The dawn of the Opry: George Dewey Hay and Uncle Jimmy Thompson on the air.
Posted on 11/28/2005 1:48:00 PM PST by tallhappy
How Grand Ole Opry Was Invented
Eighty years ago today George Dewey Hay, the new program director at Nashville’s radio station WSM, persuaded a 77-year-old amateur fiddle player from Tennessee named Uncle Jimmy Thompson to drop by and play some old-time tunes on the air. Hay had a notion that his listeners would like that. Was he ever right.
The broadcast proved so popular that on December 26 WSM launched a regular Saturday afternoon show, Barn Dance, featuring Uncle Jimmy and a growing assortment of guest performers. They did the show in a small fifth-story studio at the National Life Building in downtown Nashville. Within just a few months, Hay later recalled, “we were besieged with other fiddle players, banjo pickers, guitar players, and a lady who played an old zither,” all hoping to earn air time on what was becoming known as the most exciting radio show in the state.
The program aired right after a weekly NBC broadcast of classical music, and one Saturday in December 1927 Hay began by announcing that “for the past hour we have been listening to music taken largely from Grand Opera, but from now on we will present the Grand Ole Opry.” Listeners fell in love with the new name, and a national institution was born.
In fact the idea behind Grand Ole Opry wasn’t really new. Despite his stage name, “the Solemn Old Judge,” Hay was all of 30 in 1925, but he had already been the announcer and emcee for National Barn Dance, a weekly broadcast from WLS radio in Chicago featuring live performances of old-time music from the rural South. He understood that there was a growing demand for nostalgic country music. By the mid-1920s a vast demographic shift was underway, and over the next five decades, more than 11 million Southerners would leave their native Dixie for destinations north and west, while roughly 9 million Southern farmers, well over half the region’s total, would abandon the countryside for cities like Houston, Dallas, Richmond, and Atlanta, which swelled with new residents in the 1930s and 1940s. The causes of these twin migrations were complicated. In large part they owed to agricultural modernization and regional urbanization, which were already underway in the 20s but received important boosts from New Deal agricultural policies and defense spending.
This great population upheaval was threatening a long-established folk culture in rural communities that had, by and large, remained stable for over a century. Southern migrants—both those who went north and west, and those who settled in Southern cities—were eager to hang on to that folk culture in their new surroundings. As radio technology grew more sophisticated (commercial radio was born only in 1920) and allowed local broadcasters to reach national audiences, shows like Grand Ole Opry and its chief competitor, National Barn Dance, offered special enjoyment to members of the great Southern diaspora.
Bill Monroe, born in western Kentucky in 1911, was one for whom music was a staple of his childhood. When his family moved to Indiana, things changed. “It was kindly sad there, you know, after my folks had passed away,” he explained. “But I was raised on the farm, and I liked that kind of work, and I liked to live there. So, I’d never been in the cities, you see, and I didn’t know what it would be like. I was really scared of it. But there were a lot of country people there, of course … so I decided to go.”
With his brother, Charlie, he formed an act called the Monroe Brothers. Together they pioneered a new, commercialized style of old-time music, which came to be called bluegrass. The historian Chad Berry has aptly described bluegrass as “a blend of sacred and secular, urban and rural, hill and ragtime, sentimental and blue.” By 1939, when Monroe’s version of the old Jimmie Rodgers tune “Muleskinner Blues” caught the ear of George Dewey Hay, Grand Ole Opry had relocated its live broadcasts to Nashville’s War Memorial Auditorium and was launching old-time performers like Uncle Dave Macon, Roy Acuff and Pee Wee King to national stardom.
It wasn’t just Southern transplants who enjoyed country music (also known as “hillbilly” and “honky-tonk”), though surely they made up a good part of the audience. In the 1950s Hudson-Ross, Chicago’s leading record-store chain, found that in neighborhoods where Southern transplants were heavily concentrated, 30 percent of its sales volume was country and western. The trend had prompted Billboard to run headlines like “Hillbilly Tunes Gain Popularity in Baltimore” and “Hillbilly Tunes Score Big Hit in Most Detroit Jukes.”
