Owen Bradley

Owen Bradley was a musician, songwriter, arranger and record producer from Tennessee. He was one of the architects of the "Nashville Sound." In 1930 he quit high school to play music with Farris Coursey's Blue Diamond Melody Boys. By the 1940s he was a regular on WSM and was producing records for Decca in Nashville. In 1949 he produced one of his first big hits, Red Foley's "Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy." It featured his former "boss," Farris Coursey, slapping his thigh to recreate the sound of a rhythmic shoeshiner's rag. Bradley was head of Decca's Nashville division from 1958 until 1976.
Owen Bradley and his brother, Harold, built an independent recording studio in Nashville in the 1950s. Known as Bradley's Barn it was the site for 700 recording sessions annually in the early 1960s. He was inducted into the Country Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1974.