Demolition for Heartbreak Hotel studio
The studio where Elvis Presley recorded Heartbreak Hotel is being torn down.
The Nashville studio was purchased in 1999 by car dealership owner Lee Beaman, who had been leasing the half-acre property until recently, when he decided the business needed more customer parking.
Doug McClanahan, president of Beaman Automotive Group, said the area would be paved over within the next 60 days.
“I’m disappointed that the studio is being torn down,” Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires, Presley’s primary background vocalists from 1956 to 1968, said.
“But you can’t hang on to everything your whole life.”
The studio, used by RCA in the mid-1950s, played a part in the recording of many hits.
During the Heartbreak Hotel session on January 10, 1956, Presley also recorded Ray Charles’ I Got A Woman, according to John Rumble, senior historian at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
In 1957, Jim Reeves cut one of his biggest hits there, Four Walls. Chet Atkins, the Everly Brothers and Hank Snow also recorded at the McGavock Street studio.
The studio’s success led RCA in the late ’50s to open its famed Studio B, where Presley, Roy Orbison, Dolly Parton, Charlie Pride and others recorded.
That studio, in the heart of Music Row, has been preserved as a popular cultural and tourism attraction.
