Exploring the Legacy of the Clement House Recording Studio
Editors Note: This article is a contribution by acclaimed songwriter, producer and performer Conrad Fisher, who also owns the music venue Raggamuffin Hall in McCoysville, Pennsylvania. You can hear songs Fisher has recorded at the Cement House Recording Studio on his 2024 EP ‘Clement House Recordings,’ along with multiple collaborations with country legends to be released in the coming weeks and months.
“I’ve worked in a bunch of different studios and what sets [Clement House] apart from them in my mind is how “homey” and relaxed the environment is,” Conrad Fisher says. “You have to walk in the through the kitchen to get to the studio. You’re always cooking something in the kitchen or putting on a pot of coffee. That puts me in such a better state of mind than going to a big stone building somewhere with a receptionist guarding the front door. It makes me feel like I’m at my own house making music.”
You can see the full interview between Conrad Fisher and Cousin Bob Clement at the bottom of the article.
The Clement House Recording Studio sits tucked away on a quiet section of Belmont Boulevard in Nashville, TN. This unassuming building, formerly known as the Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa, was once the home and creative nucleus of legendary producer and songwriter Cowboy Jack Clement. Cowboy’s eccentric personality, wild creativity, and passionate devotion to the magic of music and those who make it drew some of country music’s greatest personalities to its doorstep. From Johnny Cash to John Prine, and Mother Maybelle to Nanci Griffith, countless classic songs and recordings were birthed here under his guidance.
Now, more than a decade after Cowboy Jack’s passing, a new generation of songwriters and artists are tapping into the magic of the Clement House. After spending a few days recording there with the Oak Ridge Boys and Rhonda Vincent, I sat down with the current proprietor, Cousin Bob Clement, to talk about the past, present, and future of this iconic Nashville institution.
Note: This interview has been abbreviated and edited for concision and clarity.
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Conrad: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and the legacy of this room?
Cousin Bob: Well, there’s a lot that’s been going on here. They call me Cousin Bob, because that’s how Cowboy introduced me. He’d say, “This is my Cousin Robert E. Lee Clement from Jackson, Mississippi!” (Conrad laughs) and that would be the reaction! He would make people laugh.
I got here in 1987 but Cowboy started recording here back in 1975 downstairs in his bedroom on a four or eight track recorder. He cut a few songs down there and got a record deal with Elektra from it. They gave him an advance and a signing bonus, and Cowboy used the money to hire a carpenter to build the studio upstairs. The first song he recorded in the studio was John Prine singing “Hey there she goes. Walking down the street in all her clothes,” and that made it on Cowboy’s record. That album is a country classic, and that was the beginning of this place being a studio.
It had already been a publishing office downstairs for a few years. At the time, Cowboy had just finished making a horror movie “Dear Dead Delilah.” The film was not a commercial success so he pulled back, sold a few things, and hunkered down here and recorded an album. This became a kind of club house for artists. Everybody from Johnny Cash to Waylon Jennings and Townes Van Zandt came here to hang out with Cowboy.
They made a great documentary about the place that won first prize at the Nashville Film Festival called “Shakespeare Was a Big George Jones Fan.” It redefines how to make a documentary. Before, documentaries have always been “very educational” (Bob laughs) but this one opens the door to entertainment.
Cowboy has really inspired a lot of people. He’s in the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Country Music Hall of Fame. But he wasn’t just a producer, and not just a songwriter. It’s his personality: how he carried himself and what he did. That’s what made his reputation and that’s the legendary part of him as much as any of his talent.
Conrad: Tell me about some of the albums that have been recorded here.
Cousin Bob: Some really great records have come out of here. There were five Johnny records that came out of here, and several for John Prine. Iris Dement, Nanci Griffith, Del McCoury, and Peter Rowan cut records here. The list goes on and on. We recently started an internet radio station called Clement House Radio. You can download the app for year and it plays 50 years of musical history from this place. It’s a cool vibe. You don’t hear a lot of hits on it, you just hear a lot of the music you wish the radio would play more. We play the entire record. We also have songs on there from Pat McLaughlin, Tim O’Brien, Sturgill Simpson, and all the other artists we’re recording here today.
Conrad: Can you tell me about fire that devastated the studio several years ago?
Cousin Bob: In 2011, I think it was early July, a storm came through. Lighting struck, came in through the power line, ignited inside of a wall, and burned the place down, basically. Fifteen fire trucks emptied their water here and couldn’t put the fire out. It was total destruction, especially in the studio. Everything was ruined, a lot of people’s projects and tapes. Cowboy wanted to rebuild after the fire. He was 80 years old and pretty much retired, but he wanted to rebuild, so we did. The house got all new electrical, plumbing, floors, windows and doors, which was probably not a bad idea anyway. The house was built in 1925, so it’s 100 years old this year.
