BOOKS
A Shot in the Dark: Making Records in Nashville, 1945-1955
2006
by Martin Hawkins
CMF Press/Vanderbilt University Press
Before Elvis hit town, back before country music was synonymous with Nashville, a small group of intrepid entrepreneurs--local businessmen looking to make a buck and have some fun--were recording and selling all the local music they could find. From dance bands to gospel, from rhythm & blues to, yes, country music, these men inadvertently documented a wealth of local music as they struggled to run successful recording studios.
Hawkins goes beyond the music to tell the stories of the behind-the-scenes folks responsible for turning Nashville into Music City U.S.A. From Jim Bulleit, who was there at the very beginnings of the music industry, to Bill Beasley, who took on the emerging Music Row 'establishment' and lost, Hawkins guides us through the careers of the folks who defined Nashville's music scene for an exciting, unpredictable decade and traces the rise and fall of local music labels like Bullet, World, Tennessee, Republic and Speed.
Though the focus of the book is on the recording companies, studios, DJs and other music promoters, it also underlines the importance of some of the giants of Nashville music--like Francis Craig, who recorded an international hit by accident, Owen Bradley, who had a hand in many early labels, Del Wood, the surprise star of honky tonk piano, the fabulous blues singer Christine Kittrell, the underrated R&B bandleader Louis Brooks, the ubiquitous gospel promoter, Wally Fowler, the long-established Fairfield Four, and the king of the rude country song, Randy Hughes.
This book builds off of and develops more fully the research Hawkins did for the critically acclaimed Bear Family Records box collections of Nashville recordings during this same time. Full of lush photographs, many being published here for the first time, and accompanied by a twenty-song CD highlighting the wide range of music being made in Nashville at the time, the book immerses readers in the sights, sounds, and stories of this vibrant and influential decade in Nashville music making.
Reviews
Three new books acknowledge the uniqueness of the Nashville phenomenon and address it from divergent perspectives. Michael Kosser's How Nashville Became Music City, USA is a quote-heavy account of the emergence and unprecedented growth of the city's multibillion-dollar music industry over the past half-century. Martin Hawkins, in A Shot In The Dark, focuses on the lead-up to it all, the artistically vibrant decade preceding the firm establishment and meteoric rise of that industry. And the copiously illustrated, encyclopaedic Will The Circle Be Unbroken celebrates it all in high style.
Nashville didn't really come out of nowhere to claim country music. Radio station WSM had been broadcasting the Grand Ole Opry from Nashville since the '20s, and by the late '40s hot sellers like Eddy Arnold, Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams had cut records there. So had hundreds of other artists history has forsaken, not all of them from the category that would become country. Indie labels like Jim Bulleit's Bullet recorded black artists such as boogie-woogie pianist Cecil Gant alongside pop bandleaders like Francis Craig, who had a huge hit with the B-side Near You in 1947 after a DJ mistakenly played it on the air. So Nashville was producing plenty of music, but the city remained a blip on the national music biz radar until 1955, when brothers Owen and Harold Bradley opened the first recording studio on what would become the bustling, sprawling goldmine called Music Row, 16th Avenue South.
Hawkins' meticulous, absorbing chronicle of the arrivals of Bullet, Dot, blues specialist Excello and other Nashville labels from 1945 to '55 sets the scene for Kosser's tale of the birth of the Nashville Sound, as the Bradleys' studio begets RCA Victor's, and many others, drawing in an unstoppable, if undeniably insular, juggernaut of pickers and songwriters, producers and label hotshots that continues to this day. Kosser relies heavily on first-person recollections to lay it all out, making the saga a folksy if somewhat meandering read, but the breezy casualness of the stories also lends them the air of authenticity. Mojo-Jeff Tarnarkin
Awards
ARSC 2007 Award for Best Research in General History of Recorded Sound
First-place winner of the 2006 Tennessee History Book Award. The award is given jointly by the Tennessee Historical Society and the Tennessee Library Association.
