Ernie Winfrey still recalls the night a Beatle walked through the door. It was a warm June evening in 1974, and Winfrey was in his usual place, behind the mixing console at Sound Shop studio, just off Music Row.
McCartney was hardly the first musician to appreciate the sound he heard, and he was far from the last. From 1970 until January 2015, thousands of musicians, songwriters, hitmakers, celebrities, and wheeler-dealers passed through the doors of the cement block building at 1307 Division St. They produced groundbreaking music, classic hits, and jingles that sold everything from groceries to good citizenship.
In 1970, Nashville's music industry was ushering in a new era. Just a decade earlier, Music City's recording industry was concentrated primarily in two studios — RCA Studio B and Owen Bradley's studio on 16th Avenue South, aka the Quonset Hut. When Bradley sold his studio to Columbia Records in 1961, two major labels had a lock on the majority of studio time in Nashville.
The brainchild of Nashville producer and musician Danny Davis, Nashville Audio Recorders was established in the fall of 1969 on Division Street, about two blocks east of 16th Avenue South. The property, co-owned by Nashville songwriters Dallas Frazier and Billy Mize, had briefly been the home of the Nashville Musical Instrument Company, manufacturers of Gower guitars.
Davis planned a state-of-the-art recording studio and full production complex to accommodate any type of recording session. To help foot the bill, he enlisted several non-music industry investors. The studio had more than 3,000 square feet of space and was paneled with costly Pecky Cypress wood that not only provided excellent sound insulation, but also gave the studio a very distinctive appearance. Billy Sherrill — no relation to the prominent Nashville producer with the same name — was a 22-year-old graduate of Murray State University in Kentucky who was hired as an assistant engineer before the studio opened.
Sherrill recalls steady business for the new studio through the first 18 months of its operation, but by July 1971, there were financial troubles behind the scenes. Davis' partners wanted out, and it didn't take long to find interested buyers.
Along with the new owners and name came a new head engineer, Ernie Winfrey. A native of East Nashville, Winfrey began his music career while still in high school as the drummer of one of Nashville's pioneering rock & roll combos, The Monarchs. By 1968, Winfrey was at Woodland Studios as an assistant engineer where he worked with all four of the Sound Shop partners.
R&B producer Brad Shapiro was also a frequent Sound Shop customer. For some artists, including James Brown and Wilson Pickett, Shapiro recorded tracks in Muscle Shoals or other locations, then overdubbed and mixed at Sound Shop.
In addition to cutting great records, Buddy Killen's love of publicity ensured that the Sound Shop name made frequent appearances in both the trade press and mass media. He brought in photographers to document sessions and actively pursued record deals for many Hollywood celebrities, including Burt Reynold's notorious 1973 "so bad it's good" album, Ask Me What I Am.
With studio time in high demand, some projects were divided between various Nashville studios, such as Grand Funk Railroad's 1972 album, Phoenix, which was recorded at Sound Shop and then mixed at Quadrafonic Sound. The album, which produced the Top 40 hit "Rock 'N Roll Soul," proved to be a turning point for the band as they consolidated the trademark sound that led to their first No. 1 single, "We're An American Band," the following year.
The Sound Shop's most famous brush with rock & roll celebrity came in the summer of 1974 when McCartney brought his entire family and his band Wings to town. Lee Eastman was Killen's attorney, as well as McCartney's father-in-law and business manager. He asked Killen to find a country retreat near Nashville McCartney could lease for several weeks for a country vacation, sightseeing, and rehearsals for Wings' upcoming tour of the U.S.
After failing to find a suitable location for a reasonable price, Killen talked songwriter Curly Putman into renting his 133-acre farm located just outside Lebanon. With McCartney footing the bill for a Hawaiian vacation for Putman and his wife, the former Beatle moved his entourage to Tennessee the first week of June 1974.
"They weren't going to cut here, but Buddy was thinking, 'Hmm, I've got a studio . . . ,' and his plan worked," Winfrey says. It only took one visit to the studio to convince McCartney to "give it a go," but not everyone in his entourage was convinced at first, as the engineer recalls.
The McCartney sessions took place during the first two weeks of July. The band cut the songs "Junior's Farm" and "Sally G," which became a double-sided hit single for Wings that fall. They also recorded the Denny Laine composition "Send Me the Heart," as well as "Walking in the Park with Eloise," a Dixieland-style instrumental written by McCartney's father that was released under the nom de plume, The Country Hams. Overdubs for several songs they had already tracked in London were also recorded, including "Hey Diddle," "Bridge on a River Suite," and "Wide Prairie." Despite the thrill of working with McCartney, Winfrey says it wasn't that different from other Sound Shop sessions, at least at first.
