How the Nashville Number System revolutionized recording sessions

On April 1, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum will celebrate its 50th anniversary. To mark the occasion, the institution opened its archives, offering an unparalleled look at country music’s most prized artifacts as well as some of the collection’s hidden treasures.

The first language of Music Row is money. The second is the Nashville Number System.

Created six decades ago by Neal Matthews, Jr. of the Jordanaires and elaborated upon by legendary session musician Charlie McCoy, the number system, is “shorthand for a song’s chord structure,” explains Michael Gray, Museum Editor at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

Nashville’s recording industry was thriving in the late 1950s, especially after RCA Studio B opened on Music Row in 1957. Musicians and vocalists were doing three or four three-hour recording sessions a day – few had the training and even fewer had the time to write out formal arrangements for each song.

Enter Neal Matthews, who began using numbers to represent a song's chord structure.

Steel guitarist Lloyd Green, who has played on thousands of recording sessions over the years, explains: "This simple system would enable the players to simply know the starting key of the tune and it would always translate without having to rewrite an alphabetical notation if the singer changed keys, thus saving valuable studio time. This system dictates that if a song is in, say, the key of G, that key becomes the 1 chord, C is the 4, D the 5. If the singer changes the key to D the mathematical formula is still the same, so long as you know the tonic starting key, which is always 1."

For the Jordanaires, who sang on many of the 200+ sides Elvis Presley recorded at Studio B, the number system was an essential tool.

As country songs became more elaborate, so, too, did the number system, thanks to McCoy and his knowledge of music theory. But the 1-4-5 chord structure is the backbone of countless roots songs.

Studio B was donated to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in 1992, and Matthews’ chart for Presley’s 1960 chart-topper “Are You Lonesome Tonight” is in the museum archives. To the uninitiated, the notations seem like hieroglyphics, but for those in the studio, it would have been universally understood, said Gray.

Decades later, the number system remains a session staple.

“Today, it’s ubiquitous in Nashville recording sessions,” said Green. “Probably more than 90% of the charts we are handed are written in the number system, all thanks to those intrepid pioneers Neal Matthews and Charlie McCoy.”

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