The Grand Ole Opry

by Colin Escott

  JUDGE HAY introducing the first Prince Albert portion of the Grand Ole Opry, October 14, 1939:

  Friends, these are the same people you’ve been listening to for fourteen years; the only difference tonight is that they’re coming to you from the Mexican border to the mountains of Virginia. Our show is ready to ride right down the middle of the road to our friends and neighbors throughout America.

  JACK DEWITT:

  The Prince Albert deal surprised me because I’ll never forget writing to the president of NBC, Bobby Sarnoff, son of the general [NBC founder David Sarnoff]. I told him we had an awful lot of talent here and we’d like to put our programs on NBC. He wrote back and said, “We’re not interested in country music. Perhaps you had better try CBS.” But you had the same attitude here in Nashville. We started the first FM station [in October 1940] because Edwin Craig was embarrassed in front of the [upper class] Belle Meade crowd because of the Grand Ole Opry. He thought that broadcasting classical music on FM would help.

  With the Prince Albert sponsorship, nationwide Opry tours, and country songs taking over the airwaves, national magazines began taking an interest in the Grand Ole Opry for the first time. Most of the pieces were patronizing, but the writers couldn’t fail to be impressed with the Opry’s hold upon its audience or with the size of that audience.

  DON EDDY, journalist, in American Magazine:

  One 30-minute segment is piped over the full coast-to-coast NBC network, during which pollsters say it has 9,500,000 faithful listeners. The cast varies from 120 to 137 performers, depending on how many show up. Pay is small (one featured singer gets $19.50 a week) but advertising value to the individual is enormous. There are surprisingly few women on the show because (a) women don’t like to be laughed at, and (b) backwoodsmen in the audience with their wives would get their ears slapped down if they stared at a strange female, much less applauded her. That is why Cousin Minnie Pearl deliberately tries to make herself homely.

  Stills and a lobby card from Republic Pictures’ Grand Ole Opry movie, directed by former railroad worker Frank McDonald. Critic Evelyn Keyes said, “I’ve never seen anyone as terrified of directing as Frank McDonald.” Regardless, he directed over a hundred movies, mostly low-budget westerns.

  The Opry also attracted the attention of Republic Pictures, and in 1940 several Opry members were in a Republic feature, Grand Ole Opry. To secure Republic’s commitment, Judge Hay brought the producer to Uncle Dave Macon’s house near Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

  JUDGE HAY:

  After dinner, Uncle Dave invited us to be seated under a large tree in his front yard, where we discussed the possibility of a Grand Ole Opry picture. As the producer and [I] drove back to Nashville, that experienced executive said, “I have never met a more natural man in my life. He prays at the right time. He cusses at the right time, and his jokes are as cute as the dickens.”

  Knoxville News Sentinel, 1940:

  The other night, Acuff and the other Opry players were a bit spryer with their songs and wits than usual. The Hollywood scouts were in the audience. Republic Pictures had a producer, director, and writer there listening. “Roy and the others will start packing soon for California,” said Jack Harris, WSM publicity director.

  “Cameras are to start grinding on May 1.” The WSM man said that the picture was originally scheduled with Gene Autry, but that didn’t go through.

  The movie was short (just over one hour), and the plot was flimsy and didn’t have much to do with the Opry, but it was significant that the movie colony in Hollywood thought that Grand Ole Opry was a salesworthy title for a nationally released picture.

  JUDGE HAY:

  We got the contract to do a Republic picture. Uncle Dave Macon was in it, and he always said that he couldn’t get along without his country ham. Uncle Dave and I went out to Hollywood on the train. Roy Acuff had a station wagon and drove all the way along the southern route with very few stops. Uncle Dave told Roy, “I’m not sure we’re gonna get enough to eat out there. I’ve got three country hams. I want you to put them on top of your bus so we’ll be sure to have something to eat.” Uncle Dave would go into restaurants out there and tell the cooks that he wanted a large order of eggs to go with his country ham so he wouldn’t get too lonesome. Then he insisted that Roy carry the crates back to Tennessee so that he could use them for chicken coops. When Uncle Dave visited the shore of the Pacific Ocean, he took out a tobacco sack and filled it with wet sand. That was a token of his visit to the West Coast. We worked, I guess, two or three days on the picture. It had two hundred scenes and each scene was a minute or less. Finally the director told us we could come over to a little shed and watch the rushes. After a couple of minutes, Uncle Dave came on. His son Dorris was standing beside him in the movie plunking a guitar, looking like a wooden Indian. Uncle Dave looked up there at the screen, stood straight up, and said, “Wheeeeeeeee, that’s me!” Hollywood has seen many unusual people, none more so than Uncle Dave.

