The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum & RCA Studio B
When you get off the elevator at the top floor of the Country Music Hall of Fame, you’re greeted by the Taylor Swift Education Center. It’s a pretty perfect microcosm for the whole experience of the museum, which seems to want to be a real cultural institution but has to contend with visitors that really just want to see Shania Twain’s leopard print hooded jumpsuit from the “That Don’t Impress Me Much” video.
The museum has informative if thin dioramas about the history of the art form that people zip right past so they can get to the good stuff (a temporary exhibition about Blake Shelton). I had given up on getting anything of substance out of the museum entirely when we stumbled into Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City, an exhibition all about Bob Dylan’s effect on Nashville in the sixties, when he recorded there and re-legitimized the city and its session players. The whole exhibit was like an extended companion piece to Nashville Skyline, which I had made Michael listen to as we approached the city the day before. The second half of the exhibit featured vestibules, each of which was devoted to a session player. In each one you could hit one of 6 buttons to play a notable song they played on. I will tell you that I was in heaven here. Norbert Putnam, Lloyd Green, Charlie McCoy, Grady Martin, Charlie Daniels, Fred Carter, Jr., Hargus “Pig” Robbins, I could have spent hours here. Getting to explore the sound of each of these session players, and more whose names I didn’t get time to write down, was a joy.
As it happened, though, we had to run — we had signed up for a tour of RCA Studio B, which is located about a mile away on Music Row but accessible only via guided tours that leave from the museum. This, too, was a mixed bag of really cool stuff presented in a pretty superficial way. Studio B was the studio in Nashville in the sixties and seventies, and tons of artists recorded hits there, but mostly our tour was filled with Elvis fans. Our tour guide was professional but her schtick was overly practiced and felt recited, which it probably was. I felt we would have been better served by an actual music nerd. Our guide just couldn’t geek out, which is what I wanted to do. Still, it was pretty cool to see the space where Dolly Parton recorded “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” in the same afternoon. If you actually want to learn about Studio B, here is a nerdy thing I found about it where you can learn more than you will on the actual tour, but it’s still really cool to walk around the space, in contrast to the artificial feeling Hall of Fame.
So, the Country Music Hall of Fame and RCA Studio B: kind of a mixed bag! The museum is made for the average country music fan, not for me. Glad we visited, though.
