Some of the survivors have changed their musical directions dramatically. Charlie Daniels has gone from pot-smoking, long-haired country boy to a man who fantasizes and sings about hanging drug dealers with “a short piece of rope.” But there are a few others who have stayed on course. Bobby Braddock, whose inclusive “I Believe The South Is Gonna Rise Again” was spotlighted by Gaillard, went on to write “He Stopped Loving Her Today”: The George Jones version of that one is now considered by lots of historians and fans to be the greatest country record of all time. And Emmylou Harris, who appears in Watermelon Wine as a gifted student of classic country music, has spent decades now making unforgettable music. She has served as friend, mentor and employer to Rodney Crowell, Ricky Skaggs, Emory Gordy, Jr., Vince Gill, Barry Tashian, Steve Fishell, Buddy Miller, and plenty of others. If her music has all but disappeared from country radio, she has become, nevertheless, both a sure bet for the Country Music Hall of Fame and a godmother to the burgeoning, semi-underground Americana movement.
And thankfully for those of us who appreciate a few vestiges of old-school Nashville, there are a few other things that haven’t really changed. Some folks are still around who used to run with Waylon or hang out with Harlan Howard. One of those people is Billy Ray Reynolds, whose wandering eye and Marlboro Man looks garnered him the nickname of “Rogue” when he was tearing up Music Row with Jennings and other outlaws. Reynolds can tell you about what happened on Waylon’s black bus, or he can tell you all about the sadly unheralded Billy Large:
“He was the only guy that ever fell off the Faron Young building and lived to tell about it,” Billy Ray assured. “He was taking a leak off the side, and the wind blew him off.”
A little ways from the spot where Billy Large landed is a tiny bar called Bobby’s Idle Hour. The place has been there for longer than anyone seems to remember, and plenty of greats have swilled beer there and passed around an out-of-tune guitar. The guitar is still there. It rests behind the bar and makes its way around the room most nights. Recently, the regulars were singing songs when someone handed that guitar to a long-haired, leather-clad twenty-something, who held it a few moments too long. “Play something,” hollered one of the least patient of the Bobby’s crowd. “I guess you’re a guitar player. If you’re not, you’re wasting your look.”
That same night, visitors to the men’s room at Bobby’s could take instruction from a hand-scrawled sign the management had placed above the club’s toilet: “This is a urinal. If you gotta take a dump, go to the MapCo.”
It sounds like a crude place to be, and it is. But it’s also, in some strange but palpable way, a haven of wonder and innocence along Music Row. Around midnight on a Tuesday, you can make your way up the steps to Bobby’s, take a seat and hear bartender Jonathan Long halt his beer-serving long enough to strum and sing a sweet little song called “We Need More Barns.” After that, he’ll start a new circle, and let anyone - regardless of pedigree, resume or reputation - play whatever they wish. If Long likes what he hears, he’ll chuckle and say, “That didn’t suck.” If not, everyone is still welcome to sit there, drink, talk and play another when the six-string comes back around.
Some people work in Music Row’s steel buildings for decades and never darken the Idle Hour door, and there’s probably a reason for that. Those people won’t be interested in this book, either, and the book won’t suffer for their lack of concern. The rest of you would do well to read on, though, and let it take you back into time. There’s something that doesn’t suck on every page.
1
Commercializing the Heritage: The Grand Ole Opry
Walk out of this bar, turn the radio on in my car and listen to that Grand Ole Opry show . . .
—Hoyt Axton
People disagree about Jimmy Snow. Some say he’s a holy man, and some say he’s just another of those dime-a-dozen radio God-salesmen who have made a pretty fair living off the souls of Southern white people for almost as long as men have known about the airwaves. But whatever he is, it didn’t much matter on the night of March 15, 1974, for the spirit was moving inside Jimmy Snow, and there was a fire in his belly and a quiver in his voice. He knew it was his kind of crowd, and knew too that there might never be another one quite like it. He was ready.
