn’t limit these performances to the studio. They often toured together in a revue-style configuration—in which Randolph served as the affable emcee—and played together as part of the Million Dollar Band on numerous episodes of “Hee Haw.”

06/18/2025

“You could say that my career actually started here at RCA Studio B because it’s where we recorded the song that started it all,” said Donna Fargo on a visit to the studio last year.

That song was "The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.,” which Fargo wrote and recorded for Dot Records at Studio B in 1972. The song went No. 1 country and No. 11 pop; won a Grammy for the Best Country Vocal Performance, Female; took CMA’s Single of the Year award; and was named BMI’s most performed country song in 1973.

Fargo cited recording in Music City, with background singers like the Nashville Sounds and a conductor/arranger like Bill Walker, as one contributing factor to the song’s success. “I can’t say enough good things about the musicians in Nashville. You just sing a song, and they interpret it perfectly. ‘Happiest Girl’ just has a three-note pick-up for an intro, so it wasn’t a fancy cluttered arrangement . . . it was simple, and Stan [her husband and producer Stan Silver] mastered it perfectly, so the lyrics were easy to hear.”

Another factor in the song's popularity was creative flexibility. Fargo explained, “My [first] idea was ‘The Happiest Girl in the World,’ but when I started to write it, it changed my mind. I could have changed the rhyme scheme, but how many words rhyme with 'world'? I limited my happiness to the U.S.A., which is still pretty big, right?”

06/13/2025

The Everly Brothers were Nashville’s first consistently successful rock & roll act. They sang close, sibling harmony in the country tradition of brother duets but infused their records with rock & roll rhythms and lyrics that appealed to a young audience. They were also hitmakers on the country charts, and they were elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001.

Don and Phil Everly, born almost two years apart, arrived in Nashville with their parents, Ike and Margaret, in 1955. By early 1957, they’d secured a deal with Cadence Records. The brothers began releasing a string of hits, including “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” recorded at RCA’s Studio B on March 6, 1958. Cadence owner Archie Bleyer produced the session, which featured Chet Atkins on electric tremolo guitar.

The husband-and-wife songwriting team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant usually wrote together, but Boudleaux wrote “All I Have to Do Is Dream” without Felice.

Phil Everly recalled, “I remember hearing ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’ on an acetate with Boudleaux’s version on it, and I said, at the time, they could have put Boudleaux’s out and it would’ve been a hit. It’s just a great, great song.”

“All I Have to Do Is Dream” spent three weeks at #1 on the "Billboard" C&W Best Sellers chart, five weeks at #1 on the "Billboard" Top 100, and was a massive hit in the United Kingdom, where it was #1 on the "New Musical Express" chart for seven weeks. It received a Grammy Hall of Fame award in 2004.

06/04/2025

On April 18, 1963, Bobby Bare stepped into RCA Studio B and recorded his first Top Ten country hit. The future Country Music Hall of Fame member made a piece of country music history that day with his recording of Mel Tillis and Danny Dill’s “Detroit City,” a ballad of working-class discontent that soared to #2 on the country chart. It not only was a hit on the pop and country charts; it also won Bare a Grammy.

Dill had the idea after noticing a trend of southerners migrating north for better-paying jobs, only to end up feeling homesick for the place they left behind. He couldn’t figure out how to properly say it until his friend Tillis played him a snippet of a song that began with the line, “Last night I went to sleep in Tupelo County.” Dill insisted that it be changed to “Detroit City”—with heavy emphasis on the first syllable—and they ran with it, turning their refrain “I want to go home” into a mantra for the displaced.

“You don’t have to be from Detroit for you to like that song,” Dill told the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in 1975. “‘Detroit City’ becomes every city. When you hear it, why, you want to go back wherever you’re from; the ‘I want to go home’ is just as important as the song.”

Billy Grammer cut the first version (as “I Wanna Go Home”) in 1962, and Bare followed with his not long after. Produced by Chet Atkins, Bare's record featured a signature instrumental lick—a low E guitar string that’s tuned down to D and then back up—borrowed from Grammer’s version but given a boost with rumbling electric guitar. “When I did it, it was strictly Chet’s idea to use an electric guitar for this effect,” Bare told the museum. Henry Strzelecki, who played bass on the session, recalled learning the lick. “Chet showed it to us,” Strzelecki said. “And so it was, to me, one of the great records that was done in Nashville. It was so unique.”

