Nashville, Tenn. – Downtown Nashville’s “Smithsonian of country music,” The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, opened in ‘67 on Nashville’s Music Row (“the neighborhood attracted music industry firms after WSM announcer David Cobb referred to Nashville as ‘Music City, USA,’ during a broadcast in 1950″), becoming accredited by the American Alliance of Museums in ‘87 (only 3% of museums in the nation), and launching its current downtown location in 2001 to expand in 2014 housing their carry-on, original, oldest surviving recording studio in Nashville, RCA Sudio B, as well as the CMA Theater, and Ford Theater, and the Taylor Swift Education Center.     

Walk-ins on cold, winter days seem beneficial with American history.

First, some area news…

Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s Haley Gallery, 2024 Exhibits:

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s Haley Gallery held a comprehensive, Everywhere Is Beauty: 2023 Print Invitational, supporting local artists, near and far through January 19^th, this year featuring situations such as “Printer/Designer/Birthday Boy (on right),” Dan H. Brawner’s Hip Donelson (1970, 2020, Edition of 20, $150); Starpointe Studio’s Joanne Price with Tree Swallow Sunrise (2023, Edition of 50, $210); Carlos Hernandez’ Bayou Queen (2022, Edition of 11, $200); Emmalea Chan’s The Pekin Noodle Parlor (2021, Edition of 25, $200). 

As area serendipity goes, searching for quilt exhibits on snowy days, this winter, mostly turned misdirected due to atmosphere, but sanctuary was found elsewhere in “Music City, USA,” January 18, 2024, …at the Hatch Show Print (as serendipity -or synergy, in this case, goes, it was one of Jim Sherraden’s quilts over on the Haley wall that brought us in). 

Daniel and Erin, curators, describes the exhibit immediately following Everywhere is Beauty.  

“Marilyn Murphy. She is […] was head of the Vanderbilt MFA program. She’s primarily a graphite pencil illustrator of fanciful drawings that draw from popular science illustrations of, like, the 40’s and 50’s. Some of them will be in charcoal, some of them are in letter press print. -That one’s [was] on Wednesday, [January 24th] at 5pm. We [had] an opening, booze, food, the whole bit,” said Daniel, at the Haley Gallery desk. 

…Coincidentally, on the last day of the Marilyn Murphy, as well, Willie Cole’s Lyrical Reconstructions will feature area sculptor and printmaker, Willi Cole, guest curated by Paul Barrett, and free and open to the public, “opening, booze, food, the bit,” according Daniel, and the Haley Gallery desk, with Erin, within the The Country Music Hall of Fame, located at 222 Rep. John Lewis Way Blvd S, Nashville, TN (Haley Gallery – Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum), west entrance.

Lyrical Reconstructions is open from March 28 – May 16.

For more information, The Haley Gallery can be reached at (615) 577-7711, as well as is open to walk-ins, seven days a week, between 9am – 5 pm.

Haley Gallery exhibit walk-throughs are free of charge.

VIP Elevator at Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum Still in Order, January 18, 2024

“Do people, like, ever pop in here?” asked Hatch Show Print tourist, waiting in line to be signed in.

“Yeah. That’s a locked elevator,” said Sarah Edmonds, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s Education and Program supervisor.

“That’s where all our VIP’s come up, which is just wild to me. And that’s very Nashville, too, that the VIP’s are, you know, kind of right here with the rest of us. They just pop up there. It’s like, ‘oh,’ y’know,” said Edmonds.

People say things like, ‘That’s so Nashville,’ -and you can take that a million different ways- but still, I was behind Sheryl Crow in a coffee shop, the other day, and I was just like, ‘okay.’ The girl at the checkout was freaking out, which is also not very Nashville, ‘cause you see so many people just take things in stride here because they’re used to it, or whatever, […] and she was totally losing it -and then I didn’t say anything. […] 

“My mom got me into her!” the tour guide’s barista told the tour guide when she got to the counter.” 

“It was in the Starbucks in Green Hills,” the tour guide said. 

“We were going to the little shops. We’re like, ‘I wonder if we’ll see someone in the little shops,’ but… Starbucks. It’s Starbucks,” said the Hatch Show Print tourist.

Hatch Show Print Tour, January 18, 2024:

Rosa:  -Hello. Are we friends? Do any of you have any Hatches? Any posters?  

You’re going to make your own by the end of the day, so… Pretty cool. 

We are printing a beautiful, beautiful way. Are any of you guys’ printers? Have any of you done this before?  

F&P: I’m a newpaper publisher, but I haven’t done the print thing. 

Rosa: You’re going to know a lot of the stuff. We have newspaper presses next door. You’ll be pretty familiar, I feel like. […] All right. Cool.  

Well, we do letter press printing. All right?  

Beautiful, beautiful type.  

We are 144.  