Many Northerners liked country music, too. It seemed to offer rural authenticity to a world that was becoming ever more urban—or even suburban—and ready-made. In 1947 Grand Ole Opry traveled to New York City, where it staged a two-night live-broadcast concert at Carnegie Hall. The event grossed $9,000.
During World War II the Opry moved to brand new quarters at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, where a rising generation of country stars, including Ernest Tubb, Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, and Porter Wagoner, reshaped a genre that was growing in influence and popularity. Between sets and after shows they retired to nearby Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge for liquid refreshment and more singing.
Hay had always insisted on an ever-elusive sense of authenticity. “His motto all the time was ‘Keep it down-to-earth,’” explains the historian Charles K. Wolfe, author of A Good-Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry. “What that meant was no modern orchestra, no modern electric instruments, and not very much slick cowboy music. That’s just the opposite of what happened with the National Barn Dance. It became watered-down, it became more popular, and by the 1940s it wasn’t much different from any other variety radio program.” In the 1960s National Barn Dance went out of business. Grand Ole Opry continued to thrive.
Largely on the heels of the Opry’s success, Nashville emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as the heart of the country-and-western recording industry. And as the times changed, so did the music. In the 1950s a rising generation of artists gave birth to what was alternatively called the Nashville sound and the Chet Atkins compromise, an electrified pop-country blend made popular by rising talents like Atkins, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jim Reeves, and Patsy Cline.
In the late 1970s and 1980s the Opry hit a rough patch. In 1974 the show abandoned the Ryman Auditorium for newer facilities, thereby alienating some longtime fans. Meanwhile other cities, particularly Branson, Missouri, updated the most successful elements of the Opry formula to emerge as rivals in the competition for country music tourists.
A few years ago Nashville started fighting back. The Ryman Auditorium underwent a much-needed facelift, and it will host this coming winter’s run of Grand Ole Opry. And the show is still going strong. Since 1925 it has broadcast over 4,000 successive weekly performances, and today fans can tune in (or travel to Nashville to attend live performances) to hear Carrie Underwood, Rascal Flatts, Emmylou Harris, Elvis Costello, Joe Nichols, Josh Turner, Buddy Jewell, Keith Anderson, and the Del McCoury Band carry on a time-honored tradition.
What began as an experiment 80 years ago has grown into an old American institution.
—Joshua Zeitz is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine and the author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made Modern America, to be published in April 2006.
The dawn of the Opry: George Dewey Hay and Uncle Jimmy Thompson on the air.
Very cool.
My great uncle actually played the Grand Ole Opry in the late 1940s - early 1950s.
He met all the greats of the time and played with more than a few.
Hmmmmmmm....almost exclusively - crap.
As a kid, I enjoyed tuning in and listening
Elvis Costello? Isn't he a limey?
The Chicago station mentioned, WLS, got its call letters from Chicago mainstay Sears - "Wolrd's Largest Store..."
Drink some Pet Milk!
Carrie Underwood is nice to look at, though. And Del McCoury isn't bad to listen to.
Thanks for the fun read!
From a pedal-steeler who started out on 5-string,
Dr. Bogus
Our roots are showing.
A guy born in 1848 kicked off the Grand Old Opry.
to hear Carrie Underwood, Rascal Flatts, Emmylou Harris, Elvis Costello . . .
Somehow don't seem right.
More call sign trivia: Atlanta's WSB is "Welcome South Brother" and WMAZ in Macon, GA, started out as a project by some students in the Physics Department at Mercer University, and stands for "Watch Mercer Attain Zenith."
This is the best I could do for a pre-restoration photo. 
It's a neat tour. They let you go up on stage, tour the dressing rooms and everything. It's a really neat place to visit.
That's because they switched from country to urban cowboy.
Something tells me y'all don't know much about Del McCoury, or what kind of music he plays.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.