March 20, 2026, 5:01 a.m. CT
- Buddy Spicher is a renowned Nashville session fiddler who has played on thousands of recordings.
- A new Nashville bar, Buddy’s Tiny Tonk, honors his legacy with memorabilia from his career.
- Spicher was part of the “Nashville A-Team,” a group of elite studio musicians behind many country hits.
Buddy Spicher’s life unspooled in memories spread across the bar top.
He traced the fragments of a working musician’s life with his fingers. The sheet music. The session notes. The Polaroids of the musicians he’s played with. Mementos from nearly 70 years of playing alongside some of the biggest names in music sit preserved beneath the bar’s glass at Buddy’s Tiny Tonk.
Thousands of recordings, from Loretta Lynn to the Monkees, lean on the work of Spicher, who has become one of the most recorded musicians in Nashville history.
In one photograph, the Ray Price and the Cherokee Cowboys band stood together. Price was in the center, Spicher beside him.
“That’s Willie Nelson with the sunglasses,” said Corey Ladd, Spicher’s grandson. “They were in a band together for years and years.”
The story of Nashville music is often told through its singers. Increasingly, it’s written in big lights on Broadway, splashed across multistory buildings with booming sound systems. Inside, hard-working musicians still mix in originals – knowing the covers draw louder cheers and bigger tips.
But behind the voices that defined country music was a small circle of studio musicians whose names rarely appeared on the marquee.
One of them was Spicher, whose fiddle playing shaped the sound of country records for decades.
Now 87, Spicher’s stories rarely come in straight lines. But his advice remains simple: “Don’t overplay.”
Of Parton and Presley
Not far from Broadway in distance, but worlds away in spirit, a small bar in downtown Nashville’s historic Arcade honors the musician behind the sound. Buddy’s Tiny Tonk was opened by Ladd and business partner Jamie White in September 2025, but it already feels like it’s been part of Nashville for decades.
That’s in part because of the depth brought by Ladd, a man who played with Dolly Parton, but downplays the fact.
“I didn’t work with Dolly all that much,” Spicher said.
But one memory stuck: a playful moment with the country icon while recording “(Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher and Higher.”
“I recorded that song with her, and she reached over and pulled my beard,” Spicher said. “She said, ‘You’re cool.'”
For years, the photographs that told the story of Spicher’s musical legacy lived in file cabinets and shoeboxes, reminders of a career so long that even he had forgotten parts of it. When he recalls stories, his wife, Paula, often helps fill in the blanks. The photos help, too.
“There were tubs and tubs of it,” Ladd said. “A whole garage full.”
Eventually, he began digitizing the archive.
“Just to forever have it,” Ladd said. “The (Country Music) Hall of Fame was great about some of their archives, but it’s kind of bottomless as far as the amount of work.”
Sheet music from Spicher’s recordings decorates the bar tops.
“Then we took all of his original Polaroids and put them on top of that, just to kind of give a little history,” Ladd said.
The images line the walls. Some of his fiddles hang behind the bar. The collection pays homage to a man who was a household name among musicians like Bob Dylan, who recorded “Nashville Skyline” on Music Row with Spicher playing fiddle.
Born in DuBois, Pennsylvania, Spicher became a staff musician on the WWVA Jamboree in Wheelin, West Virginia, at age 15. He moved to Nashville at 18.
He became part of the Nashville A-Team, a loose fraternity of studio musicians, including Grady Martin, whose backup work helped power the golden years of Nashville’s recording industry and included credits with Elvis Presley and Patsy Cline.
Producers called them because they could walk into a studio cold, hear a song once and play the parts that formed a song’s spine. Get in with the right musician, and you might pull three or four sessions in a day.
Martin’s efficient work helped make that possible.
“He sat in a big green chair and wouldn’t talk,” Spicher recalled, waving his hand in the air. “He would just go like this when we had to play.”
Never leading. Always listening.
Spicher met Paula when he was playing fiddle with singer Judy Lynn on a tour that passed through Las Vegas. At the time, Paula was working as a dancer with a Hawaiian troupe. Both were performing at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas.
“They played 45 minutes, took a 15-minute break, and came back out in all Nudie suits – hats and boots that matched,” she said. “They changed at least eight times a night.”
The couple eventually moved to Nashville together and had five children.
“We raised Corey,” Paula said. “His mother worked day and night and he stayed with us. So I paddled his little butt many a time.”
Music was central at the Spichers’ Tinywood Road home, where music spilled out of a barn stage on weekend nights. It drew crowds of up to 1,000 people. Neighbors helped park cars. Friends from the Nashville music scene often joined in. Dottie West came regularly, and groups like the Osborne Brothers, Riders in the Sky and the Fox Brothers all took turns on the stage.
Meanwhile, the pace of Nashville recording sessions was relentless. If a musician landed in the right circle of session leaders, as Spicher did, the calls rarely stopped. Sessions could last four hours or more, and most days Spicher had several, including on weekends, when the pay doubled.
Artists increasingly wanted that “Nashville sound,” Paula said, and they’d pay for it, even if not every recording was destined to become a hit.
“They weren’t all famous people. A lot of them were wannabes,” she said. “The famous songs didn’t pay for the houses. The wannabes did.”
As an adjunct professor at Belmont University, Spicher taught his students that being part of the background for musicians, famous or not, was the work.
“The main thing I tell them is, ‘Don’t overplay,'” he said, looking around his namesake bar at the musicians he’d spent years playing behind. Never leading. Always listening.
“Most of the time that’s hard for people to learn to do,” he said. “They want to play too much too often.”
Mackensy Lunsford is the senior dining reporter for The Tennessean. Reach her at mlunsford@tennessean.com.