Jim Beck Recording Studio — Dallas

Jim Beck's recording studio at 1101 Ross Avenue in Dallas was where Lefty Frizzell walked in on July 25, 1950, and recorded two songs that both reached number one on the country charts: 'If You've Got the Money, I've Got the Time' and 'I Love You a Thousand Ways'. It was Frizzell's first recording session. Beck had discovered him performing at the Ace of Clubs honky-tonk and arranged the Columbia Records session with producer Don Law. The achievement of reaching number one with both sides of a debut single is one of the more extraordinary moments in country music history, and it happened in a modest studio on Ross Avenue in downtown Dallas.

Jim Beck's studio was one of the most significant recording facilities in the development of postwar Texas country music. Beck worked with George Jones, Ray Price, Floyd Tillman, and Marty Robbins among others, and his ear for the honky-tonk sound emerging from Texas and Oklahoma — rawer and more rhythmically direct than the Nashville product — made his studio a launching pad for a generation of country artists. Frizzell's session with Beck introduced to the wider world a vocal style that had never been heard in country music and that would prove impossible to ignore or forget.

The studio at 1101 Ross Avenue in downtown Dallas no longer exists as a recording facility. Beck himself died in 1956 from carbon tetrachloride poisoning in a tragic accident at his studio. The address on Ross Avenue represents the place where, in a single afternoon, Lefty Frizzell became a star and country music acquired a vocal influence it still hasn't fully processed.