"Paul's limo would come to the back of the building so they could unload their gear," Winfrey explains. "They would come in and leisurely set up their stuff. They had a roadie-type guy helping them, but Paul always carried his own guitar.
Veteran Nashville musicians joined the band for some of the McCartney sessions. Sherrill recalls they made quite an impression on McCartney.
Although the McCartney sessions brought rock & roll flash to Sound Shop, as a studio and production facility, its best and busiest days were still ahead. By the start of 1975, Killen had bought out his partners' interests and become the sole owner of the building, equipment, and production company.
Although Killen now had primary say, he also recognized the importance of the income from the commercial jingle business. In February 1975, he forged a new partnership for the Sound Shop production company with experienced jingle producers Craig Deitschmann and John Shulenberger. They brought many prestigious clients with them, including Budweiser, Lincoln-Mercury, Bell Telephone, and General Electric. In the spring of 1975, Sherrill left Sound Shop for a position at Jack Clement Recording. Not long thereafter, Mike Bradley, a fellow Murray State graduate, looked him up for advice, and Sherrill sent him to Sound Shop.
"I met with Craig Dietschmann, who was the studio manager at the time," Bradley says. "He said we've got big plans over here, we want to build another studio, and you're welcome to hang around until there's a reason to staff somebody. That's what I did. Ernie Winfrey was doing most of the big record sessions at night. I worked a security job in the daytime, and then I would hang around and watch over Ernie's shoulder all night. After a few months, Craig offered to let me run the dub room." Within a year Bradley was a full-time engineer, mostly working on jingle sessions.
Bradley worked on many well-known jingles, including the popular and fondly remembered "Tennessee Trash" campaign for the Tennessee Department of Transportation. Sound Shop was one of the busiest production houses for commercial jingles in the U.S., and Bradley worked with many celebrities — Hollywood actors, sports figures, and even a future president.
By 1977, Sound Shop's business was evenly divided between record production and jingle work, with the jingle sessions usually being held in the mornings or late afternoons and record sessions starting around 6 p.m. and often going into the late-night hours.
With the studio running at full capacity, a $300,000 upgrade and expansion was undertaken. The main entrance was relocated to the side of the building, and a smaller Studio B was added along with a reception area between the two studios; a second floor for additional office space was also added during the build out.
Although R&B and rock records were still cut at Sound Shop, including hit albums for R&B singer Millie Jackson and some tracks for Neil Young's 1978 LP, Comes A Time, the growth in country sales during the late '70s and into the early '80s meant that country sessions were becoming more prevalent in the studio.
Winfrey left Sound Shop as a full-time employee around 1979 to become a freelance engineer, but he still chose to do most of his freelance work at his former place of employment. By the late '80s, Bradley became the studio manager and oversaw another major renovation in 1989.
"We gutted Studio A and rebuilt it completely," Bradley says. "We wound up with a great studio. I think it was the best tracking room in town." The renovated Sound Shop continued the tradition of scoring hits when producer Don Cook began using the studio for a string of million-sellers by Brooks & Dunn. By the late '90s, Killen had become a millionaire through his many business interests.
After selling his publishing business to Sony Music in 1989, Killen dabbled in many new projects, but kept Sound Shop as one of his favorite holdings, as Bradley recalls. "Buddy told me once, 'I'll probably die in the Sound Shop, this will probably be one of the things I'll never sell,' but he eventually changed his mind and started talking seriously about selling it. I never really wanted a studio, but I didn't want to see someone come in and change everything. I was freelancing by that time, but Sound Shop was where I did 99 percent of everything I did. I took on Don Cook as a partner, and we worked out a deal with Buddy to buy the studio." Bradley and Cook operated Sound Shop until 2008, when they sold the studio business, equipment, and Sound Shop name to the Christian music production company Riverbend Media.
Studio B was eventually leased to the music production company Destiny Nashville, while Riverbend Media continued to use Studio A for occasional sessions. In spring 2014, it was announced that the property was being sold for redevelopment. A final and tearful farewell party was held on June 15, 2014. Dozens of producers, engineers, musicians, and others who held fond memories of the studio gathered to say their goodbyes. Scattered sessions continued through October, while the building served out its time on real estate death row.
On the morning of Jan. 28, 2015, Winfrey received a phone call from an old friend saying Sound Shop's time was up. By the time, he made it to Division Street, 45 years of Music City history was already a jumbled pile of rubble.
Ultimately what made Sound Shop so special wasn't the brick, mortar, and wood. It was the talent, personalities, sounds, and experiences that created a special time and place where musical magic was captured on slowly unwinding spools of tape. The recordings and memories remain, but the physical connection of standing in the spot where that magic happened is now gone, forever erased from a city that sometimes seems incapable of balancing its past and future. It's an equation that may fill bank accounts with dollars, but it leaves the cultural soul of Nashville in poverty.