Jimmy Snow had heard the call of the Lord, he explained, one cold winter night a dozen years before, when he had found himself in his front yard, alone and on his knees, no shirt on his back, listening to voices from above. Because of that night, and because his daddy happens to be Hank Snow, a pillar of the Grand Ole Opry for decades, it fell to Reverend Jimmy to preach maybe the last sermon that would ever be heard in Nashville’s ramshackled old Ryman Auditorium. The Ryman is a creaky, magnificent monument to a lot of things—to the conscience of Tom Ryman for one; for it was Ryman, a hard-living, liquor-dispensing riverboat operator, who had had his own encounter with the Divinity a little less than a century ago and decided to build a downtown tabernacle to honor the event.
In the years that followed, Ryman’s brick and stained-glass edifice shook with the thunder of many an evangelist, and the crowds would swarm in on muggy summer evenings to listen to Billy Sunday and the rest of them, shouting their amens and standing up for Jesus. But gradually economics got mixed into the picture, and the Ryman Auditorium evolved into an entertainment center—a metamorphosis culminating in 1943 in the Grand Ole Opry’s choice of the Ryman for its permanent quarters.
There was logic in the choice, of course. For the same people who had come to hear Billy Sunday were just as likely to come hear Hank Snow and Roy Acuff and Sam McGee. They felt comfortable there, and for upwards of thirty years they arrived in droves.
But March 15, 1974, marked the end of that era. It was the Opry’s last performance in its old home, and when it moved on the following evening, the President of the United States came down to celebrate, and the crowd that was there to celebrate with him consisted not of the poor whites whose music was being performed onstage, but of the Nashville business people, who appreciated the economic possibilities if not the twanging guitars.
The night before, however, had belonged to Jimmy Snow and the country people. And in place of the President, there was Johnny Cash in his ruffled white shirt and long-tailed coat-looking like a Civil War-vintage U.S. senator, but singing like what he is: a man who has seen both the bottom and the top, and who was probably right at home in both places.
Cash was the closing act for Jimmy Snow’s “Grand Ole Gospel Time,” a popular Friday-night feature of the Opry, and that night’s show was one of the best. It featured the traditional gospel renditions of the LeFevres, the more upbeat compositions of a young Johnny Cash protege named Larry Gatlin, a rollicking, foot-stomping performance by country-rock singer Dobie Gray (who was one of the few blacks ever to appear at the Opry), and then the whole Cash clan.
By the time Dobie Gray was through it was late at night, and though it was cold and rainy outside, it was stuffy and humid within. The air was musty with mingled sweat fumes, and the people were tired. But they came abruptly to life and the flashbulbs popped like a psychedelic light show when Cash appeared on stage. And when he and his venerated mother-in-law, Maybelle Carter, led the entire cast through the country-folk classic “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” even the hard-bitten newspaper reporters in the crowd had to admit they were probably seeing something special. At least a few eyes were not entirely dry.
Then Cash left the stage and Jimmy Snow, as is his custom late in the show, launched into his Friday-night fire-and-brimstone message—mingling his exhortations for Jesus and America and the good ole days, and forgetting, it seemed, that immortal sermons don’t have to be eternal.
Meanwhile, a very different scene was taking place across the alley from the Opry’s backstage door—in the beer-sloshing pandemonium of Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge.
Tootsie’s is a typical-looking downtown dive with a garish purple fron
t, presumably approximating the color of an orchid. In the front window are two neon Stroh’s Beer signs, one of which works. Neighboring establishments include a pawnshop, a skin-flick theater, and the Magic Touch Massage Parlor, which generally finds itself locked in a chronic life-and-death struggle with the local D.A. The inside walls of Tootsie’s are papered with thousands of photographs and autographs of musicians, ranging in stature from Elvis Presley and Faron Young to such lesser lights as Billy Troy and Ken Allen.
As its inner decor suggests, the thing that sets Tootsie’s apart is its clientele. Over the years, country musicians have made it a part of their ritual to duck out the back door of the Opry House and grab a quick beer with Tootsie, rubbing shoulders in the process with the truck drivers, downtown drunks, Opry fans, and other everyday beerdrinkers who are, in fact, the blood and guts of country music.
