Since the pandemic, lovers of creative roots music and bluegrass may well have noticed a curious studio name popping up on albums and in the press, attached to artists like Molly Tuttle, the Jerry Douglas Band, the Del McCoury Band, and bluegrass supergroup Mighty Poplar. I certainly started wondering about it. Where is this Tractor Shed? Does it or did it ever provide shelter to tractors? And who is this guy, this audio engineer and producer, who seems to be behind it, Sean Sullivan? In Episode #369 we find out, and the answers are encouraging for the trajectory of (mostly) acoustic Americana.
As we establish early in this field trip episode, The Tractor Shed is down a scenic gravel byway near Goodlettesville, poetically named Happy Valley Rd. The house that dominates the property is a stylish log cabin that was formerly the long-time home of the late Opry and Hee Haw star Grandpa Jones and his wife Ramona. Its owner today (and thus owner of the studio too) is veteran studio guitarist Mark Howard, a musician’s musician who worked with Johnny Cash, John Hartford, Nanci Griffith and others. When Sturgill Simpson made his two-volume Cuttin’ Grass project, Howard was in the band. Both Simpson and Howard are important off-screen characters in this week’s story.
Our main character is a guy who pursued his musical path to the studio life, and what I most wanted to know, besides everything else, was how Sullivan had made his reputation, and earned the first of his five Grammy Awards, by landing a gig working with Sturgill Simpson at a studio that’s now bulldozed and gone - the Butcher Shoppe in Germantown, co-owned by John Prine and David Ferguson. That requires that we take it from the top.
Sean grew up in Cincinnati, where he figured out he could get into rock clubs when wildly underage by hustling opening slots for acts coming through town. “I was playing in bands and had kind of gotten into home recording. I was interested in computers when I was really young, like 12 or 13, but I also liked music and playing guitar, and I just managed to meld those two things together.”
Sullivan found a local guy who taught recording clinics and then, after two years of community college, transferred to MTSU’s music program. Inspired by a feature in a music magazine, he emailed studio owner and acoustic music producer Randy Khors out of the blue and landed a little work, including what sounded like a tedious but necessary job - re-formatting hours and hours of live tape from the McCoury family’s Maryland-based DelFest.
“So,” Sullivan tells me, “that required somebody to sit there and press play and listen to a three-day bluegrass festival and transfer it and take some notes about who's playing and - if you can - what the songs are (and) are there issues with anyone's set? And obviously that's not something anyone with anything better to do would want to do with a weekend of their time. But I said, ‘I'll do it!’”
The venue for this long weekend happened to be the Butcher Shoppe. Sean met Ferguson, a key figure in Nashville’s country underground who was my guest on this show in 2021. And by the time it was over, Ferg took a shine to Sean, and he started working there, the right place at the right time. Sturgill Simpson loved the studio, and when his career-breaking album A Sailor’s Guide To Earth (tracked at the Butcher Shoppe) was nominated for Best Country Album at the Grammy Awards, Sean had a really good seat and earned his first Recording Academy trophy.
By this point, Sullivan was well on his roots music journey, leading to even more bluegrass. The Travelin’ McCourys cut at the Butcher Shoppe and won the Best Bluegrass Album Grammy, as did Michael Cleveland for his album Tall Fiddler. After the old studio was closed during redevelopment of the district, Sean moved to the Tractor Shed to do most of his work, and there he cut two of the more influential bluegrass albums of this decade, Molly Tuttle’s Crooked Tree and City Of Gold. Both were Grammy winners.
Asked about his approach, he invokes Cowboy Jack Clement (mentor to David Ferguson) who advocated for keeping things light and efficient. “I don't really spend a lot of time getting sounds,” Sean says. “It's like you stand in front of the person playing their acoustic instrument… figure out where it's speaking, and you put a microphone there, and it takes 30 seconds.”
The musicianship of Nashville’s players has always impressed him, and he expresses awe at being able to capture them in performance. “The proficiency of musicians in Nashville is kind of unparalleled,” he says. “The melodies that are living in these musicians' heads, that they can come up with these parts that are musical and lyrical on hearing a song for the first time, is kind of unfathomable. I'm just trying not to mess it up.”
Anyone who’s fascinated with how songs go from idea to finished track will get a lot out of my conversation with the humble and thoughtful Sean Sullivan. See Sean's recording credits here. Follow him on Instagram here.
Watch the Jerry Douglas Band track “The Fifth Season” at The Tractor Shed, with Sean Sullivan engineering.
