Columbia Recording Studio B — Nashville (former site)

Columbia Studio B at 804 16th Avenue South on Nashville's Music Row was where Johnny Cash recorded the bulk of his classic Columbia Records output from the late 1950s through the 1980s. Cash signed with Columbia in 1958, leaving Sun Records after Sam Phillips declined to invest in the orchestral and gospel recordings Cash wanted to make, and began working with producer Don Law in Nashville. The Music Row studio became his primary recording home for three decades, the place where 'Ring of Fire', 'Jackson', 'Man in Black', and hundreds of other recordings were made.

Columbia Studio B — not to be confused with RCA Studio B, which is the preserved facility associated primarily with Elvis Presley and now operated as a museum — was a working professional studio on the strip of addresses that constituted the institutional heart of the Nashville music industry. Music Row in its postwar heyday was a compact geography of competing record labels, publishers, booking agencies, and studios, all within walking distance of each other, producing the recordings that defined American country music for forty years. Cash was one of the most prolific and important artists to work in this environment.

The Music Row of Cash's recording years has changed considerably. Some buildings have been demolished, others converted to other uses. The studio infrastructure that made Nashville's sound possible has been partly preserved and partly lost to development and changing industry economics. The site on 16th Avenue South represents the institutional Nashville that Cash both worked within and periodically rebelled against — his prison concerts, his political statements, his refusal to conform to the Nashville Sound's commercial formulas were acts of resistance made by a man who nonetheless kept recording on Music Row.