The first time I was a part of that scene was around 1971, when I was with a group of half a dozen tourists that happened to include several high-powered newspaper editors from my home state of Alabama. Our table was being attended by an enormously obese waitress, who reminded me somehow of the Wife of Bath and regaled us with a wide assortment of mildly off-color jokes. As she served the second round of beers, she placed one of them too close to the edge of the table. It teetered precariously for a moment, then toppled neatly into one of the editorial laps. “Oops,” she said matter-of-factly in her flattest cracker twang, “did I get it on your dick?”
The editor stared helplessly from his lap to the waitress and back to his lap, trying to decide what response was appropriate under the circumstances. And then with his pretensions pretty well devastated, he collapsed in helpless laughter. It was typical of the sort of ribald egalitarianism that prevails at Tootsie’s, presided over by Tootsie herself—Tootsie Bess, a worldlywise little lady known around Nashville for her acts of maternal kindness toward anyone down on his luck.
Tootsie’s is one of those collateral country music institutions that have nurtured the Grand Ole Opry for years. And though such things are difficult to measure, the Opry is somehow a little bit different now that it has moved from its old building and severed its back-alley affiliation with the orchid-colored lounge.
The lounge itself, to the surprise of a few people around Nashville, has developed enough institutional momentum over the years to survive very nicely. The crowds, though smaller than they used to be, are still respectable, and the only difference is that Tootsie’s one-of-a-kind jukebox—still crammed full of songs from the lesser-knowns as well as the stars—now competes with live, hard-country bands on Saturday evenings.
But if a sizeable handful of Opry fans have refused to abandon Tootsie’s or their other traditional stomping grounds like Ernest Tubb Record Shop across the street, it is also true that the biggest crowds have shifted their allegiance to the Opry’s new home. By any objective standards of comparison, the new place is a great deal nicer than the Ryman. It is bigger, it has more comfortable seats, its acoustics are more scientifically coordinated; and it’s in what would be an idyllic pastoral setting on the winding banks of the Cumberland River. The only problem is that the Opry people also plopped a large amusement park down on the same spot, and it doesn’t quite fit. It’s a nice amusement park, with a hair-raising roller coaster ride and lots of animals and things for the kids to look at, but there is nothing much left of the beer-guzzling, God-fearing milieu of white-man’s soul that used to surround the Ryman.
The Opry folks, however, seem to like it. The press kit handed out to reporters on hand for the grand opening was jammed full of quotes from various stars on the virtues of Opryland, as the new place is called: “I am very much impressed with the structure of the new Opry House,” said Roy Acuff. “I think it is the greatest thing that has happened since the Grand Ole Opry was born,” added Roy Drusky. “The move will be a great thing for country music,” offered Hank Snow. And so on.
No doubt the quotes were for real, but whether they were or not, nobody could deny that the Opry got off to a spectacular start the first night in its new home. On hand among others for the dedication performance were one President, two senators, at least three governors, and a basketful of congressmen. The President, who clearly enjoyed his temporary retreat from the pressures of Watergate, played “God Bless America” on the piano. Roy Acuff tried unsuccessfully to teach him how to yo-yo. And the specially invited crowd, which was a Nixon crowd—not country, but spiffy, big-business, fund-raising Republican—loved every minute of it.
The Opry performers themselves were in pretty glittery form. Comedian Jerry Clower told some of his funniest down-home Mississippi stories. Porter Waggoner was dressed in one of his gaudiest sequined suits. And blond-haired Jeannie Seely offered a knock-out version of “Don’t Touch Me If You Don’t Love Me, Sweetheart,” dressed at the time in a svelte, tight-fitting pants suit, with a bare midriff and the kind of plunging neckline that would have knocked many a country matron dead in her tracks from shock.
Backstage the reporters were swarming around, snatching interviews where they could, and during the course of it all, a Voice of America man cornered Minnie Pearl just outside her dressing room. “Would you tell us, please,” he said, “if you think perhaps that the Grand Ole Opry has lost its innocence?”
