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Nashville, Tennessee Advertising without posters is like fishing without worms — The Hatch Brothers – circa 1880 The story of how a 128 year-old print shop became a showpiece for the Country Music Hall of Fame is the meandering story of people who don't let good things go. Like the art they create, the people themselves stop us mid-step and grab us by the collar as we stare hard, if not at their dedication, at their delightful delirium in what they do. Two brothers, Charles and Herbert Hatch, sons of printer and minister William T. Hatch, who moved to Nashville from Wisconsin, Charles, the son Will, and Jim Sherraden, a Middle Tennessee State student from Kansas, were at one time separated by a century and the Mississippi River. But a mutual bond with the printing press united this quartet in way that some country song someday needs to capture in words and melody. The story has religious beginnings, and to this day has a kind of religious zeal lurking in the floorboards and century old presses.  Jim Sherraden displays a monontype of Bill Monroe to the bluegrass legend himself. Like most sons in the mid 19th century, Charles and Herbert Hatch first resisted but later capitulated to the trade of their father when opportunity aligned with duty. Celebrity preacher Henry Ward Beecher was in town one week, and the Brothers Hatch took their first job printing a handbill to advertise the renowned man of the gospel. Following the early death of their father, the brothers assumed the business. With hand-carved woodblocks and metal type, Charles and Herbert developed a signature style, and began taking poster orders for vaudeville acts, minstrel shows, and the new picture-shows along with the wedding invitations and flyers. In 1921, Will T. Hatch continued the family trade after his father Charles and Uncle Herbert could no longer handle the day-to-day travails. Will had grown up in the shop, and was a prodigy in the craft of carving large, multicolor printing blocks by hand from chunks of basswood, maple and beech. He used this personal motif to set Hatch posters apart from others commonly composed only with commercial type. Some technology looked kindly on Will Hatch. Radio, the new empire of the air, was beginning its reign in America. The publicity of the many radio entertainers depended upon posters to disseminate their appearances. And none did the job better than those of Will T. Hatch. The Grand Ole Opry soon discovered that expensive movie trailers and radio advertising fell short to the power, simple beauty and draw of a Hatch poster, and a long symbiosis with the print shop began. As Nashville became the hub of country music so did the Hatch Print Shop become the herald of who was coming to town. Hatch produced posters for the likes of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hank Williams and later, even a young Elvis Presley, whose appearance at the Ryman Auditorium next door met more sneers than cheers. Soon anyone who was anybody appearing within 500 miles of Nashville went to Hatch for their primary source of publicity. Musicians, politicians, men of the cloth, if you wanted fannies in the seats, you went to Hatch and loaded up the trunk. In 1952, Will T. Hatch died, and the business fell to a series of owners and managers of varying abilities and reputes. By the 1980s, woodcut lettering and hand-cut engravings were a lovely anachronism long overtaken by the speed and economy of the offset press.
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