05/29/2025

Since the early 1960s, the Nashville Number System has been the musical shorthand by which many players and singers communicate in the studio and onstage. The Nashville Number System has been used frequently by session musicians at RCA Studio B.

For centuries, instrumentalists, composers, and theorists had substituted Roman numerals for chord letters, allowing their values to apply in any key. In the Baroque period, J. S. Bach and others used the "figured bass" method of harmony writing—underscoring the melodic notes with single bass notes and a set of Arabic numerals denoting scale-degree intervals to be played above them. Until the mid-twentieth century, however, no one had devised a system whereby an entire song could be quickly transcribed on a single page and understood with only a rudimentary background in music theory.

As a time-saving measure, Jordanaires member Neal Matthews Jr. began using numbers to map out vocal parts for the group's busy schedule of recording sessions and live appearances around 1957. Rather than adopt the shape notes commonly used by gospel quartets in the 1930s and 1940s or even Roman numerals, Matthews used regular numbers as his foundation.

In May 1961, multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy began playing sessions at Studio B and other studios in Nashville, and he applied Matthews's technique to create rhythm section chord charts, combining his own symbols and markings with formal notation standards. McCoy's sophisticated adaptation was quickly embraced by other Nashville session players, who previously had used no charts, but rather had memorized songs before recording.

Although fully developed today, the system still retains its informal quality; one musician's chart-writing techniques may not mirror those of a studio colleague—a badge of individuality characteristic of the system itself.

Pictured: a handwritten example of the Nashville Number System, 1973.

05/20/2025

Country Music Hall of Fame member Dolly Parton recorded “Coat of Many Colors,” the title track of her eighth studio album, for RCA Victor at Studio B in April 1971.

Produced by Bob Ferguson, “Coat of Many Colors” poignantly shares a painful memory from Dolly’s childhood while demonstrating her storytelling prowess. Though rich in love, the Parton family struggled to provide for their twelve children. From a bag of donated remnants, Dolly’s mother, Avie Lee, sewed young Dolly a coat by piecing together some of the brightly colored scraps, and as she sewed, she told Dolly the biblical story of Joseph and his coat of many colors. Though Dolly proudly wore the patchwork coat to school, her classmates were not impressed with it. They laughed at her, broke the coat’s buttons and took it, then locked Dolly in a closet.

When the song came to her in 1969, Dolly was traveling on Porter Wagoner’s tour bus. Because she didn’t have paper, she scribbled the words on the back of a dry-cleaning receipt from one of Wagoner’s suits. Dolly later told journalist Chet Flippo of the song’s healing powers: “For years, I had that in my mind, and it became a masterpiece to me, and I never worried about it anymore.”

“Coat of Many Colors” is one of Dolly’s favorite songs not only because of its specific connection to her life but also for its universal appeal. Added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry in 2011 and listed in 2021 in “Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” special issue, “Coat of Many Colors” reached #4 on the “Billboard” country singles chart on Christmas Day, 1971.

Pictured: Dolly Parton with Porter Wagoner at Studio B.

05/16/2025

Between 1957 and 1977, approximately 18,000 sessions were recorded within Studio B's walls, including #1 hits on both the country and pop charts. Explore a sampling of those hits here.

1950s

Don Gibson – Oh Lonesome Me (1958)
Everly Brothers – All I Have to Do Is Dream (1958)
Elvis Presley – Big Hunk o’ Love (1959)
The Browns – The Three Bells (1959)
Jim Reeves – He’ll Have to Go (1959)

1960s

Hank Locklin – Please Help Me, I’m Falling (1960)
Roy Orbison – Running Scared (1961)
Skeeter Davis – The End of the World (1962)*
Connie Smith – Once a Day (1964)
Eddy Arnold – What’s He Doing in My World (1965)

*a #2 hit on both the country and pop charts

1970s

Dolly Parton – Joshua (1970)
Charley Pride – Kiss an Angel Good Morning (1971)
Donna Fargo – The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A. (1972)
Ronnie Milsap – Please Don’t Tell Me How the Story Ends (1974)
Gary Stewart – She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles) (1975)