Minnie Pearl paused thoughtfully before answering, for contrary to her “Howdeee” public image, she was one of the brightest, most reflective members of the cast. “Well,” she said quietly, measuring her words, “there are a lot of people who would argue that the Opry lost its innocence some time ago—back when the music started to change.”
“Lordy, I reckon it has changed,” echoed Sam McGee, and he had ample reason to know. McGee, then seventy-nine years old and the oldest featured performer on the show, joined the Opry on its third or fourth radio broadcast back in 1925, when it was still called “The WSM Barn Dance” and performed in a small hotel room. Those were the days when country music was in its commercial infancy. Record producers and radio broadcasters were just beginning to grapple with the notion that an art form as crude and backwoodsy as hillbilly music could have any sort of commercial possibilities. A few of the producers, in moments of studied open-mindedness, could appreciate the fiddlers and the glib-fingered guitar and banjo pickers, but the singers—with their sentimental lyrics and piercing harmonies—simply could not be taken seriously.
But at one radio station, WSB in Atlanta, that point of view crumbled quite rapidly in the late spring of 1922. Soon after the station went on the air in mid-March, it began to feature country performances by such artists as the Reverend Andrew Jenkins, a blind gospel singer, and Fiddling John Carson, a high-pitched vocalist who later become one of the first country musicians to record commercially.
The audience response to these programs was heartening, to say the least, and the same was true the following year, some fifteen hundred miles to the west in Fort Worth, Texas. On January 4, 1923, station WBAP featured an hour and a half’s worth of square-dance music by a spirited fiddler and Confederate veteran named M. J. Bonner. WBAP had not been on the air very long, but never in its brief history had it received so many ecstatic phone calls from listeners demanding more of the same. As a result, the station soon began a regular program—reportedly heard as, far away as New York and Hawaii—called “The WBAP Barn Dance.”
At about this time, record companies began getting into the act, but almost by accident. Seeking an antidote for plunging sales, recording director Ralph Peer of Okeh records in New York began putting on tape a number of urban blues musicians who, along with scores of other blacks, had migrated north in the years just after World War I. The experiment met with immediate success, and Peer ventured south in the hope of recording still more blues musicians in the quainter confines of their native habitat. His travels took him to places like Atlanta and station WSB, and there he discovered and decided to record the other side of the Southern folk scene—country-singing
white artists like Fiddling John Carson.
Other record companies soon followed suit, and in the late twenties and early thirties the number of country records on the market began to proliferate rapidly. A few ministars emerged—people like Pop Stoneman and Charlie Poole—but those were also the days when a depression was looming, and as the economy crumbled around them, many record buyers simply retreated to their radios where the music was free. Record sales quickly fell to one-fortieth of their level a decade earlier—at a time just after the purchase of radios had increased by well over one thousand percent.
Radio, therefore, became the primary medium for country music, and few of the stations that chose to dabble in it were disappointed with their decision. One station that wandered into the field, almost timidly at first, but then with considerable gusto, was powerful WLS in Chicago. A year and a half before the birth of the Grand Ole Opry five hundred miles to the south, WLS had booked a fifteen-minute country show by a young, college-educated Kentucky guitarist named Bradley Kincaid. Kincaid’s rollicking renditions of traditional mountain ballads drew what was rapidly becoming the typical audience response—dozens of calls and letters demanding an encore—and the WLS executives decided to launch their own barn-dance program similar to the pioneer show in Fort Worth. The program quickly caught on, and for more than a decade WLS was the most-listened-to country station anywhere in America.
It didn’t take long, however, for the Grand Ole Opry to gain considerable respectability of its own. It received its name from a chance quip by its founder and master of ceremonies, George D. Hay, shortly after the program went on the air. Hay’s broadcast followed NBC’s “Musical Appreciation Hour,” and tradition has it that one night early in 1926, the network show ended with a symphonic composition depicting the rush of a speeding locomotive. Hay, whether to make a point or simply to poke some fun, decided to open his program with DeFord Bailey, a popular harmonica soloist, and his arrangement of a driving and equally graphic train song called “Pan American Blues.”
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