How the Opry Gave Country Music a National Voice

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. Nashville is known as Music City for good reason. Eight out of every one thousand residents are involved in the music industry, which pumps five point five billion dollars into the local economy each year. But beyond the raw statistics, it’s the birthplace of country music, and a big reason for that is WSM and the Grand Ole Opry. Here to share the story of country music’s most famous stage, the radio station that created it, and the men and women who put Nashville on the map is Craig Havoghurst. Take it away, Craig.
Music City was named on the air, but it would not have been in a position to be named Music City. US era have the name stick without WSM and the Grand Ole Opry starting in nineteen twenty-five.
Nashville, Tennessee, here’s your junior friend. All are.
The origin of the station has to precede the origin of the show, because there’s no show about the station. WSM was a flight of imagination by a guy named Edwin Craig.
Edwin Craig was a Tennessee native.
His dad was one of the founding managers and owners of a company called the National Life and Accident Insurance Company. The company was still kind of getting on its feet, but they were building a fancy new headquarters building in downtown Nashville. Edwin Craig was working for the company at the time, coming up through the ranks as a walking-the-beat insurance salesman to a regional sales manager. His father’s like, “You got to come up through the ladder like anybody else.” And by the time he’s in his late twenties, he has a senior position in the office in Nashville, and he is now a radio enthusiast, so thinking something on the order of, “We need a website.” In nineteen twenty-five, Edwin had to sell this idea to his dad and to the board of directors, which were all old guys who didn’t understand where radio is going. They would say, “Well, why do we need this?” And he would say, “To spread our brand, to spread goodwill, to give back to the community, and then that will come back to us as business and political alliances and all kinds of things.” Long story short, he makes the sale, and they said, “If we’re going to do this, National Life does everything the best.” They put a radio tower up on a big hill where Belmont University is today.
They get a Steinway piano.
They have the best microphones, they have the best broadcast equipment. They throw the equivalent, as I recall, the equivalent was about a million bucks. They didn’t give him a few bucks.
Closet is WSM and Nashville, and this is the big.
ZU. And they go on the air in the evening of October 5, nineteen twenty-five, with a full-scale, multi-part show. They have live bands in two different hotels. They had bands on the roof of the new building on the.
sixth-floor roof.
The station is on the fifth floor, above four floors of insurance teletypers and, you know, secretaries and claims guys. I mean, it’s just the operations of the insurance business are going on right below them. And they invite the mayor and the governor of Tennessee, and they have a Shriners’ band, and they have all this festivities. So they had this big festive opening and got the station off on the right foot, high-profile. So once some USM goes on the air, they have this responsibility to have content all day. They were not twenty-four hours at the beginning, but there were no records to play. So imagine the challenge of having live acts stepping to a microphone constantly from like six in the morning until eleven.
p.m., and they have to do this every day.
Edwin Craig’s in charge of this, and he has several people he works with initially, but the big one that he has his eye on from the day that they go on the air is a fellow from Chicago named George D.
Hay.
He was a newspaper columnist, so a good writer. But he got into radio in Chicago with Sears and Roebucks’ big, powerful radio station, and he created a show, a variety show, called The National Barn Dance.
Hello, hello, hello, everybody, everywhere, and a special hello to our boys in the service wherever they may be. Well, well, welcome to your old Alka-Seltzer National Barn Dance’s tenth anniversary, folks. Yes, Tonight’s party March the tenth full year since these old cow bells first rang out on the network to welcome all our good friends and neighbors to the the old WLS Haylofts.
Here in Chicago that had a sort of rural, rustic country music or hillbilly theme, as they would call it in the day—what we would have, you know, came to be country music—but also comedians or lighthearted banter. And Hay, as the MC of the show, grew to the point where he had national magazine readers’ poll saying that he was the most popular broadcaster in America.
Hay accepts just a few weeks after they go on the air.
But it was not an easy fit, not a natural fit for WSM as it started, because the community heard a radio station playing popular music, classical music, string quartets, formal solo recital piano, but also like lectures from Vanderbilt professors, and politicians would come in and give addresses. They were trying to be a full-service radio station, and by no means a country radio station. There wasn’t even such a thing until way later in the fifties and sixties to were there anything called “country news” at radio stations. This was an all-purpose public-interest radio station. But that happens because on a Saturday night, he needs time to fill, and he had heard about this elderly fiddle player who was the uncle of a woman who was already on the air doing.
some pop vocals.
