Books
To read Martin Hawkins’ A Shot in the Dark: Making Records in Nashville, 1945-1955 is to marvel at our collective history. Today Nashville wants to position itself as a cosmopolitan place determined to overcome its reputation as one more Southern city with a lot of churches, a lot of sprawl and an amateurish event that for years was known as Fan Fair. But 40 years ago, according to Hawkins, that reputation itself didn’t exist. Belmont was a small Baptist college, Music Row was a residential neighborhood, and East Nashville was a place no one west of midtown knew how to find. Musicians in folk, hillbilly or Western music traveled to cities such as Los Angeles, Atlanta, Cincinnati or Chicago to make their records. Nashville had “no dedicated recording studios, no career session men, no record companies, and only one or two music publishers.” (Needless to say, there was no Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business, either.)
Hawkins lives in England and works as a manager in the British health services. His vocation as a historian of regional and roots music, however, has already yielded Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1991), among others. That an Englishman can write with such detailed feeling for Nashville by itself marks A Shot in the Dark as an achievement. What started out as an “interesting spare-time activity” is now 318 pages, 17 chapters, 227 illustrations—many published for the first time—a 20-song CD, liner notes, index and, most impressive, an exhaustive listing of every record issued between 1945 and 1955 by Nashville area independent labels.
A Shot in the Dark is a pleasure to read, though the less factually fanatical may find the endless names, dates and songs impossible to keep straight. (It helps to remember that the purpose of the book is to highlight that which might otherwise be forgotten.) The book succeeds on more than detail alone, however. Hawkins’ goal to give “the point of view of the Nashvillians and Nashville-based businesses and performers who were in at the beginning—those who helped provide the impetus, the continuity and the outrageous stories that contributed to Nashville’s growth as a music town” is realized in his careful handling of people and their stories. As Hawkins writes, “Some were dreamers, some were realists, and some just aimed to capitalize on the music enterprise’s reputation for quick profits.”
These factual gems are invaluable conversation starters at cocktail parties. The reader of A Shot in the Dark can tell stories about Ted Jarrett, Nashville’s first African American record producer and arranger, the man Little Richard once described as “the producer in Nashville.” Or Howard Bradley, who performed this town’s first overdub session with singer Pat Boone in 1953. Or Eleanor “Hank” Fort, a woman who didn’t let her social standing in Belle Meade society prevent her from writing and recording songs on Select Records, the label she started with Owen Bradley and singer Dottie Dillard.
A Shot in the Dark: Making Records in Nashville, 1945-1955
By Martin Hawkins (Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 318 pp., $65)Then there’s Wally Fowler, the first songwriter to borrow money against a song—perhaps setting in motion innumerable future Music Row bankruptcies—with “That’s How Much I Love You.” As lawyer Jordon Stokes told Hawkins, “The song did well, and Wally needed some money, so I went to see P.D. Houston at First American National Bank, and we got him to lend five thousand dollars on the BMI payments due. That was the first time a Nashville bank had ever lent money on a song. Soon, other banks were loaning money. It used to be that a songwriter had to put up the car, farm or house to get a loan.”
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Hawkins believes it’s often only after a building is torn down or a business disappears that a city’s civic and tourism industries begin to appreciate what once was. And in Nashville, it wasn’t so long ago that a clear divide existed between those on Music Row and the rest of the city. But now that the Swan Ball invites performers like Martina McBride to play, and the CMA Awards have traveled to Manhattan, the publication of A Shot in the Dark proves to be good timing. With its focus “on the local heroes and labels that laid the groundwork for so much of what would happen in the years ahead,” it shows just how much Nashville and its music have changed. Just as it took British bands like The Rolling Stones to introduce America to its own music, the blues, so does the British writer Martin Hawkins illuminate the culture of Nashville and its music before the days of Garth, Gaylord Entertainment and CMT.