We are called Hatch Show Print because our Hatch family, right here (points to three pics of Hatch legacy). […] They gave us, pretty much, most of our collection. The typing has not been added to since the last Hatch, here, Will T. He passed in ‘52, so we don’t want any typists. We stopped adding to keep their full collection together. I think not adding new typefaces really emphasizes how old everything is –those old, old fonts; beautiful, beautiful dings and dents on the letters, you can see. They are old. You can’t help that look. People do recreate our look, kind of complement our style, give their own letters those dings and dents on their computer, but they can also print that file in 30 years. They can put an ‘A” in every time, if they need. These are individual pieces of type. A huge part of our job here is putting everything back, so the posters won’t physically exist to be printed anymore once the shows happen. We keep everything until then, but then it’s got to go back in its place so we can use it, so it won’t exist. They are very limited for that reason. People do love to collect our posters because there’s only so many to be had. The type is very cool, though. It’s bigger than I am, and it also gets smaller than that, all right (Rose pulls out a tiny letterpress). 

Rosa: What point do you think that is? 

F&P: That would be a period. An apostrophe? 

Rosa: No. No, what point? How tall? 

F&P: Oh! […] 1? 

Rosa: One? This is 14 point. 

F&P: Ah, my bad. 

Rose: Oh, you’re good. I was just curious.  If you type on your computer it tells you ten point-twelve point, that’s 14.  Really, really small. We have it down to 6, so less than half that height. I can guarantee you they’re not using it, currently, but we have it if we need it. 

***“The drawers are where ‘upper case/lower case’ came from. My favorite fun fact,” said Rose quickly directing to drawers. 

Upper case, top drawer, capital letters, lower case, lower drawer, lower case of letters. Now, things are set up “The California Job Pay,” so everything’s on one level. I guess California did that first, so you can kind of see it all at once. 

Another fun fact about the shop, if you pull the drawer out a little too far, everything falls out, you get to write your name on the drawer: a memory that lasts forever. 

I do think our bread and butter is the hand carving. They use little tools like this [holds up an etching tool]. Some people have fancy tools. Some people go buy these at Michael’s, Lit, Staples, whatever. Little tools like this. To carve it out.  

Do you know how long it takes someone here? …  

F&P: Here? 

Rosa: A Year? 

Other tourist: Less than a week? 

Rosa: Less than a week?  

F&P: I was gonna say a week. 

Rosa: About three hours, y’all. Not too shabby. Thank you for guessing, because earlier someone guessed it right on the nose, and I was like, ‘well, that’s no fun for me’ (tour group laughs). But doesn’t take’m too long. Every single designer/printer, all those folks next door, they can carve. So, if they got this job -with the armadillo, that was their responsibility. They didn’t go bother somebody else with all that work to be done… So, they carved them for this. 

Now, we needed him for this job, but they were thinking, ‘do I want him facing left? Facing right? They’d have to carve him the opposite way. That’s the nature of the beast, here, it’s going to end up backwards, and we get to keep this, now. Any imagery we carve that isn’t a proprietary thing belongs to our collection, so they can write what it was, about halfway. (examining it) Nothing’s on the other side. That’s how we find things.  

He’s going to go in the animal section.  

They have general categories. There’s ‘musicians,’ to ‘foliage.’ We have a roller-skating bear over here. This was originally a sad, circus bear photo plate. Nick re-carved him; wanted him to have a happy –live a second life, so he gave him roller skates, but he’s in ‘transportation,’ because he’s on the go, and he’s not with the animals, so you kinda just learn where things end up, and they’re kind of just in that collection all week long, so they know exactly where stuff goes, but they’re found all the time. On whatever material they want. 

The last thing we print –I kind of mentioned it- photo plates: We don’t make these. We never have. We never will. It’s a chemical thing. We have enough going on. You’ll see photos that look like this:  

“…Titans logo. Mr. Predator, here. The soccer club. …Colonel Sanders,” she continued.

Rosa: So, we can do them, we just don’t make them here. Someone has to send them back to us. It takes, like, two days to come back in the mail, so if somebody wants a photo plate, they just let us know, and we get that sent out. We’ve been doing these for a very long time, now. 

Now, those are the only three things on the poster. Those are the only three things we design with, and we design it all by hand. They’re gonna start out pencil sketches, and then they’re physically built for you. All you have to tell us is the words, and how many posters you need. It’s really pretty simple. 

We’re going to design your poster, because we know it’s in this collection. […] One person gets the job, probably, within three weeks of your meeting. We have a four month turn around, just about, for these posters, so you’re waiting a while, and somebody’s going to hit you with an email, ‘hey, I just got your order. Anything I need to know about this poster design?’ And then they’re going to sketch, turn straight into this: 

And then every line you build should be nice and snug, and coming out pretty evenly, so they can compose, line-by-line, this way. 

Rosa: There’s a couple of ding bats on both sides, but (examining it) everything is fine right here. Ding bats are in there. […] Ding bats, they help us fill in negative space. And they’re gonna print the ding bats, and the title. 

So, they’re sitting up a little higher. We call everything you’re going to print, ‘type-high.’ It’s really specific, .918 of an inch. If it’s high enough to reach the rollers and print, it’s type-high,’ so that’s ‘type-high.’ 