So they sort of almost on the fly invite Uncle Jimmy Thompson, seventy-some years old. Absolute classic old-man Middle Tennessee fiddler, the tradition going back to the nineteenth-century roots. This guy would learned his craft around the Civil War, right? He’s that.
Old. Hello, folks, there’s a whole other Jimmy Thompson. I’m gonna play your fan quadrille, Land Porte, day of August in eighteen and sixty. See, that’s a long time.
I hold you, Uncle Jimmy.
Ate it too.
And I’ve got young Grand Killing and great big great Grand Killing running cards and tops, yit, and them playing the fiddle. Yeah, and I left to look at a pretty woman. Yes, but.
I bet you do. Let’s hear that quadrille.
All right, yeah, hit come.
He comes on. He starts playing fiddle music, one after the other, sawing away.
And while some people in Nashville probably, like, “What is that?” turning off the radio station, a lot of people heard their music—their sort of hometown music, their personal what they grew up on—for the first time, and so they start sending those cards and letters and telegrams to WSM and Hay. And Edwin Craig realizes, this is the thing: let’s get him back.
So they have him back, and then.
They began to flesh out their lineup, and they bring in musicians from the region who were noted for their prowess in traditional old-time music. One of them is Uncle Dave Macon, who at the time was pushing sixty years old. But he’s a band player and a songster whose day job was driving a moving wagon. He was a mule driver. But he’s a known musician. So he’s on the air, and the public starts to go into the studio and watch it play out live on Saturday nights. They start to crowd around the studio, they start to fill the stairwells, and then they bring in some other guys, a guy named Humphrey Bate, who was actually a physician by David.
He was a traditional musician, a picker. You know, “Oh, how many biscuits, nuin?”
Oh, how many biscuits, nuin?
How many biscuits?
And Hay’s like, “Well, let’s play the part.”
Let’s have Humphrey Bate, who’s a surgeon, dress up in overalls and a and a floppy hat and look like a hillbilly, and his guys should be like that too. And he starts giving the bands names like The Fruit Jar Drinkers, and they play up the artifice of it a little bit, even though the music was authentic.
But, uh, they got this thing going as the Grand Ole Opry. And the rest is history.
And you’ve been listening to Craig Havoghurst, and he’s a musician but also a professional writer, covering the music business, the art, the commerce, the tech, all of it in Nashville for over twenty-five years. When we come back, more of Craig Havoghurst’s storytelling, more about the origins of the Grand Ole Opry here on Our American Stories. And we returned to Our American Stories and the story of the Grand Ole Opry. When we last left off, Craig Havoghurst was telling the tale of WSM’s early-days radio station that launched country music’s most famous stage, explaining how a station built to serve the general public, airing everything from Vanderbilt lectures to hybrid classical music, somehow became the beating heart of foot-stomping folk. That unexpected shift didn’t thrill everyone. After all, Nashville wasn’t yet Music City. It was the Athens of the South, proud of its universities, its culture, and its refinement. How did the transformation take root? Let’s return to the story. Here again is Craig Havoghurst from.
The Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, the Country Music Capital of the World at Randell Opry starring The Texas Troubadour Ernest Tubb.
As Yellow Rolls in Texas, and I’m gone.
I see.
Nashville’s upper crust and society, the establishment, if you will, that sort of thought of Nashville as the Athens of the South—the nickname that the city had given itself as a place of culture, higher education with Vanderbilt and many other colleges and universities. I was told that there had been sort of a rebellion against the early Grand Ole Opry on their radio station. And because when Craig and the Craig family are part of the establishment in Nashville, the family had clearly heard from some of their peers, some of their other rich-folk friends at the country club that it was kind of awkward to hear this hillbilly music on the otherwise wonderful and marvelous studs. But it turned out that this revolution was much smaller than it had been made out to be. It was a few letters to the editor, a few sly remarks. But indeed, at one point one of the two newspapers, I think The Banner, did a kind of informal poll and said, you know, “Is the Opry something that you all, that people want to hear, and should WSM keep it?” And the overwhelming, like ninety-nine percent, of the letters that came in and the responses were, “Yes, we love this show.” So there was never a threat to the Grand Ole Opry for real. But that dynamic played out over the years, even into the fifties, sixties, and seventies, as the country music business grew, as the first seeds were planted on Music Row—the studios, the beginnings of the record industry, the publishing industry. And it becomes something that Nashville is doing and doing well and getting a national reputation for. There was still the element of uppercross Nashville that thought, “Well, this is very awkward and strange for us. This is not part of our culture. This is sort of an interloper kind of a thing.” To the point where songwriters couldn’t get bank loans in the sixties, you know, “Well, that’s not a real job.”
