The Grand Ole Opry

by Colin Escott

  But that wasn’t quite the way WSM’s news service reported it.

  WSM press release, October 21, 1934:

  The Grand Ole Opry has outgrown its old clothes. Last February [1934] when the new WSM auditorium-studio was completed, WSM officials felt they had solved the problem of accommodating the crowds which assemble every Saturday night. From February to July, the audience was admitted to the Opry in the new auditorium-studio, which has a capacity of 500. Three color tickets were issued, each admitting a person to one hour of the Opry. Thus 1,500 were taken care of on Saturday night. After a summer of no audiences, the Opry again opened its doors and this time even the large auditorium studio of WSM proved inadequate.

  The Opry cast on the stage of the Hillsboro Theater, 1935.

  GRANT TURNER:

  Scouts were sent out to find an auditorium that would accommodate a few hundred to one thousand people. The struggling Nashville community playhouse at Hillsboro and Belcourt rented out their quarters [October 3, 1934]. A makeshift control room was constructed in one corner of the stage. The bands could never keep to the time slots. They would perform a song, and all of a sudden, before the Judge could thank them and get them off, they’d burst into another song. Judge told Harry Stone of his trouble, so Harry suggested that they get a musical contractor to come assist the Judge and put some muscle into the show. Vito Pellettieri was that man.

  VITO PELLETTIERI, Opry stage manager:

  I don’t think there will ever be a man who could go in front of a microphone like Mr. Hay. Never, never will be another one. I went to see Mr. Hay, and he laughed. “What are you doing out here?” I said, “I want to help you on the Opry tonight.” He said, “What are you going to do?” I said, “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  I’d told Harry Stone I didn’t know a thing about those damn hillbillies. That first night, I saw all these open, horse-drawn wagons. The beds were filled with hay to make it easier on the backside. There were only a few cars and most of them were Fords. The acts were string bands. Fiddles, banjos, and basses. They would come in off the road and half of them were full of mountain dew. They’d show up when they felt like it. I’d take four numbers from them, which would be about ten minutes, then I would pass it over to Mr. Hay, and he’d announce the numbers, and we tried to keep it up until twelve midnight.

  It wasn’t unknown for Vito Pellettieri to phone a top Opry entertainer and say, “Hey, you no-good hillbilly. What kind of garbage are you going to dish up this week?”

  I got out of there. I went home, took me a big drink, and told my wife there weren’t enough devils in hell to ever drag me back. She says, “You stay with it. That’s your job. You stay with it.” So I went to Harry, and I says, “Harry, I can’t do it the way you’ve got it. I want to block that show off in fifteen-minute blocks. I want to tell each one of the fellows when they’re supposed to be here, and if they’re not here... that’s it.” Np1 Saturday night, why, I blocked them off in fifteen-minute blocks and put them on. I told each one of them, “Np1 Saturday night, you’re on at a certain time.”

  JEANNIE SEELY, Opry star:

  Vito was a wonderful dirty old man. He loved it when I said suggestive things to him. But he was full of good advice. Little things, like he told me, “Never turn your back on the audience, even if you’re taking a bow.” He taught us all like that.

  Until Vito Pellettieri came into the picture, the Opry’s only advertiser (or sponsor) was National Life, but after Vito divided the show into segments, he came up with another idea.

  VITO PELLETTIERI:

  After I guess maybe three or four months, I told Harry, “Now, it’s all right, but I’m very commercial. Why can’t we sell this stuff?” He said, “Well, if you feel we can do it, why, we’ll just sell it.” So he sold fifteen minutes, then thirty minutes to the Crazy Water Crystals. So I got a format up. The fact of the matter is that the show that’s on the Opry right now is the same format I gave’em.

  Vito Pellettieri with the La Dells. Bill Anderson, Opry star: “He was the dirty-talkingest, filthy-mouthed old man I ever was around in my life, and I say that with more love and respect than you could ever imagine.”