The other things in here that are not going to show up, that’s your furniture pieces. Furniture doesn’t show up. We don’t want it to. It’s like furniture in your house. It sits there and takes up space. That’s all the furniture does for us. I think that’s kind of the hard part about doing all the posters, is doing all the math, and measuring for those little negative spaces, but they have every single size you can imagine: a rectangle. They also have triangular furniture, and they just take it out, filling it up. 

Now, once they have to whole thing built, we call it the ‘form’ [forn?], all right? -Reached a good spot, here.  

What they’re not going to do is run to the press, print you three hundred, and hope you like what we did. We have show you this, first.  

We’re going to ink this up at the table, get some trace and paper, put this on top, and we pretty much just print with our hands. Smush it down, pull the proof up, and this is all the client is going to see before we print.  

‘Advertising Without Posters is like Fishing Without Worms,’ this one says. Very true. 

We’re going to tell you the colors we’re planning on. We don’t want to mix our colors, quite yet. We know you imagine the color you want. I pointed out the Titans poster, y’all. -Whole NFL draft came through in 2019… matched every single color.  

Sarah [Edmonds] has done wonderful, wonderful job of grabbing all those posters, so if you have a team preference, we might be able to find that for you to get a picture. But…very good at matching every single team color. Matched every single team color by eye. I think we did a pretty good job. NFL approves. We just want to make sure you like it. We don’t want to mix the same thing, and it’s great for you job, and then waste it because you did not end up liking it, or wanting it, so in this case, they’re going to say, ‘all right. Your posters going to be bright red,’ just like this:  

Rosa: Now, let’s say the client –here’s where they ask for the posters in blue, so if you want an adjustment like that -that’s what you typically hear from the clients [like,] ‘we make that bigger,’ or ‘smaller,’ or ‘a different font’- if they want this in blue, you move it off this layer to a new one, you would fill in that space with the furniture, move it here to the opposite, fill in around with the furniture. They would have to make sure these layers line up later on. Then they’ll hit you back on an email, ‘All right we got your blue. We got your red. We’re waiting for approval. Once we have it… Heads to the press. 

Now, we can’t start printing immediately, because we’re 144.  

Technically, they’re going to pull a print that they make ready with those little shims to bump up the letters up to type-high. 

If they pull a print, and things aren’t looking quite right (Rose pulls up a poster) … Smokey Robinson. I know exactly who did this. He’s very neat. You can see him making notes. 

Branch, that’s a perfect paper copy, copy paper, pretty thin, All the way down to “T.” That’s for scotch tape. Sometimes it doesn’t take much. Sometimes you really have to bump that letter that hasn’t been used in a while, or it’s way lower than everything else, so they keep pulling prints like this:

We call it the ‘make-ready,’ until they cannot read it anymore, and we recycle the stuff. All right. These paper chains. That’s where they come in. 

This Renaissance Festival, a lot of tiny, skinny letters you gotta fix. Some days it’s easy. Those little adjustments, you might have to make 15 minutes-worth of them, some days you’re there for three, four, five hours. You don’t really know. You get to the press and find out, but you don’t want to bump things up too high. You want the thin shims, if things get up, too high to get super-hard by the press, so it can be kind of a tedious process, but they’re willing to do it for every single layer you order.  

Now, we do have two rules for anyone who wants a poster, these days. I told y’all a four-month turnaround for us, so you have to order a hundred. We don’t want people waiting four months and they order ten for their brother, whose birthday is on Saturday. That’s pretty crazy for everyone. So, you have to order a hundred, and it can only go through the press three times, or about three passes.  

In this case, one layer takes 24 hours for that ink to dry. I’m going to point out some stacks. They just kind of lean on their side, overnight. They dry very well this way, but if you have three… that’s three days of printing. 24 hours between every layer. And you’re still waiting for day four to trim it up.  

Now I know y’all can see this. We’ve got some tricks:  

All right, to fit […], I have to split fountains, and to explain with our “Beach Boys,” they have a big one. “Beach Boys,” went through two times. They want that huge gradient, so they sent this through sideways. There’s only one press this big, and we use it for sideways posters, or some of our two-night shows where you print them all at once, chop them in half for two different nights for that event.  

Now, when they split up their fountain to make on the rollers, they’re making different colors on the spin. Got a blue line on one side. They’re going to dab some yellow on the middle rollers. Red on the other end. There we are.  

There are about five or six rollers on a press, so they spin together. One goes left and right –not very much. It’s jobs evening out your ink, but it’s also going to start to blend those colors together. They’ll wait for it to be smoothed and pretty, as soon as there’s paper in sideways. So, it’s going over a big rectangle, with that circle cut out. That’s how it got that light. 

That’s day one. SO, You got to let these dry. 

Day two, you collect the big color backgrounds, print all the black on top. You gotta let those dry again.  

So, day three, you turn these up. You send them out. There we go. True making of… (tour member laughs) 

F&P: You’re talking about ‘bleed,’ and stuff like that, right? 

Rosa: Uh, I don’t know if this would be a bleed. Technically. 

F&P: Different paper? Different ink, and stuff like that? I didn’t know if terminolgy crossed over.  