Pictured: Charley Pride in Studio B, late 1960s

05/14/2025

If a country recording in the late 1950s or early 1960s required backing vocals, chances are that either the Jordanaires or the Anita Kerr Quartet were going to supply them. For her part, Anita Kerr (born Anita Jean Grilli) came from singing with her family in Memphis to Nashville, where she created a group to sing on WSM’s "Sunday Down South." After backing Red Foley on his recording of “Our Lady of Fatima” and arranging for Decca Records, Kerr assembled the quartet of Dottie Dillard, Louis Nunley, Gil Wright, and herself for session work.

The group sang backup on numerous country recordings from the Nashville Sound era, including Jim Reeves’s “He’ll Have to Go," a #1 country hit that reached #2 on the pop charts in 1960. In the early 1960s, Kerr was hired as Chet Atkins’s assistant and worked on RCA sessions, where she led the vocal group and arranged numerous recordings that were cut in RCA Studio B. Among them were releases by Floyd Cramer, Al Hirt, Rosemary Clooney, and Roy Orbison. Studio B recording engineer Bill Porter was impressed by Kerr’s musicality and ability to compose vocal arrangements on the fly.

“Anita had perfect pitch. She was just right on every time; could tell you exactly what the note was, why, and everything else. She had good arranging ideas,” Porter recalled in a Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum oral history interview. “Most of these sessions didn’t have charts. She’d tell them this, that, and everything, and get it together. And then hum a part. They’d work it out and do the arrangement.”

The Anita Kerr Singers also recorded their own work, with albums that included 1959’s “Voices in Hi-Fi" and 1965’s Grammy-winning “We Dig Mancini.” Kerr left Nashville for California to focus on writing and arranging for film, then departed the United States altogether in 1970 to live with her family in Switzerland. She continued to compose and arrange for many years after, earning a NARAS Governors Award in 1992 for her contributions to popular music. She died in 2022 at ninety-four years old.

The Anita Kerr Singers pictured from left: (below) Gil Wright, Anita Kerr; (above) Dottie Dillard, Louis Nunley.

05/08/2025

Few films left audiences more devastated in the 1960s than “Dr. Zhivago”—an epic tale of two star-crossed lovers torn apart by a brutal war. As the credits rolled for John Hartford, however, he was left with a different feeling in the theater: pure, urgent inspiration. “When I came home, I was really turned on,” the singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist recalled.

Twenty minutes later, Hartford had written the song that would define his career: “Gentle on My Mind,” a freewheeling tune about a restless soul who keeps a vision of his love “in the backroads by the rivers of my memory . . . ever gentle on my mind.”

Recorded by Hartford at Studio B in 1967 with producer Felton Jarvis, “Gentle on My Mind” would quickly become one of the most-covered songs of its era—even though it violated “all the principles of pop songwriting,” in Hartford’s words. “It’s a banjo tune, it has no chorus, it has a lot of words so that it’s hard to sing. One of my songwriting principles at that time was that the words should travel past you as fast as they do in conversation.”

Despite its intricate, lengthy lyrics, many top artists were moved to cut their own version of “Gentle on My Mind”—most notably Country Music Hall of Fame member Glen Campbell, whose definitive recording cracked both the pop and country Top Forty in 1968.

He’d also make “Gentle on My Mind” the theme song of his TV variety series, "The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour," and recruited Hartford to the show’s cast of musicians.

“Gentle on My Mind” won four Grammys in 1968—two for Campbell’s version, and two for Hartford’s original. Nearly fifty years later, a version by country trio The Band Perry won the Grammy for Best Country Duo/Group Performance.

05/02/2025

Stand right where American icons made music history. Tours of Historic RCA Studio B are offered daily.

Monday–Thursday
10:30 AM, 11:30 AM, 12:30 PM, 1:30 PM, 2:30 PM, 3:30 PM

Friday–Sunday
10:00 AM, 11:00 AM, 1:00 PM, 2:00 PM, 3:00 PM

*Tours are only available in conjunction with Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum admission

https://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/experiences/studio-b

RCA Studio B

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