Harold Bradley

He grew up in Nashville and started on the banjo, playing a six-dollar guitar his father found in a junk store only after Owen urged him to concentrate on guitar. By 1943 he was playing amplified jazz guitar, and that summer Owen got him a job playing lead guitar with Ernest Tubb’s Texas Troubadours. He served in the Navy from 1944 to 1946, then came home to study music, play in his brother’s dance band and work in the Grand Ole Opry’s house band.

His first country session was in Chicago in 1946, on Pee Wee King’s “Tennessee Central No. 9” with the Golden West Cowboys. As more recording came to Nashville his studio work grew, and it was his acoustic rhythm guitar that opened Red Foley’s “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy,” a number-one country and pop hit in 1950. Rhythm was his specialty. On many sessions he worked alongside the lead guitarists Hank Garland and Grady Martin, and after Garland was disabled in a car accident in 1961 Bradley often took his place, with Ray Edenton on rhythm. He also played lead when a record called for it: the banjo notes that open Johnny Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans” (1959) and the guitar figure that opens “Jingle Bell Rock” are his. On six-string electric bass he popularized the muted “tic-tac” style of doubling the bass line, heard on Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.”

The hits he played on include Roy Orbison’s “Crying” and “Running Scared,” Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” Eddy Arnold’s “Make the World Go Away,” Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” Ray Price’s “Danny Boy,” Faron Young’s “Hello Walls,” Burl Ives’s “Holly Jolly Christmas,” Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet,” Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man” and Conway Twitty’s “Hello Darlin’.” The A-Team also backed Elvis Presley, Loretta Lynn and Bob Dylan. In the early 1960s Bradley made three instrumental albums of his own for Columbia.

The studios came out of a partnership with Owen. After running two small studios in the early 1950s, the brothers opened Bradley Film and Recording on Sixteenth Avenue South in the mid-1950s and soon added a second studio in a military-surplus Quonset hut, where they also filmed television performances. With RCA’s Studio B, which opened in 1957, the Bradley studios were where the pop-influenced Nashville Sound took shape, and they produced pop and rock hits as well. Columbia bought the property in 1962.

Bradley was the first president of the Nashville chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. In 1978 he helped organize a White House concert by Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty and Tom T. Hall honoring the Country Music Association. In the 1980s he toured with Floyd Cramer and led Slim Whitman’s band, and he produced the Irish country singer Sandy Kelly and Eddy Arnold’s later RCA albums. In 1999 he co-produced Mandy Barnett’s second album, I’ve Got a Right to Cry, which included four tracks Owen had produced shortly before his death.

From 1991 to 2008 he was president of the Nashville local of the American Federation of Musicians, and from 1999 to 2010 the federation’s international vice president. The union gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award shortly before his election to the Country Music Hall of Fame was announced in 2006. In 2007 he was inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame with the other members of the Nashville A-Team, and in 2010 the Recording Academy gave him a Trustees Award. He died in Nashville on 31 January 2019, at the age of 93.