Rosa: I thought bleed was off the edge. This one, technically it’s bleeding to the edge of the wooden press, but its not a bleed to the edge of the paper.  Let’s see (looking around the room). We’ve got a lot of bleeds, actually. […] Raconteurs, that’s a bleed in the background.  They just trimmed it up. 

-But often times these blocks are… Okay. In a weird way, good question.  

The blocks, you don’t want them wider than your paper, or you’re printing on the roller the whole time you’re printing. You don’t want ink all over your roller, so the blocks are going to fit within the paper, and then they’re going to trim if they want to bleed. They’re gonna trim it there, because they don’t want to get all the roller covered.  

F&P: Bleed and trim. 

Rosa: Good job. All right. That’s all I have to say, though. Does anybody have any questions, design-wise? 

All right, y’all. You get to print. We are very excited about this year’s posters. I’ve to say they’re very adorable. There are options. -These are 2024. We make a new one every year. They’re up there on either side of the clock, but I don’t know if I can tell, these are going to pop, I think. They’ve got bright, bold, beautiful colors, and we have all our dingbats. I told you how we love our dingbats. We treasure and cherish them. They’re all over this.  

You have one little section. It’s going to fill up the middle. It’s set up back here, our little sign press. Super-easy to use. Y’all be coming back. 

We have our ink. This one’s super cool: Mac-n-Cheese cup over here. , though, so …we find anything we can to recycle.  

Y’all are going to get back here. I’ll have enough ink on this little square for ya. You’ll flip it.  

Rosa: Do y’all want to go ahead and print? 

Tour, murmurs. 

Rosa: Okay. That sounds awesome. 

All right, so, you’re just going to run through here (Rose goes through the motions as she explains). Pretty sizzly. It’s very thick, oil-based paint. So, we’re covering our little roller, and then you’re laying it on your type. It’s kinda like a stamp. Every single time y’all print, y’all are going to have to add some more ink. A lot of folks I’ve had so far are going a few times, both directions, for safe keeping, then you just flip this back to the metal side. I’m gonna put your paper in. Once this is in, you guys just tell me which color you want. This thing works like an old credit card machine, if you know how that went (Rose slides the roller with a mechanical whirl, clanks). Just pretty gentle. Down. And back. Doesn’t take any pressure from you, just roll it. -Hold this up… All right, beautiful. It’s going to fit in this little space in the middle, and it will be wet for 24 hours. We’ll put this in a bag for you guys. It’s safe in the bag, all right. Don’t take it out of the bag. Keep it in the back. Don’t sit on this or set your kid on it, or shove your hands down there at dinner and say, ‘I gotta show you this.’  

I am not kidding, y’all. You get this on your hands, you rub it on your pants. Your favorite t-shirt? It’s not gonna come out. I would leave it in the bag for that reason, but I bet by tomorrow morning, it’ll be pretty safe and dry.  

While we’re printing, I guess we’re going to go ahead and do that, so I’m going to fill that up for Sarah, and then we can get you guys… 

F&P: What if you leave the print in the car over night and it turns, like, 3 degrees negative? 

Rosa: Oh, I’ve never seen frozen ink. That would be crazy. 

Sarah Edmonds: Is it like the experiment with people frosting their hair? (tour giggles). 

Rosa: This is actually really thick. Sometimes it’s really think, like, I dunno. 

You feel brave. You want to go first? 

F&P: Sure. 

Sarah: All right, just get you some ink.  

F&P: What’re some of the perks about going home at night? Do you smell like the ink? Do you dream of the way the press sounds because it happens so much over the course of the day? Just little odds-and-sods, little silver linings of…. 

Sarah: Sometimes its weird when things get quiet. Sometimes a press will stop, and you’re like, ‘oh, wait, what happened?’ Y’know, it’s the background noise that keeps kind of sounding like the shop. 

F&P: Sometimes the ball player, or Jack White will talk to you when you’re not watching out (ghost of the ‘celebrity press’). 

Sarah, laughs: Yes.  

Also, I just heard sound check is happening. I don’t know what event’s happening tonight, but there’s sound check upstairs, so sometimes there’s that kind of stuff is like, ‘oh, yeah,’-kinda reminds you you’re in a print shop within the hall of fame, y’know? 

F&P: I can’t remember the last time I was here to watch a show, but you’re talking about Sheryl Crow being of a particular generation, Cat Power is coming to play Dylan in like a month, or something? That’s kind of funny. 

Tour guides: Oh, yeah! Cat Power singing Dylan.  Yeah, it’s fun to kind of see who comes through town. It’s such a –I mean, you mentioned Tanya Tucker [earlier, before taking quotes].

Rosa: I was going to say, I have days where I come in here –I did the internship in 2019, and there’s days where it smells like 2019 when I walk in. And it’s nothing different. It’s just dust and paper. Takes me right back. 

[People be rollin’].  

[…] Rosa: Thank y’all. Sarah’s going to get you down on the history, and then we’ll go see the shops/what’s going on today. 