  Crazy Water Crystals was a Texas company that claimed its product could cure an unlikely number of ailments. Analysis revealed that the crystals were mostly horse salt and laxative, and the Federal Communications Commission eventually closed the airwaves to them, but by then Vito Pellettieri had established the Opry’s “sponsored segment” format. In the late 1930s, thirty-minute segments could be had for $350. And Pellettieri, the son of Italian immigrants and a former “sweet” band leader, came to appreciate both the Opry and its performers.

  VITO PELLETTIERI

  When I was in the bands, somebody would get sick or be in financial trouble. I’d go around to the other musicians and they’d say, “Hell, no, I work as hard for my money as he does for his. He didn’t have to go out and blow it all’til he was broke.” But then I got with the hillbillies. One of them would get sick and you’d go tell the others, and they’d say, “Damn, is that right?” And they’d haul out their fifties and hundreds. I never saw any of them back away from one of their own people in trouble. When I saw that, I said to myself, “Well, from now on, I’m going to be a hillbilly.”

  Vito Pellettieri and his saxophone orchestra . . . in business until the Depression.

  With Harry Stone in the front office, Vito Pellettieri backstage, and Judge Hay auditioning the artists and emceeing the show, the Grand Ole Opry was poised to become radio’s leading barn dance.

  3

  “GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH FOR THE MONEY”—THE OPRY HITS THE ROAD

  The grand Ole Opry’s home turf, the South and Southeast, was especially hard hit by the Depression. As personal incomes fell, the country music record business almost disappeared, and records by top artists sold as few as five hundred copies. Offering free entertainment, the Opry prospered, but faced stiffer competition as an increasing number of stations devoted airtime to hillbilly music. Meanwhile, the music itself was changing. The first nationwide country star, Jimmie Rodgers, died in 1933 without once playing the Opry, and his success made it clear that Judge Hay’s concept of amateur string bands was out-of-date. The Opry needed stars, but stars wanted to make a living from their music. With that in mind, Hay organized the Artists Service Bureau to book and coordinate shows around the mid-South.

  Grand Ole Opry tent show, “The Greatest Show on Earth for the Money.”

  PEE WEE KING, Opry star:

  We had to be on the Opry for the prestige and the publicity, and on the road for our income.

  The idea for the Artists Service Bureau began with a trip to west Tennessee for a show over the Independence Day weekend, 1934. The turnout surprised Judge Hay,.”who brought along Uncle Dave Macon and several other Opry acts. Almost eight thousand people showed up for the all-day show, and Hay’s eyes were opened to the potential of the Opry on the road. Open-air picnics were an especially big draw because admission was sufficiently low to attract Depression-weary farm families.

  JUDGE HAY:

  The Opry was pretty solid after about ten years, and so was the Artist Service Bureau. The Artist Service Bureau was started during the last part of 1934, but we didn’t get underway to any appreciable p1ent until the first part of 1935. Very soon, it was no longer a case of groping in the dark. We had records of the dates played; which act had played it; the amount taken in at the box office; how large the attendance, etc. Theatre managers, high school principals, promoters of fairs and picnics called WSM frequently for acts, whereas in the first years we had a selling job to do.

  Judge Hay’s role at the Opry and the Artists Service Bureau could have made him into one of the most powerful men in the young country music business, but personal problems sidelined him, and he took a leave of absence between December 1936 and March 1938. Harry Stone’s brother, David, took over the Artists Service Bureau and assumed responsibility for the Opry’s newes
t stars, the Delmore Brothers. The Delmores had come to the Opry in 1933 and were instantly popular. Their two guitars and haunting sibling harmony wove delicate patterns, quite unlike the boisterous string bands. The earlier Opry acts had come of age in the pre-microphone era, but the Delmores, like Bing Crosby and the pop crooners, used microphones to produce a much subtler, nuanced sound. Their musical harmony didn’t spill over into their personal lives, however, and they fought each other and the Opry management.

  ALTON DELMORE of the Delmore Brothers:

  We had pulled for David Stone to take Judge Hay’s place as Artists Service manager when Mr. Hay got sick. We thought David would help us to get someone to play with we could depend on, but we couldn’t get the good ones from the Opry. We had to take the drunkards and troublemakers and it nearly drove us nuts. We had pulled for David to get the job, but when he got in he forgot about us, and I learned another lesson in human personality. We’d gotten along real well together until he got the big job of being our big boss.

