Owen Bradley
| Owen Bradley | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | William Owen Bradley |
| Born |
October 21, 1915 Westmoreland, Tennessee, United States |
| Died | January 7, 1998 (aged 82) Nashville, Tennessee, United States |
| Genres | Country music |
| Occupation(s) | Record Producer |
| Instruments | Piano |
| Associated acts | Ernest Tubb, Burl Ives, Red Foley, Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline, Brenda Lee, Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty |
William Owen Bradley (October 21, 1915 – January 7, 1998) was an American record producer who, along with Chet Atkins and Bob Ferguson, was one of the chief architects of the 1950s and 1960s Nashville sound in country music and rockabilly.
A native of Westmoreland, Tennessee, Bradley learned piano at an early age, and began playing in local nightclubs and roadhouses when he was a teenager. At 20, he got a job at WSM-AM radio, where he worked as an arranger and musician. In 1942, he became the station's musical director, and was also the leader of a sought-after dance band, joined later by vocalists Bob Johnstone and Dottie Dillard, that played well-heeled society parties all over the city. That same year he co-wrote Roy Acuff’s hit “Night Train to Memphis". He kept the band up until 1964, although in the intervening decades, his work as a producer would far overshadow his own performing career..
In 1947, Bradley took a position as a music arranger and songwriter at Decca Records. He worked for Paul Cohen on recordings by some of the biggest talents of the day, including Ernest Tubb, Burl Ives, Red Foley and Kitty Wells. Learning from Cohen, he eventually began to produce records on his own. When his mentor left the label in 1958, Bradley became vice president of Decca's Nashville division, and began pioneering what would become the "Nashville sound."
Country music had long been looked on as unsophisticated and folksy, and was largely confined to listeners in the less affluent small towns of the American South and Appalachia. In the late 1950s, Bradley's home base of Nashville was positioning itself to be a center of the recording industry, and not just the traditional home of the Grand Ole Opry. In fact, the Nashville sound began in a Quonset hut attached to a house Bradley owned with his brother Harold at 804 16th Avenue South in Nashville.
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