  ROY ACUFF:

  Hollywood, I came to find out it was phony. I’d say seventy-five percent of Hollywood is phony and maybe twenty-five is pure, whereas I’d say that our business with the Grand Ole Opry is maybe ninety percent pure.

  Movies weren’t the only other industry to benefit from the rapidly growing Opry business. When World War II ended in 1945, there were still no recording studios or record companies in Nashville, but there was one pioneering music publisher.

  VITO PELLETTIERI:

  The two men who are responsible for Nashville being Music City are Roy Acuff and Fred Rose. Fred was on WSM and he’d written songs for Gene Autry. I says, “Fred, I’m having trouble clearing tunes. I just wish we had a publisher here that can do it. Nobody will take the hillbilly tunes. Nobody wants them, and I’ve got to have them.” He said, “Well, I can help you out if you get Roy Acuff interested in this thing.” So I went to Roy and I told him what Fred had said. Roy said, “Yes, I’ll be interested.” He asked me what kind of fellow Freddie was, and I told him the finest there was. And that was the beginning of Acuff-Rose, the publishing company.

  left: Fred Rose and Roy Acuff. Hank Williams: “Fred Rose came to Nashville to laugh, and he heard Roy Acuff and said, ‘By God, he means it.’ ”

  right: One of Roy Acuff’s first songbooks.

  DAVID STONE:

  Roy was selling songbooks. He had a little trailer home out on the east side, and he had girls come in daily and stuff them in the mail. So he and Freddie got into the publishing business, and it blossomed from the first day. Roy advanced some money to Fred. The money was put in five different banks, so Roy said nothing could happen to all five accounts at once.

  ROY ACUFF:

  We were like blind pigs searching for an acorn. I was selling a lot of songbooks and I had accumulated a little extra money. I wanted to make some kind of investment, and I knew there wasn’t anyone publishing country music, at least not in a big way. I talked to Harry Stone and Vito Pellettieri, who knew Fred real well and knew a lot about music. Finally, I went to Fred, and he thought I was kidding. But it kind of got to him. I told him I had saved twenty-five thousand dollars and I took it to the bank to put in his name. That’s how much I trusted him. That money didn’t come from personal appearances and it didn’t come from playing the Grand Ole Opry. It came from selling songbooks because I knew my songs were hotter’n a pistol. I paid eighty-five dollars for a spot on the Opry broadcast advertising a book of my songs with pictures, and by Wednesday there were twenty-five thousand letters in the post office. People paid twenty-five cents apiece for them.

  WESLEY ROSE, Fred Rose’s son:

  Nashville wasn’t a music town. But there was the Grand Ole Opry, and that was the reason we stayed. The fact that the Opry was here made us decide to settle in Nashville permanently. The artists were available every weekend and we could take our songs to them. Nowhere else in the world did artists congregate like that every weekend.

  Despite the Opry’s ever-increasing crowds
at home and on the road, it had yet to find a semipermanent base. The primitive Dixie Tabernacle was already deemed unsuitable when the owner precipitated another move.

  “THIS WILL RUIN EVERYTHING”—THE OPRY PLUGS IN

  Electric steel guitars were introduced in the early 3333s and became popular in western swing bands and big bands where acoustic instruments had to do battle with larger ensembles. One electrified instrument would have created an imbalance in the early Opry groups, but that wasn’t the reason they weren’t on the show. Judge Hay was dead set against them, and his opinions were shared by many within the Opry cast. If Hay was a pioneer, he was also a purist, and saw no contradiction there.

  PEE WEE KING:

  We proved that country music doesn’t have to sound old-timey. The first time Judge Hay heard me play my accordion, he said, “What is that thing?” I said, “It’s an accordion.” He said, “That’s not a country instrument.” Every time we’d introduce a new instrument on the Opry, Judge Hay would get upset. His glasses would come down on his nose. He would call me over, and I knew I was in for a lecture. That’s what he did when we did a show with a drum for the first time. He said, “Pee Wee, there’s no room on the Opry for that.”

  Pee Wee King with the offending accordion.

  SAM MCGEE:

  Fellow by the name of McLemore had this electric steel guitar. I heard him play the thing and I thought it was pretty. Never heard one before, so I bought it offa him. I got by with it for two Saturday nights on the Opry, and on the third I was ready to play on our half hour, and Judge Hay came out and tapped me on the shoulder.

  BASHFUL BROTHER OSWALD:

  Judge looked at it, and he said, “We’re not ready for that thing yet, sonny boy. Take it back home.”

  Ernest Tubb’s electric guitarist, Jimmie Short, didn’t make the journey to Nashville, and Harold Bradley subbed for him in this 1943 shot. Toby Reese is on bass.

  ROY ACUFF:

  This will ruin everything.

  KIRK MCGEE:

  It wasn’t too long after, Judge Hay was gone. Then they had electrified instruments in every band.

  JUSTIN TUBB:

  My dad started using the electric guitar so people could hear him in the honky-tonks where he worked. He delivered beer for a company out in west Texas, then he’d get up and play for tips, and you couldn’t hardly hear him over the drunks. Some of those west Texas honky-tonks can be kinda noisy.

  GRANT TURNER:

  It was 1943 when promoter Joe Frank insisted that his new star, Ernest Tubb, be allowed to use electrified instruments. He would not have sounded like his records otherwise.

  DAVID STONE:

  The owner of the tabernacle on Fatherland got fussy and wanted a big cut, so we had to move on.

  HARRY STONE:

  I don’t remember who was governor of Tennessee at the time, but I went to see him and asked permission to use the War Memorial Auditorium just across the street from WSM’s offices. Despite the ruling against commercial use of the facilities, I convinced him this was art and culture and [in July 1939] he let us have it.

  PEE WEE KING:

  When we arrived at the Opry in 1937, admission was still free. People would arrive early and eat dinners they’d brought from home on the ground. [My manager] Mr. Frank was looking out at the throng of people waiting for the show to start, and he said to David Stone, “You’re missing the boat. You should charge a small admission. Maybe a dime or a quarter.” Mr. Stone said, “Why should we charge? We’re getting a lot of valuable advertising out of these free shows.” Mr. Frank said, “When you give something away, people don’t value it as much as they should, but if you charge even a small amount, they know it’s something special.”

  JUDGE HAY:

  We put a small price of twenty-five cents on the seats in an effort to handle the crowds, but the auditorium was soon filled to overflowing. Imagine a theater turning crowds away year after year.

  If, as Hay said, the Opry’s first admission charge was a quarter, by 1941, it had increased to fifty cents.

  HARRY STONE:

  The upholstery at the War Memorial was a gum-chewers’ heaven. Going there set us back ten years. I listened to this committee spell out all the reasons why we should not only be put out, but put in jail. But it sure was a nice place.

  A spectacular venue, Nashville’s War Memorial Auditorium was home to the Opry for almost four years between 1939 and 1943. Onstage in 1939, Roy Acuff is backed by Bashful Brother Oswald on Dobro.

  The War Memorial was close to the State Capitol, and the litter left by the Opry crowd was the last straw. Once again in search of a home, WSM approached the trustees of the Ryman Auditorium. The Ryman was built in 1892 by Captain Tom Ryman, president of the Nashville, Paducah, and Cairo Packet Company. It was, Ryman wrote, “purely an outpost to catch sinners.” A reformed sinner himself, Ryman built the hall so that the evangelist who had turned his life around, the Reverend Sam Jones, might have a place to preach.

  Judge Hay with Sam McGee (holding the sheep) and Lonnie Wilson of Roy Acuff’s Smoky Mountain Boys.

  left: The Ryman Auditorium shortly after its construction.

  center: Captain Tom Ryman was converted by the Reverend Sam Jones in 1885. The auditorium he built was originally known as the Union Gospel Tabernacle, but, at Jones’s suggestion, was renamed the Ryman Auditorium after Ryman’s death.

  right: Reverend Sam Jones. In the year he converted Ryman (1885), he preached, by his own estimate, one thousand sermons to three million people. He preached against the theater, trashy novels, cards, baseball, dances, and alcohol. “I will fight the liquor traffic as long as I have fists, kick it as long as I have a foot, bite it as long as I have a tooth, and then gum ’em ’til I die,” he said.