  The Delmore Brothers, Rabon and Alton.

  Trying to keep the Delmores employed, David Stone put them on the road with the Opry’s African American “harmonica wizard,” DeFord Bailey.

  DEFORD BAILEY:

  They’d stick by me through thick and thin. They was one hundred percent. They watched out for me. “If you can’t feed DeFord, we can’t eat here, either,” I remember them saying many a time. I usually had to eat in the kitchen, but at least they saw to it that I got to come in and eat, and not have to set out in the car. If the place wouldn’t let me come in at all, they’d drive on down the road fifty miles or more to find another place that would. Most of the other performers would bring me a sandwich to eat in the car, but not them boys.

  Judge Hay wrote several booklets and many articles about the Grand Ole Opry, almost never mentioning rival radio barn dances, like the WLS Barn Dance in Chicago, or competition from hugely powerful American-owned stations just across the Mexican border. WSM had a five-thousand-watt signal, but the border stations’ five-hundred-thousand-watt signals were so powerful that wire fences could pick up their transmissions. David and Harry Stone, however, were very much aware of the competition, and fought it ruthlessly.

  ALTON DELMORE of the Delmore Brothers:

  One Saturday night, Harry Stone called us off and whispered to us confidentially, “Boys, I understand that some WLS big shots [program directors from WLS, Chicago, which hosted the WLS Barn Dance] are coming down np1 week to make you a lot of promises and tell you a lot of lies. They will be trying to get you to come work on WLS. You have a good future here on the Opry, [and] I’m raising your pay. You, Alton, will get twenty dollars a week and Rabon will get fifteen. Now don’t have anything to do with those sons of bitches when they come here np1 week. They just want to pull you away from us because you are so popular. If you leave, I will never take you on the Opry again. Your career will be ruined.” Four or five weeks later, we were called into Mr. Stone’s office. “Boys, I have bad news for you. We’re gonna have to cut you back to the regular rate for Opry entertainers.” That was five dollars a week each.

  Edwin Craig and Harry Stone were sufficiently concerned about the five-hundred-thousand-watt border stations and fifty-thousand-watt Ameri-can stations to lobby the Federal Communications Commission for an increase in WSM’s wattage. Most fifty-thousand-watt stations were allocated a “clear channel,” so that no other stations could broadcast on their frequency.

  JACK DEWITT, WSM’s chief engineer:

  In 1931, WSM got permission to go to fifty kilowatts [fifty thousand watts]. In the daytime, the fifty kilowatt is a ground wave and it’s steady. It reached about twohundred miles. At night, the ionosphere reflects the skywaves to great distance, so WSM could be heard eight hundred to a thousand miles away, but it’s always a fading signal, slightly intermittent due to the ionosphere moving around. I’d been a part-time engineer [at WSM in 1925–1926] and I rejoined the station in March 1932 as chief engineer. We went to fifty thousand watts in November that year.

  Jack DeWitt: “Originally, we had a five-hundred-foot tower that a bridge company built, and that had trouble, so we made a contract with Blaw-Knox to build a transmitter in Brentwood. It was designed by a Chinaman at MIT. I couldn’t get him to let me pay him for I finally sent him a check for fifteen hundred dollars, and he told me it made an alcoholic out of him.” The new tower was completed in 1932, the year WSM went to fifty thousand watts.

  left: WSM’s Tower under construction.

  right: A souvenir postcard of the completed WSM tower.

  The increased wattage took the Opry from the Rockies to the Caribbean, and that in turn brought many more people to Nashville to see the show. After less than two years at what is now the Belcourt Theatre, a larger venue was required, and, in mid-June 1936, the Opry moved across the Cumberland River to the Dixie Tabernacle in East Nashville. Even in the larger venue, the show was still full to overflowing every Sat-urday night.

