The Musicianship of the Nashville Cats

Abstract At the height of the Nashville Sound era, the city’s session musicians were widely celebrated for their ability to hear new musical compositions, construct “head arrangements” of those songs, and execute improvised arrangements with great precision. This story—although certainly true in the broadest sense—obscures valuable detail about the musical backgrounds, abilities, and tastes of Nashville’s session musicians, in effect normalizing their diverse skill sets by treating them as interchangeable cogs in a record-production machine. This chapter examines the musicianship of Nashville Sound–era session musicians, following ethnomusicologist Henry Kingsbury’s (1988) observation that discourses about musicianship reveal the values and ideologies that a given music culture celebrates and replicates. This chapter, therefore, explores the myriad ways that Nashville Sound–era session musicians learned the fundamentals of music theory, utilized existing notional traditions and developed new ones, and negotiated work in recording sessions in which multiple kinds of musicianship were at play.