And The History

Sarah: I think we get three pretty common questions: One, I mentioned, can we open the gate [into the press room]. Usually the answers no. If you happen to be one of the well-known people we’ve worked with, the anwer is yes, but we have to recognize them first to be able to open the gate (tour laughs).  

That didn’t always used to be.  

So, we were a shop that had moved, technically, up to seven times. Sometimes in that period, some people think we were franchising. Somebody said, ‘Which Hatch Print Show did you go to?’ They go, ‘Down on Broadway.’ -Well, we were down on Broadway for a little bit of time, and we got moved, so…we are in Nashville, so show-business and real estate are always going to be available. Business swings, and we are in both show-business and Nashville, so how we got our real estate, a little bit is up to this guy over here (points at the farthest of the pictures on the wall mentioned earlier). 

Well, we first opened up with this name, ‘Hatch,’ in our name, because William H Hatch, […] he was a printer and preacher of one of the churches that has lots and lots of religious influence here, even today, and who you’re thinking of.  

So, Charles and Herbert, Will’s sons, opened C.R. & H.H. Hatch Printers. They run this together for forty years. They are printing before the invention of the light bulb. They are printing presumably during daylight hours because there just was no commerical light buld. They’re doing this kind of printing before Albert Einstein was born. Obvously way before radio, televsion. All they had to work with was ink and paper. That’s why that phrase is the one we print: “Advertising Without Posters is like Fishing Without Worms,” because that’s what these guys were for: 

You needed papers and printers to advertise.  

This is not the original. We don’t even have the originals. We’ve never saved the originals. This was just a means to an end, but the Smithsonian was able to help us identify that this is one of our earliest know jobs.  

I think that possibly this was saved by somebody, somewhere because this prominent name, Beecher, otherwise this would have been rained on, thrown in the trash, used to wrap fish. Nobody saved advertising. It would be as silly as saving a screen shot of Twitter, y’know? But somebody saved it because this Reveren Hemingworth Beecham was an important guy at the time. He is the brother of his, now, more famous sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, so when The Smithsonian got us a copy of this, we hold onto it as our birthday. This lecture is Septemer12, 1879, so we just say it’s our birthday even though we don’t exactly know when. 

We still have nine of these [Tunite?]-face, typeface letters, which is pretty cool. 

 So the name dropping starts early. Beecher is the famous name, there. These guys are doing well for themselves. Well enough that they’re able to hand the business off to the next generation. Will T. Hatch, his name’s in red. You know he’s a huge part of our story. He was Charle’s son. He gets the business when these guys decide it’s no longer time for them to print. He ditches the mustaches and gets the hipster glasses. He does, probably, our most important thing, arguably: Gets us into this ‘camp cars’ era. He basically says, ‘Thanks, Dad. I’m going to take over your business, and make it more fun. I think you could always tell when Will T. was in the shop. After 1921, you start to see ladies on everything. Ladies. Ladies. Ladies. Behind this grumpy gentleman, Ladies. Ladies. Our great hero shows up, then. Ladies.  

So, he’s kind of spicing things up. He’s also adding great colors.  

He has left us with a legacy, now, of things that –in his own words he would carve once, won’t have to do it again [yammering?] -and this is the kind of stuff we’re getting from Will T. 

He hand-carved all of the blocks, and they turned out to be something like an early clipart, where now, it’s almost ninety years later, we can print that same cooler block, and then just add whatever type we won’t at the bottom, because these are metal […] This polar bear’s holding up pretty well all these years later. If you’re a follower of the rules, you can get this block right on your poster. He does this again and again. -This, The Fulton County Fair, probably my favorite two blocks, at least at the moment. We can print this forever. So, this is in the early 1900’s, and that’s 2019, a little later on. 

Will T. is printing on these one sheets. The largest piece of paper manufactured at the time. He’s hired to do billboard printing, which is multiple one sheets that he prints one layer at a time, one color at a time, by hand, on the press, very much like yours, just a little bit bigger. And then he’s putting them together at the seams. An advancement is paid to make these in-seams larger though, […]that’s apparently what everybody had to do to advertise, so this is one, two, three, four, five, six carbons. Your standard billboard was 16 one-sheets, hand carved by Will T. If you wanted a two-cover billboard, 32 bunches. So, this guy was amazing. Just this guy with a hand carving tool saying, ‘Yeah, I got an advertising company. I can make you one of these.’ 

Super-important real estate decision for him being in that building right across from what is now the Ryman Auditorium. 

Ryman Auditorium, not a bad place to have a little advertising company –especially when the Ryman Auditorium starts to host this Saturday Night Barn Dance. The “We Sheild Millions,” radio station [L&A Insurance Company’s radio station/WSM, ~1925] has The Grand Ole Opry. Everybody who’s anybody comes to town.  

Sarah, continues: -Guess what? 

Those guys need posters because, those guys are singing a few songs at the Opry on Saturday night, but by 1930, their voices are going to 30 states on that “We Shield Millions,” radio station, and going to 30 states, their voices first, then their tour buses follow.  

They need posters to send in advance on their tours, because you can’t make a living just one Saturday. Depending on who you are, it’s touring. They come to town on a bus and have people come to their shows. 

So obviously, Dolly you all know her. I mean, you can’t – I don’t even know- I want to meet someone someday who doesn’t know Dolly. -Rose met somebody once who didn’t know what queso was, so that a first (tour ‘hms’). Didn’t know what queso was. I’ve never met anyone that didn’t know Dolly. 

Bill Monroe, you may not know him. He’s an old one, but a goody. Father of American Bluegrass. This is the caliber of people they were printing for. When you come through the Opry, they get an actual print, they get a poster. We’re kinda going gangbusters, doing pretty well. Couple of these kids start coming through our doors. We are printing for the likes of –essentially everybody who comes through Nashville makes a litte raucous.  

Elvis Presley. This was his first headlining tour in this state. We did not know Elvis, at first. We knew his, now, somewhat notorious manager, Colonel Tom Parker. I always say Colonel Tom Hanks, because in that movie, Tom Hanks plays such a great Colonel Tom Parker. But we had been working with Colonel Tom for so…- all these folks 

We, again, didn’t save this poster. Why would you save a poster, over time, probably worth a quarter of a million dollars? Might as well, just throw it away.  

We did, however, save the invoice. We know how much we paid for penicils in 1956,because that was important as a business, saving invoives.  

If we would’ve save this, we would’ve been one of four people who could see the future and hold onto this. Four of these have ever been found, which is kind of amazing. 

One sold at a private auction at Graceland in the 90’s, and it was announced after-the-fact that it sold, and now the general recommendation is, if you find anytning, check to see if its a letter press –You can see if it’s a letter press by touching these. You can feel all that in there. Next thing you want to do is maybe see if it’s a Hatch. Hatch Show posters, now, tend to be worth quite a bit of money because we only made either a hundred, or two hundred, and we put all the blocks away, and went about our business.  

This is a cool one. You can still feel the type in here because this is not a copy, like, done on a computer. Its a re-strike. So, all we do is go to the shelves, find this very exact type, go to our collection of photo-plates. We pull out this very original same photo plate we used the day this poster was made; we stick it all in the press –in this case we always like to print light /to dark, but in this case you’re gonna print the photo plate first, so we print the blue layer, let that dry for 24 hours, then we print the red. 

Did Rose show you the tiny type? 

This tiny type basically says that you know that we know that this is a re-strike. And you shouldn’t pay a quarter of a million dollars for it. 

Tour member: Oh, so if it has this, it’s a restrike? 

Sarah: A restrike will aways say its a restrike, but in this case, it’s the Elvis Presley Enterprises, so this is Priscilla’s, so I think it’s still… 

Tour member: Ohhhh. 

Sarah: Yes. So, they would order this and get a portion of the sale of this, so it’s not the original, but it is a restrike, which means it’s a Hatch, it’s just not the original from 1956. 

F&P: If you could find one of the four originals to compare this, could you be able to tell the age difference between the two based on the ink that you’re talking about? 

Sarah: I think so. First things we always look for is that texture. It would done on a cheaper paper meant to just be deteriorated –get put on the side of a barn, or on telephone poles to wash away, or get pasted over. I think the ink would be fairly the same. A couple of cool things about this, the ‘Jordanaires’ is spelled wrong. We are able to restrike this because this photo appeared in Life Magazine in 1956. This minister in Jacksonville went to one of those telephone poles, or whatever, pulled our poster off the wall, and brought it into church with him. So, he has a bible in one hand, our poster in the other. They’re all going to the show. […] Isn’t it well turning the children. This girl and her mom must’ve been so proud when this went in Life Magazine in 1956. 

Tour Member: She’s rolling her eyes (laughs). She knows she’s going later anyway,  

Sarah: -or at the show last night, is my favorite version of that made-up story for her. She was out late last night, now she’s listening to this guy. She’s a goner, but kind of cool. 

And so, when we restrike, we restrike this exact poster, because this is the photo proof we have of this, and this has the spelling mistake, and some things. 

Tour member: So that one has the spelling mistake too (asking about the restrike in her hands). 

Sarah: Mmmhm. So Jordanairres was spellled wrong on the original poster, so now every time that we do it, we have to spell this wrong. There’s a couple, little funny parts about this poster that are kinda cool. -We say every poster has a story, this one has about ten million.  

F&P: Have you ever [sic]’d yourself on a poster? 

Sarah: Yes. So funny. Like, proofing something that has to be intentionally spelled wrong, or, this is a whole different –this is nice sized tour, we can kina get into specifics and radicals –when we were printing [in the] pandemic, Joe Bonnamasa printed with us quite a bit, and Joe Onamasa printed with us with shows that were never going to happen, or shows that had dates before the pandemic, so both in your pandemic mind, and kind of proof reading a poster date from 2017, imgagine it was very upsetting. I didn’t have to do that, but it’s interesting to think that. It’s the proofing you have to do. 

We’ve also had to proof fake words, which is interesting. You know, a band that will have a whole bunch of gibberish, and you have to proof it to make sure it’s exactly the copy.  Kinda cool right? 

We print the little bands you’ve heard of, for sure. We don’t have to posters to show you because we didn’t keep them. The Beatles. Bob Marley and The Wailers. The Rollings Stones. All kinds of stuff. 

-But the word on the street was that Hatch Show Print could print you a pretty good, quick show poster, so a lot of people did it.  

Will T. has a great letter that he has from Bessie Smith that’s down in our archives. It’s from 1927, and Bessie Smith saw a show, and it had something that looked just like a photo on it in 1927. She said, ‘I want my poster to have my photo on it,’ so you know we were doing photo plates as early as 1927. We also know we never did them in the shop in the 1900’s. It was just super easy to have people do them for you because we were on a printer’s row, so we had five photo plate makers right here next to us.  

All we do is take the picture, give that picture to the photo plate maker, they make it into a negative, put it through a dot screen, dots are applied to a metal surface, that metal surface is dipped in acid, everything that is not protected is eaten away by the acid.  

Tour member: So, it’s not a negative anymore… 

Sarah: So, it’s not a negative anymore.  

If we ever screw these up, at some point somebody forgot to flip it because it still has to be reverse to be right, reading. We have one down there, I think. There was a new federal building in town, and we had a photo plate made of the new federal building, like, three months ago, and it wasn’t flipped. So, the photo plate got made.  

And then, the shortest version of this, everything that creases –you know that number from Rose that she told you? It’s been on jeopardy twice. Does anyone remember the type-high number?  

.918″! 

If anything is .918 of an inch. […[ If anything is .918 of an inch, and it’s that inky roller, it’s gonna print.  

So, this is Porter Wagner. All we is lock him in on the brown layer, and just -we could print him in bright blue today. He’d print just as good right though today.  

Tour member: And this one’s not a restrike.  

Sarah: This on is Not a restrike. Good call. One of the reasons is because it doesn’t say restrike. We also can see… Oh,Rosa, we have a question… 

It’s 4/20/18, but it’s in 2007. We don’t know. 

We don’t know 

Rosa: Did he pass away in 2007? 

Sarah: No. So –you have your Opry-membership only lives with you as a living person, because there’s a requirement you play The Opry, and you cant’ play The Opry if you’ve fallen to the great beyond. 

Rosa: Is it just one they did for retail, maybe? 

Sarah: Hm. I wonder. 

Rosa: Like, Dolly? We still cut that for the Opry, and that was, like, 2019.  

Sarah: And that was restrike, or no? 

Rosa: According to Corey, no. I went in depth with him on this a few -over last week, and he said no. Not a restrike.  

Sarah: I don’t know. Good luck getting stumped. 

The last stump we have here, Rosa knows very quickly and very easliy. For the Ryman, 130 years… But we’ll get to that.   

Anyway, this is how to make all these things.  

You may have heard of Hatch, from this area, or you may never have heard of Hatch, and that makes sense, beacuse about the time that all of us were being made as people, tachnology was changing, so everything started to shift, starting as early as the 1970’s and starting as late as, I don’t know? The 3D printers’ technology from earlier this week, or NFT, or whatever, the technology from letter press printing is just left in the past, and that’s important. Our shop goes through some of the struggles that you expect and old letter press shop would go through as your stars follow the technology into digital.  

We are not a shop that’s able to make it through this computer-generated print. We have one paying client that keeps us going through the late seventies, early eighties. They liked letter press printing, but I think more than anything else, they liked photo plates. The Professional Wrestler. So everytime they would pose for a muscle, they came to our shop. Tojo and George were huge fans of our shop, a travelling troupe from Memphis. They loved getting cheap, bulk poster printed letter press and they also love to stick them on the Grey Hound bus; all over regional wrestling areas. So, it’s kind of funny, this is not a name-dropping poster, it’s kind of a functional way to keep the lights on in our shop, but now we know that little Manny Paco was the brother of Randy Paco, who you may know as Macho Man Randy Savage, so it’s, like, right there before the big time. We’re just making these to keep our lights on.  

The word on the street is that we’re going to close our shop up because we’re not going to transition to any kind of digital printing.  

We’ve been here about a hundred years. It’s a good run for a print shop. There’s a kid that just graduated from MTSU. He comes into our shop. He’s hired to write the history of the Hatch Print Show, to close our shop. You know just by the fact that we’re standing right here he didn’t do a very good job of closing us up, and one of the reasons is because he got us licensing deals.  

So, his name is Jim Sherraden. He graduates from MTSU. When he’s closing the shop, he’s restriking all of the original wood carvings from the Hatch family, seeing what we have, seeing what’s in good shape. He [?] about10% of all of the Hatch Family carvings available, but he can not help but get the bug, and try is hand at carving.  

This is the MCA records deal where he was asked to hand carve a poster for each artist in a 15-artist series:

I’ll carve the poster, I’ll desigin it. You buy the poster, and You figure out how to get it onto, in that case, a cd cover.  Wallets, watches, ice creams, and then, probably some of our most prominently –some of our younger artists in Nashville… its catching on. 