  AARON SHELTON:

  The Dixie Tabernacle was a tent operation. It was a big tent set up where they had revival services during the week and on Sunday, but on Saturday night they’d rent it out to the Grand Ole Opry.

  Very few photos were taken of the Opry during the years 1936–1939, when it was staged at the Dixie Tabernacle.

  BASHFUL BROTHER OSWALD, Roy Acuff’s Dobro player:

  The Tabernacle had a dirt floor. Wooden benches on a concrete block, and it was free. They gave us tickets to hand out to people on the road when we’d play a job.

  DAVID STONE, Artists Service Bureau manager:

  It was like carnival days. Sawdust on the floor. Old hinged lighting along the side. You’d have to go along on a hot night and put broomsticks under the lights to hold them up. There was no room to do anything. It held maybe six hundred or eight hundred people.

  Judge Hay is seen with Texas announcer Byron Parker, aka the Old Hired Hand.

  WSM’s Home Office Shield magazine had a much higher estimate of the weekly attendance. The Tabernacle probably held less than one thousand people, but some would leave during the show to be replaced by others.

  Free tickets to the show were handed out by National Life “Shield Men.”

  WSM’s Home Office Shield magazine, October 1936:

  About twenty-five percent of the capacity crowd, which runs well over three thousand people, are from other states. The boys on the door look at the license plates on cars which line up the streets within a half-mile radius of the Grand Ole Opry House. They report licenses from ten to fifteen states on average. Believe it or not, thousand mile trips are made with the sole purpose of visiting the Grand Ole Opry. The audiences are the most friendly to work for, and WSM has no trouble whatever. Once in a while, some of the youngsters get a little frisky outside the building, but two uniformed policemen take care of them in short order and in a nice way.

  In fact, there was often unruly behavior, and WSM’s mail-room employee, Jim Denny, made a little weekend money as a bouncer.

  JIM DENNY:

  If someone was acting up and disturbing people, I would ask him very sweetly to leave. If he gave me any backtalk at all, it was WHAM! Right then! A right to the head. Usually by the time they got over their surprise, they were outside.

  But Jim Denny had ambition. He watched and learned as Harry and David Stone recruited the stars who would ensure the Opry’s future. Denny would eventually take over the Artists Service Bureau from David Stone, and make the position into one of the most powerful in country music.

  GRANDOLEOPRY

  NEW MEMBERS: 1930s

  ROY ACUFF AND HIS SMOKY MOUNTAIN BOYS

  ZEKE CLEMENTS

  THE DELMORE BROTHERS

  CURLY FOX AND TEXAS RUBY

  HILLTOP HARMONIZERS

  JAMUP AND HONEY

  PEE WEE KING AND HIS GOLDEN WEST COWBOYS

  THE LAKELAND SISTERS

  LASSES AND HONEY

  ROBERT LUNN

&
nbsp; SAM AND KIRK MCGEE

  BILL MONROE AND HIS BLUE GRASS BOYS

  NAP AND DEE

  FORD RUSH

  SARIE AND SALLY

  JACK SHOOK AND HIS MISSOURI MOUNTAINEERS

  ASHER AND LITTLE JIMMIE SIZEMORE

  THE VAGABONDS

  4

  THE STAR SYSTEM

  Uncle Dave Macon, Sam and Kirk McGee, and other in the Opry cast provided a link to the show’s earliest and rowdiest days, but several stars who’broadened the Opry’s popularity in the 1930s, including the Delmore Brothers and the Vagabonds, left within a few months of each other in 1938. And DeFord Bailey’s days were numbered.

  DeFord Bailey’s dismissal in 1941 remains controversial, but the likeliest reason is that his songs were licensed for performance through the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). In 1941, the National Association of Broadcasters felt that ASCAP was holding radio to ransom and decreed that no one would perform ASCAP-protected songs on-air. The broadcasters set up a rival performing rights society, Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), and DeFord Bailey probably refused to learn BMI-protected songs. Bailey, though, believed that the Opry had other reasons for dismissing him.

  Ernest Tubb.

  JUDGE HAY: