Looking Back on 50 Years of Recorded History at Sound Emporium Studios

In November 1969, the record producer, songwriter and businessman Cowboy Jack Clement opened a recording studio on Nashville’s Belmont Boulevard. He named it Jack Clement Recording Studio, and he envisioned his eponymous facility as a place where musicians could create in a relaxed environment — and in real time. Like his great exemplar Sam Phillips, who helped create rock ’n’ roll in Memphis in the 1950s by recording artists like Jackie Brenston and Elvis Presley, Clement viewed making records as a psychological enterprise that was grounded in technology. In Nashville in the ’50s and ’60s, studios were places where producers helped match songs to the particular talents of singers. In contrast to the prevailing attitudes in Music City, Clement took the lessons he’d learned by working with Phillips at Sun Studio, and pointed the way to one possible future of pop music. Over the past 50 years, Clement’s studio, which was built by the brilliant Nashville engineer Charlie Tallent, has kept pace with changing technology. It has produced a staggering number of significant country, folk and rock recordings.  

Clement died in 2013 at age 82, and the great pop-music conceptualist and gadfly is much missed. Clement’s famed Gibson J-200 acoustic guitar recently became part of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s permanent collection. But Jack Clement Recording Studio still stands — and thrives — on Belmont Boulevard. Now called Sound Emporium Studios, it has a storied history, and it also boasts a list of contemporary recordings that range from rock to Americana and country. Among the recent hits recorded at Sound Emporium (in part) is pop-country singer Kacey Musgraves’ 2018 album Golden Hour, which garnered multiple CMA Awards and Grammys, including Album of the Year at both awards shows. In addition, Americana singer Brittany Howard and soul legend Swamp Dogg have recently cut records at Sound Emporium. The studio has come a long way since country-rockers Great Speckled Bird recorded the first sessions there in November 1969.

Clement — who engineered Sun Records hits like Jerry Lee Lewis’ 1957 single “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and another epochal 1957 recording, arranger Bill Justis and guitarist Sidney Manker’s “Raunchy” — moved to Nashville in early 1965 after operating a studio in Beaumont, Texas. He began producing singer Charley Pride, who took Clement tunes like “Just Between You and Me” into the charts and made history as the first major African American country star. In 1969 Clement erected a cinderblock building at 3100 Belmont Blvd. that became Studio A, and in 1970 he installed office space in an adjacent building, which would serve as Studio B. 

With rock polymath Todd Rundgren behind the console, Great Speckled Bird — led by Canadian folkies Ian and Sylvia Tyson — began making their self-titled debut album in Studio A on Nov. 6, 1969. It was Rundgren’s first production job, as Tallent tells the Scene from his Nashville home.

“Ian called me and told me I was gonna have to take care of his new producer, because he was different,” says Tallent, who was born in 1934 in Lenoir City, Tenn. “When I first met him, I realized I was going to have to take care of him, because Nashville wasn’t ready for people like Todd. He was probably one of the smartest musicians, engineers and studio people that I have ever laid eyes on.”

Tallent studied electrical engineering at Vanderbilt University before taking a job in 1964 at producer Owen Bradley’s studio in Mt. Juliet, Bradley’s Barn. He worked at Bradley’s Barn with Ian and Sylvia on their 1968 album Full Circle, and joined Clement in 1969. 

The sessions for Great Speckled Bird ran through November and included bassist Norbert Putnam and keyboardist David Briggs, who would together open Nashville’s Quadrafonic Sound Studios in 1971. Putnam remembers how Rundgren took charge during the Great Speckled Bird sessions.

“He had a lot of ideas about parts,” Putnam says. “Nashville record producers like Owen Bradley and Bob Montgomery never, ever gave me a part to play. I have to tell you, Todd had good ideas, and it was refreshing to work with a producer like that.”  

The studio officially opened on Dec. 10, 1969. Tallent would soon work on the February 1970 session for the studio’s first major hit, Ray Stevens’ “Everything Is Beautiful.” During the early ’70s, country artists like Donna Fargo and Merle Haggard recorded there, along with rock bands like Mother Earth, who cut their 1970 album Satisfied at the studio.

Clement went on to open other studios in Nashville — Jack’s Tracks on Music Row and The Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa at his home, also on Belmont Boulevard — and he sold the original Jack Clement Recording Studio to Larry Butler and Al Mifflin in 1974. Butler took over ownership in 1979, changing its name to Sound Emporium in May 1980. By 1992, Sound Emporium was owned by musician Roy Clark, who sold it to producer Garth Fundis that year. Born near Lawrence, Kan., Fundis had begun his Nashville career in 1971 as a gofer at Clement’s studio. He would later produce records by Keith Whitley and Don Williams at Sound Emporium. Fundis refurbished Studio B, and enclosed the hallway that had connected the house to Clement’s original building. 

“Jack had an idea of what he wanted the size of it to be, but Charlie Tallent really built the building,” Fundis says. “He really was the thing that made it go. Jack was great at starting stuff, but it took everybody else around him to finish it.”

Fundis sold Sound Emporium to businessmen George and Chad Shinn in 2011. In 2017 the Shinns gave the studio to Nashville’s Lipscomb University, which plans to use it to educate students wishing to enter the entertainment field. 

“Lipscomb’s [George Shinn] College of Entertainment and the Arts is pretty new,” says studio president and general manager Juanita Copeland, a music-business veteran who began working at Sound Emporium in 1995. “They don’t really have an audio program. They do have an entrepreneurial artist program and a commercial music program. Sporadically, we’ll have students that will need to do a project.”

Visiting Sound Emporium recently, I saw a beautiful space that has been outfitted with fixtures Clement would have liked. There’s a Moroccan lamp and a ’70s disco light box, and both A and B studios sport 48-channel API Legacy boards. Some of Clement and Tallent’s original features — like the recessed alcove for string players that is now a drum booth — have been modified, but the studio retains much of their original conception.

Clement was famously aphoristic about the art of record production. Talking to Nashville music writer and onetime Clement publicist John Lomax III in 1978, Clement said, “I don’t like the way studios sound. I think a recording studio is the worst place in the world to make a record. … It’s disorienting to the musicians.”

That may be true, but Clement’s philosophy lives on at Sound Emporium. Early this year, soul singer, songwriter and producer Jerry Williams Jr., who records under the name Swamp Dogg, cut his forthcoming album Sorry You Couldn’t Make It at the studio with Poliça producer Ryan Olson, former Nashville studio owner Mark Nevers, and John Prine, the last of whom Williams has known since the late ’60s. Nevers — who moved his Beech House Recording from Nashville to South Carolina in 2017 — engineered the sessions. 

Talking to Williams, whose résumé includes co-writing the country standard “She’s All I Got” and releasing futuristic soul albums like 1973’s Gag a Maggott and 2018’s Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune, I realize Clement would likely be pleased by the way Williams & Co. are keeping his ideas alive.

“Where I record is not really a big deal to me, you know,” says Williams from his home in Southern California. “I’ve gone in the studio out here right behind Rod Stewart, but it didn’t mean anything. Matter of fact, the engineer who did Rod Stewart, I thought he sucked. He just couldn’t understand what I was doing.”

Williams’ words ring true. As Clement knew, studios are important, but they don’t mean anything without the people who make the music happen inside them.