That’s when we start working for a lot of no-name people coming into town: The Beastie Boys, The Roots that went to The Factory [old, Nashville club] with R.E.M. -This shlub (she plops out a Bruce Springsteen Hatch Show Print (tour members laugh)  as he starts to sort of re-climb that popular culture ladder.  

Emmylou Harris, probably one of our favorites who lives here in Nashville. She gets a Hatch Show Print-carved record label signed here. Jim Sherraden, signed a print carving for her cd cover. This is still the cd cover today, available at Spotify streaming services, but when she’s putting this record out, she’s doing it Live, at the Ryman to protest the Ryman’s eventual demise.  

The Ryman was empty from 1974, when they played that last Opry show, until the 90’s At this point, the building was dilapidated, they’re going to tear down the Ryman to make way for something shiny and new enough for Nashville. Who needs an old church?  

Emmylou says, ‘We need that old Church.’ 

She grew up going to the shows at that Ryman.  

She performs, Live at the Ryman but they don’t have enough trust in the building the building will actually stand, so she only has a couple of hundred industry people in for this live recording. Long story short, It was awarded the Grammy of the Year in 1992.

So, this album’s winning a Grammy. Everybody in the industry knows how the Ryman sounds, but now, everybody in the world now knows how Emmylou made the Ryman sound on that CD. You can’t tear the building down that Emmylou just won a Grammy.  

You guys, the Ryman is still there.  

We print for the Ryman when it reopens, which is a big turning point for us.  

We are now commemorating what’s happening here at the Ryman.  

Our new logo goes on a poster for the first time. 

And people are getting these at the show, instead of them having to be advertising to the show. 

 So, a lot of shifts in there, but I think a big one is, now, in this building. We have this space where we have to print and get our access to all this type, we have all these photo-friendly posters up that we can take pictures of. For the guest book, we now save three of every poster of the guest book, and every one of the projects we print gets archived, so your yearly project is archived, as well. 

Everybody printed? No tears? Woot. Thanks. Any questions? I know that’s a ton of info. We want to give time with posters, time to pick our brains, time to stump us. I’m gonna find that Porter Wagner answer at at some point. Probably not today.  

Why it’s 2018, and why it doesn’t have a restrike date. 

We only got into because somebody though Corey’s answer was ridiculous, and there wasn’t an exact date on it. It was kind of just like, at a certain point it was old enough, and we’re not always making it, it’s considered a restrike. He said the Dolly wasn’t a restrike. I was like, even though we’re constantly making that? He said, no. It’s not a restrike. 

Sarah: Wow.  

Rosa: It’s interesting. And I think it’s also different if it’s a retail poster for us whether its a restrike, or not. Yeah. He but didn’t have a solid answer or I wouldve said it’s this. It makes it restrike… 

Sarah: We have a lot. We were saying earlier today, you’ll learn something new here, everyday. It’s like a hundred- and forty-five-year history here and somebody will randomly say something and be like, ‘wait, what?’ ‘okay.’ 

F&P: How often you guys stumped? 

Rosa: Once or twice a month, maybe? 

Sarah: Once or twice a week? Some are perpetual. 

Rosa: This Lizzo poster, there’s an argument about how many layers. 

Sarah: they think it’s a five-layer poster, which isn’t allowed, but the person we think it is doesn’t work here anymore, so we can’t ask them. 

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum is located at 222 Rep. John Lewis Way S. Hours or operation, and a list of options in which to participate can be found at Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum – Top Nashville Experience and Tours (www.countrymusichalloffame.org). 

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum is a 501 c3, non-profit organization chaired by Mary Ann McCready (Chair), Steve Turner (Emeritus), and E.W. “Bud” Wendell (Emeritus, Member of the Country Music Hall of Fame).  

Trustees include Mark Bloom, David Conrad, J. William Denny, Rod Essig, Al Giombetti (VP), Ken Levitan, Mary Ann McCready (Chair), David Ross (Sec.), Ernie Williams (Treas.), and Jody Williams. 

Trustees Emeritus include Emmylou Harris (Member of the Country Music Hall of Fame), Bruce Hinton, Keel Hunt, Steve Turner, and E.W. “Bud” Wendell (Member). 

Officers include Earl Bentz, Vince Gill (Pres., Member of the Country Music Hall of Fame), Randy Goodman, Lon Helton, Gary Overton, Jim Seabury, Bill Simmons, Clarence Spalding, Chris Stewart, Troy Tomlinson, Jay Turner, Marcus Whitney, Tim Wipperman, and Sarah Trahern (Ex-Offico). 

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Contributions to their Annual Fund, and to become a Member, please visit Donate – Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, and Membership – Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (respectively). 

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More information on the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, CMA Theatre, Hatch Show Print, Historic RCA Studio B, and the Taylor Swift Education Center (specifically, Community Partners – Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum), check out the website, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum – Top Nashville Experience and Tours (www.countrymusichalloffame.org), or call (615) 416-2001. Schedules are available. 

More information can be found at Wikipedia’s Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum page, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum – Wikipedia, as well as Music Row Nashville Information Guide (trolleytours.com).