Conrad: Isn’t there a news clip of Cowboy in a bathrobe being interviewed right after the fire? The reporter asks him what’s going through his mind and Cowboy says, “Well, I don’t really like it but I guess things happen that way!”
Cousin Bob: Yeah. I think I was sitting right next to him. He lived in that Elvis bathrobe. He was taking a nap when the fire hit so he had to basically wake up and get out of the house immediately. People like Shawn Camp came over right away and climbed in his office window and started handing out instruments, but everything up here was way gone. It was heartbreaking, but he had a sense of humor even about that. Someone would walk by and he’d say, “Hey, you got a match?” That’s Cowboy! But you could see the sadness in him.
To me, the best thing about Cowboy to me was all the records he produced. A lot of those records had been mixed, mastered, and released, and so in a big way that wasn’t lost. You can always go listen to those things. What he did lose was all those side projects, those artists that he loved enough to spend his own money on. The crazy stuff that’s “out of the box” was lost. We had just started using computers instead of 24 track tape so we just set up a little triage in the shed out back, bringing down hard drives and sending things off to have them recovered. You just do the best you can and move on. Cowboy moved back in a year later.
Conrad: How did you acquire the studio after Cowboy’s death in 2013? Can you talk about the transition?
Cousin Bob: The people that bought the place after Cowboy’s death had a publishing company called Zavitson Music Group. They were a lot like us. They liked to have a good time, and they were into writing songs and making records, but a few years later they called and said, “Hey, we’re done here. Would you like to have it?” I put an offer on it and they accepted it. That was in January of 2018.
They had it for three years. We started replacing a lot of things. Steve Durr designed the sound for us. We got this console (Trident 80B Series) and a lot of preamps and microphones. You’ve gotta have some vintage things that people are looking for. We started putting things back the way it used to feel because I remembered how it was. It was a lot of work and a lot of fun. Cameron Davidson (Clement House Studio engineer) has been with me for ten years now. He’s a wiring whizz and he did a lot of wiring and soldering putting the studio back together.
People like David Ferguson started coming back to do their records here. Fergie was Cowboy’s right hand man for a lot of years. When the place burned and went to other ownership, so did he, but when this place got polished back up he came back and started making records here. All Sturgill Simpson’s stuff lately has been recorded here.
Conrad: You mentioned “Dear Dead Delilah” a little while ago. It’s a horror flick that Cowboy produced, correct? I know he was into the art of film. Are you still doing some of that here?
Cousin Bob: Yes we are. Cowboy got me into film lighting around 1990, maybe ’89. He hired a film director to come up to teach us film lighting. He spent a lot of money on the latest lights and video equipment. He wanted something to look good so we started taking these lighting courses up here from Steven Koppel. For some reason that art of lighting just resonated with me. I ended up making a career out of it for about 13 years, traveling all over the world doing lighting for film and television. Since I’ve come back, I’ve made a couple albums of my own and wanted to have a visual representation of them. I didn’t want to do video, because that’s so common, so I went back to film.
I got some professional Super 8 film cameras. Cameron and I basically have a Super 8 film production studio. We do it all here, from the lighting, production, and camera operation to film processing and editing. We have a dark room over here where we process the film and a digital scanner so we can edit it digitally. We can shoot a film in the morning and be editing it that evening. It’s been quite an ordeal learning the process. It’s a lot of fun. I don’t think anyone else is doing that kind of thing. You can do it all here from the beginning to the end.
We can track a record, do the overdubs, mix it, and master it here. Everything today is usually a hybrid. A record is tracked one place, overdubbed somewhere else, and mixed and mastered in a different location so you never really get to know what a studio sounds like, but that’s not how they used to make records. They used to do it all in one place. You can come here and make your entire record. We can put it on our radio station, and we can make your videos all right here. We can do a lot of different things and it’s not the expense you think it is because everything we do is a passion project.
Conrad: Well that’s how I met you!
Cousin Bob: Yeah! You were a passion project! (Bob laughs)
Music City is changing. It always has and always will. Its detractors will tell you that the Nashville Machine squashes artistic integrity to churn out formulaic hits rife with auto tuned vocals and snap track loops, but that’s only one side of the story. The truth is that there are still lots of spaces for real artists to thrive, and down on Belmont Boulevard, the magic of music and those who make it still have a home at Clement House Studio.