  JACK DEWITT:

  The Ryman was run by a group of prominent Nash villians who got no money out of it. They brought in all sorts of plays and so on. The businessmen who helped run it included Horace Hill [chairman of the local grocery chain, H. G. Hill], Mr. Clements of National Life, and Dan May, the Jewish manufacturer. We rented it from them. I had to deal with Horace Hill. The first thing I had to do was find Horace. He never got to his office until five o’clock in the afternoon, and after that we had to go down and see him and hope that he was there. So he set the amount that we would pay them.

  On June 5, 1943, the Opry began at the Ryman on a regular basis. Even with paid admission, every show was sold out with hundreds turned away every week.

  PEE WEE KING:

  The reason the Ryman was ideal for the Opry was its acoustics. I don’t know the technical reason why the sound was so incredible, but I believe the wood in the auditorium absorbed the sound of the music, and it just stayed there. It was like being inside an old violin, surrounded by good seasoned wood. Not even the backstage noise could destroy the sound. And talk about noise! It was a free-for-all back there; a lot of the tune-ups and rehearsing took place in full view of the audience. Sometimes, the only way to tell who was performing was to see who was at the microphone. There were almost no dressing room facilities. Just one area for men and one for women. There were two washrooms to accommodate as many as two hundred performers.

  Crowds started lining up Saturday afternoon for the 8:00 p.m. show at the Ryman.

  MINNIE PEARL:

  At first, I was horrified by the seeming disorganization. I had come from directing plays. On the Opry, it wasn’t unusual for an announcer to say, “And now we’re proud to present so-and-so,” and someone would whisper, “He ain’t here, he’s gone to get a sandwich,” which didn’t fluster the emcee, who’d say, “Oh well, he’ll be back in a minute. Meanwhile, let’s hear from the Fruit Jar Drinkers.”

  Many dreamed of visiting the Opry; some dreamed of playing there.

  BUCK WHITE of the Whites, Opry stars:

  First time I came to the Ryman, it was like the first time I’d gone to the Alamo. I thought I was stepping into a holy place. It was full of spirits. Goo
d spirits.

  BILL ANDERSON:

  I listened to the Opry as a young boy down in Georgia, and they used to call WSM the “Air Castle of the South,” so I always thought the Opry was held in a castle. The first time I came I was about fourteen, and I was so disappointed because I had visions of this big castle sitting out on a big piece of land. And here was this little auditorium on Fifth Avenue. It was falling apart and there were holes in the curtains, and I thought, This isn’t the castle of my dreams at all. We had seats downstairs under the balcony. My mother had bought a new dress to go to the Opry, and someone spilled a soft drink upstairs and it leaked down on her new dress. Once the curtain opened and the music started, I didn’t care. It wasn’t broken down into two different shows then, but by 10:30 my mom and dad and sister had had enough and they went back to the hotel. I said, “Not me.” I sat there until midnight, then walked around the corner to the Ernest Tubb Record Shop for the Midnite Jamboree. I was just like a sponge soaking it all up, but getting into that business was a dream I didn’t dare dream.

  The Ryman stage from the Confederate Gallery.

  WILLIAM R. MCDANIEL and HAROLD SELIGMAN, journalists:

  Although the show lasts from 7:30 p.m. until twelve midnight, many of the fans sit through the entire program. Others leave about ten, after they have seen most of the performers. As a rule, the entertainers appear at least once before ten, and once again after ten. This makes room for many of the throng who wait outside the auditorium in the hope of getting a seat in the last portion of the show. The turnover in audience permits the show to play to an average audience of five thousand. Demand for tickets is greater in the summer months, and the show is sold out many weeks in advance. Fans holding general admission tickets begin lining up in front of the auditorium by the middle of Saturday afternoon to assure themselves choice seats when the doors are opened at six. By that time, crowds are usually lined up eight abreast for two blocks. Audience turnover is higher in the summer, mainly because it gets steaming hot in the auditorium, despite exhaust fans, personal cardboard fans, and shirtsleeves.