Nashville Cats

Record Production in Music City

Travis D. Stimeling

Features original interviews with session musicians, recording engineers, and arrangers from the period
Includes information drawn from previously unexplored archives
Draws on close listening to hit recordings

Nashville Cats

Record Production in Music City

Travis D. Stimeling

Description

The Nashville Cats bounced from studio to studio along the city's Music Row, delivering instrumental backing tracks for countless recordings throughout the mid-20th century. Music industry titans like Chet Atkins, Anita Kerr, and Charlie McCoy were among this group of extraordinarily versatile session musicians who defined the era of the "Nashville Sound," and helped establish the city of Nashville as the renowned hub of the record industry it is today.

Nashville Cats: Record Production in Music City is the first account of these talented musicians and the behind-the-scenes role they played to shape the sounds of country music. Many of the genre's most celebrated artists-Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, Floyd Cramer, and others immortalized in the Country Music Hall of Fame — and musicians from outside the genre's ranks, like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, heard the call of the Nashville Sound and followed it to the city's studios, recording song after song that resonated with the brilliance of the Cats. Author Travis D. Stimeling investigates how the Nashville system came to be, how musicians worked within it, and how the desires of an ever-growing and diversifying audience affected the practices of record production. Drawing on a rich array of recently uncovered primary sources and original oral histories,Âinterviews with key players, and close exploration of hit songs, Nashville Cats brings us back into the studios of this famous era, right alongside the remarkable musicians who made it happen.

Nashville Cats

Record Production in Music City

Travis D. Stimeling

Nashville Cats

Record Production in Music City

Travis D. Stimeling

Author Information

Travis D. Stimeling is Associate Professor of Musicology at the West Virginia University School of Music, where he also directs the WVU Bluegrass and Old-Time Bands. He is the author of Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin's Progressive Country Scene (OUP, 2011) and The Country Music Reader (OUP, 2015), and edited The Oxford Handbook of Country Music (OUP, 2017).

Nashville Cats

Record Production in Music City

Travis D. Stimeling

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the 2020 Belmont Award for the Best Book related to country music
Certificate of Merit in category Best Historical Research in Recorded Country or Folk Music, Association for Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence

"Stimeling's Nashville Cats provides detailed and compelling glimpses of these musicians who were a force in establishing not only the Nashville Sound but also in creating a fluid musical notation system and in helping establish Nashville's country music recording industry." -- Henry Carrigan, No Depression

"Broadly conceived, meticulously researched, and engagingly written, Travis Stimeling's Nashville Cats gives Music City's studio musicians the attention they have long deserved." -- John W. Rumble, Senior Historian, Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum

"I have been waiting for this book for years! Studio musicians were (and are) key to musical production and there is no one better to explain their importance than Travis Stimeling. His book will be a great addition to my graduate and undergraduate classes where students will be able to see how intimate moments behind the scenes create public musical expression." -- Kristine M. McCusker, Professor, Middle Tennessee State University

"Travis D. Stimeling's fabulous book is the first to tell us the important history of session musicians during the Nashville Sound era, and it brings our understanding of country music recording history to a whole new level. Anyone interested in the exciting story of how individual musicians helped shape country music should read Nashville Cats." --R Leigh H. Edwards, Professor of English at Florida State University, and author of Dolly Parton, Gender, and Country Music