Kind of attitude.
And interestingly enough, Minnie Pearl, the great and famous Minnie Pearl, the greatest comedian of the Grand Ole Opry’s history, was a blue blood herself, were kind of. She’d come up in some money, and then as the family lost some money in the Depression, but she knew culture, and so she’s a big, famous star.
So she lives in Belle Meade. She knows these people, and she.
became like a go-between for whenever the hillbilly-roughneck musician crowd needed a kind of a translator for the establishment. She was there, whether it was fundraisers or parties or country club events with a country band. She was there to mollify and to make it all feel like part of Tennessee culture, part of real America. She had a great role in that, but there was always that tension, and it went back to the origins. Right around the same time that the Grand Ole Opry got its name, which I recall being nineteen twenty-seven, nineteen twenty-seven-ish. The story there is well-told; it’s well-known. But they would get a feed from the network from New York and a music appreciation hour. The guy named Walter Damrosch, who would give lectures about symphonic music, called the.
Cut time in my life.
I have my office crup playing less, and all what you are done? My moza and.
From. They had a series of show on one night that featured operatic singing, and George Hay maybe had started to germinate an idea about this little play on words, but or maybe just totally spontaneously said, “You’ve been listening, folks, as we come back to the Nashville studio, and they’re live.”
with DeFord Bailey waiting to play his opening theme song. He says, “Folks, who’ve been listening to themes from grand opera, where now are to keep it down to earth and listen to the Grand Ole Opry.”
Just a little hillbilly twist on the word, and it stuck. People like it.
But the Opry could not stay in WSM’s studio forever. The fans began to show up. Before they even had a way up crowd control. They were coming into the studio and, oh sure, sit there and crowding in. And they just adapted over the weeks and months and years, but eventually it became too much, and they did go looking for a home, a theater home, a proper home to broadcast from. They first came to the Hillsboro Theater, which is now the Belcourt Theatre and Art Movie House in Nashville, but it was there at the time, and they moved to the Hillsboro Theater for a few years.
They moved into a.
timber tabernacle building that was quite big in East Nashville. That is where they began to actually sell tickets for the first time and started to charge for admission and have some souvenirs and make more of a proper show out of it. Then they went from there to all the way to the top, to the War Memorial Auditorium, which you could still go see concerts in today. It was a Tennessee-built, state-owned theater, a very beautiful place. They were there into the beginnings of World War II, and the moment that they went on the air of the NBC network and the Opry got its segment nationwide on NBC in the late thirties with Roy Acuff was a huge move for them. They’d been on the NBC network since the late twenties, but putting the Opry on nationwide was a big deal, and that happened at War Memorial, but also the first couple of years of World War II. The soldiers came through and were kind of like overdoing it. They were too rowdy, they were putting their feet on the back of the thing, they were leaving their gum on the seats, and it was punishing. So the state actually said, “Guys, we’ve loved having you, but it’s time to move on and find something else.” And they were in a little bit of a desperate situation, and luckily down the block, almost, was the Ryman Auditorium, which had had its own history by then, you know, started in the eighteen nineties and had an incredible run as one of the great theaters of the South with all kinds of variety entertainment, but it had kind of crested, and it was looking for it needed something to shake up the business model there. They went to the promoter there, the great famous Lula Naff, a woman who made music business history in Nashville before most other women were able to, and they came up with a deal to be there on Saturday nights, and eventually Friday and Saturday nights, and then they expanded the calendar.
But it became the home of the Grand Ole Opry.
In nineteen forty-three, middle World War II, and it would last there until nineteen seventy-four, when the Ryman simply got out of date: no air conditioning, kind of falling apart.
But those were what has been called the Golden Era of.
the Grand Ole Opry, an extraordinary stretch of time—the late forties, fifties, sixties. Imagine what happened in country music. I mean, I’m getting literally got chills just thinking.
About Tennessee cock.
Come in listen to my story if you will.
I’m going to tell about a game of failures from down at Nashville.
First, all start with old Red Foley doing the chad.
And Nuga shues.
We can’t farga and hang Wiiams with them, good old.
A sick glue.
It’s time for Roy go the Golden.
Melpos on his train with Lenny.
Pearl and Ron Priceville and Lazy Jim.
Pay turn on all your radios.
I know that you will wait, you Little Jimmy.
Dick In saying, “Take an old cultator anyway.”
This is the era of Hank Williams, of the birth of bluegrass music with Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, Lester Flatt. It’s Patsy Cline. It’s, it’s George Jones, it’s Johnny Cash, and even th