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

13. The Quonset Hut

113 THeQuonSeTHuT Music Row’s ground zero. —michael kosser No question, that’s hallowed ground. —kyle young, Director, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum In the mid-fifties, Owen Bradley converted the basement and most of first floor of a two-story brick house at 804 Sixteenth Avenue South into the first recording studio on what would become Nashville’s Music Row. Outside, its original columns removed, front porch reconfigured, the finished building was fainting-architect ugly, but inside, it worked. “We recorded down in that basement a lot. We did Burl Ives records down there,” recalled background singer Millie Kirkham. About a year after it opened, the facility they called Bradley ’s Film and Recording Studio got even uglier when a militarysurplus , World War II–era, prefabricated metal building called a quonset hut was thrown up in the backyard. The addition looked like a gigantic, half-buried pipe and measured thirty-five feet high and seventy-eight feet long. Little filming of note ever went on in what was called Studio B, but Bradley did record landmark records there with the likes of Patsy Cline, Brenda Lee, Loretta Lynn, Kitty Wells, and Ernest Tubb. Bradley sold the Quonset Hut to CBS in 1962 and a few years later his creative heir, Billy Sherrill, took over the place and would add David Houston, Charlie Rich, Tammy Wynette, Johnny Paycheck , Tanya Tucker, and, of course, George Jones to the lineup of 13 Music Makers 114 stars who recorded in the building. Kris Kristofferson was around, too. Not singing, sweeping. He got his start as a CBS janitor. If you believe the eyewitnesses, not the paperwork (we’ll sort that out later), the first recording session for “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” took place in the Quonset Hut sometime in late 1978 or early 1979. No one is one hundred percent sure exactly who was there at that first go-around, but Bob Moore (drummer Jerry Carrigan dubbed him “the king of the hillbilly bass players”) is high on the list of usual suspects. “We used to call him ‘the bulldozer,’” Carrigan said. “Man, he’d get that tempo in that head and he’d bulldoze you through.” A session musician’s session musician, Moore was a charter member of the A Team, the pioneering group that helped the Nashville recording industry blossom in the fifties. “There was no other bass players around at that time that could do what I could do. Even at sixteen,” said Moore. “That’s not being immodest. That’s being truthful.” In the fifties, Moore would record with some familiar names—“I was doin’ Elvis and I was doin’ Jerry Lee”—and whoever else came through town. By the time the recording session for “He Stopped Loving Her Today” rolled around, Moore, then in his late forties, had played on records that sold millions and millions and millions of copies. As for “He Stopped Loving Her Today”: “I don’t remember the day and the record session and when we did the song or anything about anything that happened while we were doing the song,” said Moore. Neither does George Jones. “There have been so many [recording sessions] at this point in my career that they seem interchangeable,” wrote George in his autobiography. This “studio amnesia” is a common affliction, according to Moore’s wife Kitra. “The musicians have an automatic clearing process in their brain,” she said, so they can start fresh every day. This means many, like Bob, don’t remember much of anything. Then there’s Charlie McCoy. “I remember it exactly,” said harmonica player McCoy of the first session for “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” “I know where I was standing.” The Quonset Hut 115 McCoy was an old pro by the time he cut the classic tune. After migrating to Nashville from Miami in 1961, where he played stand-up bass in his high school “orchestra” and spent some time at the University of Miami, Charlie McCoy would become Nashville ’s premiere session harmonica player. “It was something I could do that no one else here was doing,” said McCoy. The first session he ever saw was with teen phenom Brenda Lee. The first session he ever played on was for the surnamechallenged Hollywood sexpot Ann-Margret, a starlet even more lacking in, let’s call it “subtlety,” than her fellow Elvis consorts. That was in 1961. The...