Ink Stained Wretches: The Hatch Show Print Shop

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In 1984, Bill Denny, whose father Jim was once the general manager of the Grand Ole Opry, and who as a kid played in piles of Hatch posters, owned the business. He was doing his best to keep the shop afloat, but the burgeoning desktop publishing industry with the ease of computers was a formidable and seemingly unconquerable adversary to the cranky old presses.

That is, until the day a gangly 26 year-old kid from Kansas with long hair and scraggly whiskers walked in, bugged out his eyes, and Denny knew he'd found something. Just what he wasn't sure, but he hired Jim Sherraden with an inky handshake almost on the spot.

Sherraden was a former English major who attended Middle Tennessee State and gradated with a minor in history. In his spare hours, he wrote songs, with more than 40 recordings to his pen. Coming from a family that prized education, the higher the better, he felt compelled to keep on going and enrolled in a printmaking course as means to allay family angst. He could at least make a technical argument he was in graduate school, but, figuratively speaking, Sherraden got both feet caught in an old printing press. During a show of his prints a local café, a Vanderbilt art professor took note how Sherraden's blood pressure spiked when he talked about printmaking. The adroitly professor suggested he pay visit to the Hatch Show Print Shop.

Denny hired him to manage the shop, but Sherraden was more like an archaeologist who stumbled upon the Holy Grail and 10,000 other treasures. Where the uninitiated saw inky blocks of wood if seeing anything at all, Jim Sharraden saw the very building blocks of Nashville. There they were, in some chaos, but he could almost see the chips made by Will T. Hatch's chisels and gouges digging away at the hardwood. Sherraden could almost hear the slapping of the presses. He could almost feel the applause from the Ryman from a sold-out crowd whose herald was a Hatch poster. Jim Sherraden was home.

"I was like a bumblebee buzzing around looking for something I wasn't quite sure of," says Sherraden. "I needed the shop as much as it needed me."

Although the shop had moved a half dozen times, almost everything was still there, not just the presses, but the type, the woodblocks, the quirky tools of the printer's trade left over from another country. Everything to piece together a literal collage of Nashville's past was there for Sherraden to assemble. When he took apart racks filled with type and forms, he found the shelveing was made from sliced up woodcuts from some long forgotten show, now to be remembered again.

With both a reverence and a kind of fever, Sherraden slowly put some order and success back into the business. If what he'd discovered spoke to him so loudly, perhaps the work could again speak to others. Gaylord Entertainment eventually purchased, and then transferred ownership of the Hatch Print Shop to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1993, which says Sherraden, was just the right move.

"They buttered our bread for a while while we had ink all over our fingers," says Sherraden.

Sherraden's favorite color ink is black, so to speak, as the shop is now a cruising, profitable business that contributes back to the Country Music Hall of Fame through the sale of reprints and special printmaking projects. About 75 percent of the work done at Hatch is for private clients, however, shows, flyers, just the way the good reverend from Wisconsin imagined 128 years ago. The Grand Ole Opry and the Ryman remain loyal customers.

Six dedicated employees now work the trade, handle Will T. Hatch's carvings almost every day, all to the rhythm of the old presses, one poster, then another, the beat of Nashville from another century keeping good time.