He Stopped Loving Her Today: George Jones, Billy Sherrill, and the Pretty-Much Totally True Story of the Making of the Greatest Country Record of All Time

8. Violins From Hell or The Short, Official, Pretty-Much Totally Bogus History of the Nashville Sound

73 vIoLInSfromHeLLorTHe SHorT,offIcIaL,preTTy-mucHToTaLLy boguSHISToryofTHenaSHvILLeSound More than fifty years after the birth of the Nashville Sound, a lot of country music fans still get riled up at the sound of a roomful of violins. To them, a string section is inauthenticity personified. For all those who insist on holding this grudge, it’s time to reveal who is really to blame for all the sweet-tea, string-laden confections that have been making their way out of Nashville and onto a radio playlist near you since the early sixties. And it’s not who you think. Forget Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins and Billy Sherrill . They were all at best accomplices and anyway it wasn’t the violinizers who caused all the upheaval. The real culprit was this no-good, low-down son of a brewer from Omaha. But that story will have to wait until the next chapter. We’ll begin with the lie, the myth—the fairy tale spun from whole cloth. • • • In the early fifties country music was basking in its twangy, nasal, postwar, honky-tonk glory, when along came the evil rock ’n’ roll and threatened its very existence. Run for your lives! Some called it an “onslaught,” others a “threat,” still others a “crisis,” but whatever they called it, everybody agreed: “Country music had to do something desperate and radical to survive,” as a couple of folks put it in The Illustrated History of Country Music. That something was, of course, the Nashville Sound. 8 The Nashville Sound 74 “I think we had to change,” Chet Atkins told historian Robert Oermann. “We were all just trying to survive,” Owen Bradley said. So how bad was this rock ’n’ roll crisis? Here’s one take from Wesley Rose of publisher Acuff-Rose as reported in Country: The Music and the Musicians: “At one disastrous point, the company spent only half days at the office with the entire staff adjourning to softball games every afternoon during the summer of 1957.” That’s puzzling. If my company were at a “disastrous point,” I might have considered laying people off instead of paying them to play softball. But, hey, I’ve never been much of a businessman. “How bad was it?” item two, again from Country: The Music and the Musicians: The same year Wesley and company were playing softball, RCA announced the creation of a new Nashville office to be headed by Chet Atkins. “How bad was it?” item three, from BMI’s online history of Nashville: “Recording proceeded at a furious pace, with five hundred sessions a year by 1958. That number would increase tenfold in the ensuing decade.” “How bad was it?” item four, from Air Castle of the South, Craig Havighurst’s history of WSM radio: “Morale surged at the 1957 and 1958 [country music] DJ conventions. Country music seemed back on track.” “How bad was it?” item five, from Buddy Killen’s autobiography : “Tree [publishing] had an excellent year in 1957.” Okay, so maybe 1957 wasn’t so bad. Maybe it was even good. Fact is, in the late fifties, Nashville was busy becoming a major national recording center and by 1960 Time reported “Nashville has even nosed out Hollywood as the nation’s second biggest (after New York) record-producing center.” There’s a pesky little footnote. The records being made weren’t necessarily country. “One out of every five popular hits of the past year was written and recorded in Nashville,” reported Time. Of course, deciding what was pop and what was country in those days was a bit tricky. “Since the spring of 1956, a country boy named Elvis Presley had been dominating both the pop and country charts,” wrote Paul Kingsbury, onetime editor of The Journal of Country Music. The Short, Official, Pretty-Much Totally Bogus History 75 In 1955 both Cashbox and Billboard “picked him [Elvis] as the most promising new country and western artist,” reported Craig Havighurst, and a 1956 article in Billboard held up Elvis as an example of “how country music is being accepted by the masses.” Elvis wasn’t the only country act making noise on the pop charts. The Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Don Gibson, among others, were going strong. (Even George Jones jumped on the bandwagon, recording rockabilly tunes under the name Thumper Jones.) So, for a while there, a lot of country music was...