Slingerland Drums in Shelbyville: Two Years That Put Bedford County on the Map of American Music

A Chicago Company in a Tennessee Town

H.H. Slingerland didn't start with drums. He started in Chicago in 1912, initially producing ukuleles and banjos , the instruments of the pre-jazz popular music era. When Ludwig Drum Company entered the banjo business in the mid-1920s, Slingerland returned the competitive favor by expanding into drums in 1926. It was a pivotal move. Slingerland became one of the two or three most significant American drum manufacturers of the 20th century, building instruments played by Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa, and a generation of jazz and rock drummers who defined what American popular music sounded like.

Then, in 1965, Slingerland opened a plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee.

Nobody outside of serious drum collector circles knows this. It deserves to be known.

Why Shelbyville, Why 1965

The mid-1960s were a period of manufacturing expansion and relocation across American industry. Southern states , Tennessee prominently among them , were actively recruiting manufacturing operations with competitive labor costs, available industrial space, and business-friendly state governments. Shelbyville's industrial base included Musgrave Pencil Company and several other manufacturers; adding a drum factory was consistent with the city's identity as a small industrial community alongside its agricultural and equestrian heritage.

The Slingerland Shelbyville plant operated from 1965 to 1966. Two years. Barely a blink in the company's decades-long history. But long enough to produce instruments that are now, sixty years later, sought after by collectors who understand what they're holding.

Drum forum discussions among serious Slingerland collectors include specific questions about the Shelbyville plant's production , whether Radio King snares were produced there alongside the student kit lines, what distinguishes a Shelbyville-made Slingerland from a Chicago-made one, and how to identify the factory of origin from a drum's serial number and construction details. These are the questions that serious collectors ask. The answers are still being pieced together from production records, serial number research, and the physical examination of surviving instruments.

The Drums Themselves

A Music World Tennessee post puts it directly: "Did you know Slingerland Drums had a factory in Shelbyville, TN for 2 years during 1965–1966? We just acquired this snare made in that factory." The casual certainty of that statement , the snare drum as a tangible artifact of Shelbyville's manufacturing moment , captures what makes this history interesting. It is not abstract. The drums exist. They can be found in pawn shops, at drum auctions, in the basements of musicians who bought them decades ago without knowing they were purchasing a piece of Bedford County history.

Slingerland's drum shells were produced using radio frequency (RF) bonding technology , a manufacturing innovation that produced consistently shaped, strongly bonded shells more efficiently than traditional methods. The RF shell-making machinery that Slingerland used became legendary in the drum collecting world; Bernie Broussard purchased the original machinery in a 2001 eBay auction and spent the following decade bringing it back to operational status. The shells made by that machinery , including those produced in Shelbyville , are prized for their acoustic properties and their historical provenance.

Why They Left

Two years is not a long run for a manufacturing facility. The reasons for Slingerland's departure from Shelbyville are not fully documented in the public record , manufacturing decisions of the mid-1960s were rarely explained to the communities they affected , but the pattern is familiar. A company opens a satellite plant to expand production or reduce costs, discovers that the logistical or labor challenges outweigh the benefits, and consolidates back to its main facility. Slingerland's core operations remained in Chicago throughout the Shelbyville period; the Tennessee plant appears to have been a production expansion that didn't justify continuation.

The company itself wound down in the early 1980s, ending decades of prominence in the American drum manufacturing industry. What remains is the instruments , in collections, in working drum kits, in the inventories of vintage instrument dealers who know what they're selling.

Shelbyville's Place in American Music History

Bedford County is not the first place most people associate with American music manufacturing. Chicago. Kalamazoo. Nashville, for guitars. But for two years in the mid-1960s, a Shelbyville factory produced the drums that would go on to be played by musicians in studios and on stages across the country , instruments that contributed to the sound of an era without anyone knowing they were made in a Tennessee town best known for walking horses and pencils.

The Slingerland chapter is one of Shelbyville's stranger historical footnotes , brief, almost accidental, completely unconnected to the city's primary industrial and agricultural identity. But it is real. The drums exist as proof. And for the drum collectors who know to look for the Shelbyville connection in their instruments' provenance, it is a genuine discovery , the moment when a piece of music history intersects with a small Tennessee city's industrial past in a way that neither community fully anticipated.

If you have a vintage Slingerland snare drum from 1965 or 1966, it may have been made in Shelbyville. Examine the construction, cross-reference the serial number against known production records, and you may find yourself holding something that connects directly to a factory that existed in Bedford County for exactly two years and then disappeared without a plaque or a marker or any public acknowledgment that it had ever been there at all.