United States Department of the Interior National Park Service / National Register of Historic Places Registration Form NPS Form 10-900 OMB No. 1024-0018

RCA Victor Studios Building Davidson County, TN Name of Property County and State

pump. Studio A was narrower and bigger, with high ceilings and a brighter sound. I cut more in Studio A, as a rule.34

When Jennings returned to the studio in February 15, 1967, to record one of his signature songs, “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line,” he recalled the nature of recording in Studio A:

Where it finishes is late some night in Studio A. The musicians have gone home. The track is done. They’ve moved the microphone from the vocal booth to the floor, so I can have more room to move, though I don’t move much. We’re working on ‘Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line.’ I’m going to sing harmony with myself, the moaning OH of “Only.” If you slide into the control room, maybe with Bare or Johnny Darrell, you might catch Chet and the engineer bent over the board, listening to me in solo with the track shut off, trying to get a fix on the frequency where my voice is wandering. I’m out in the studio. I’ve got the headphones turned up high. I’m walking’ the line and talkin’ the line, doing a little dance to Wayne Moss’s stuttering Tex-Mex guitar solo as it comes blazing through. Chicken-pickin’. Singing along to the chorus. Ooooohh-nly Daddy . . . . Bobby turns to Chet. ‘Damn, I believe he’s got something treed.’ Ooooohhh…..Howling at the moon.35

Charley Pride’s entire early career—1966 to 1970 when he became the genre’s first bona fide African American star--centered at the RCA Victor Studios Building. According to a story from his producer, Cowboy Jack Clement,

I run into Chet Atkins down by the coffee machine downstairs next to the big studio. He said, ‘What did you ever do with that colored boy?’. I said, ‘Well, I haven’t done anything yet. I’m thinking of pressin’ it up myself.’ He said, “’Well, I’ve been thinkin’ about that, and we might be passin’ up another Elvis Presley.’36

Clement and Atkins worked together to record Pride’s first RCA album Country Charley Pride, and within a year he was a major star, the first major African American recording star in modern country music. Pride’s emergence and success helped RCA, and country music, as a whites-only genre in a racially charged period of history.37

RCA executives in New York City and Nashville always looked to Studio A for its potential in pop music. The work of Elvis Presley in RCA Studio B had launched the label in Nashville; it is only appropriate that company executives wanted to score again, with a pop sound that was Nashville based. Recording records by Perry Como, Al Hirt, and Ann-Margret in 1965 were good, but the studio hoped for a bigger name. In the spring of 1967, it happened. Reprise Records artist Nancy Sinatra, with Lee Hazlewood producing, recorded at the RCA Victor Studios Building. Nashville’s music industry was so excited that it held a “press party” to

34 Waylon Jennings with Lenny Kaye, Waylon: an Autobiography (New York: Warner Books, 1996), 132. 35 Jennings, Waylon, 137. 36 Michael Kosser, How Nashville Became Music City USA (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2006), 117. 37 Hughes, Country Soul, 133-139. 18