Dreaming Out Loud

by Bruce Feiler

  Minnie Pearl was unique in Nashville, a remarkable time capsule who embodied the ongoing clash of classes that has always defined the relationship between country music and Music City. Born Sarah Ophelia Colley, she came from a line of silk stockings and privilege, but gave it up for a life as a traveling thespian. As Cousin Minnie Pearl, the cotton-legginged good ol’ girl who grew out of those years performing across the underbelly of the South, she earned back the money she had shunned as a girl and gained the one thing that had always eluded her colleagues: genuine social status. Her death, coming just days after Wynonna’s wedding, marked a rare moment in the life of the community. With both the founding and the current heartbeats of the Opry there, along with the political and social backbone of the city (the sitting governor came, along with three of his predecessors, all of whom had lived next to her 6-acre estate in the fashionable enclave of Oak Hill, not far from tony Belle Meade), it could have been a moment in which the two dominant sides of the city—Belle Meade and Music Row—finally achieved the union they had been inching toward for decades.

  Sarah Ophelia Colley was born at a time before Music Row, or Belle Meade, even existed. In 1912, Nashville was a provincial, soot-covered city of roughly 100,000 people about to become the centerpiece of a new urban migration across the South. Laid out on the gentle, if rocky terrain that dominates middle Tennessee, the city was perched on a serpentine stretch of the Cumberland River that runs five hundred miles from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River. The state was so long and thin, in fact, and its cultural heritage so diverse, that one saying about Tennessee would later proclaim: “There’s blues to the west, bluegrass to the east, and a whole lot of country in between.”

  The state capital, Nashville, is indeed halfway between Memphis to the west and Knoxville to the east, as well as Louisville to the north and Birmingham to the south. Founded in 1780 by a band of Carolinians who trekked three hundred miles on the frozen Cumberland, then later exploited the unfrozen river to transport cotton and other products to New Orleans, Nashville (named after Revolutionary War General Francis Nash) has always been something of a benchmark town. In the eighteenth century, it served as a hub for a series of Indian trade routes, including the Natchez Trace, that early settlers used to move goods from the Ohio Valley to the Mississippi. In the nineteenth century, three early presidents, Andrew Jackson (“Old Hickory,” number seven), James Polk (“Young Hickory,” number eleven), and later Andrew Johnson (number seventeen, the only one impeached), came from Nashville. And, because of its network of railroads, the city was a pivotal resupply town during the Civil War, first for the Confederacy, then, following a brief battle in 1862, for the Union.

  In the century that followed, Nashville fluctuated between two conflicting poles. One was as a center of education and enlightenment, the “Athens of the South.” Vanderbilt University, founded in 1873 by New York-born industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt, was a leading Methodist institution aimed at “strengthening the ties which should exist between all geographical sections of our common country.” Fisk University, founded six years earlier for similar missionary purposes, was the first African American university in the country. In 1897, on the commemoration of the state’s one hundredth birthday, the city of Nashville decided to promote its enlightened image by constructing a 228-foot-long, 65-foot-high full-scale concrete replica of the Parthenon, complete with a frieze depicting Zeus lying ill on the ground, his son Hephaestus accidentally striking him on the head with an ax, and Athena springing from the wound. Today the world’s only fully constructed Parthenon (the other one long since having been marauded) still stands proudly across the street from Vanderbilt, separated only by a Wendy’s. Its inside now has a 41-foot-10-inch-tall statue of Athena; its outside provides the backdrop for a laser light show every summer.

  Nashville’s alternative image, though, is as a center of evangelical Christianity and Southern spirituality, the “Buckle of the Bible Belt.” Because of its central location, Nashville has long been a Mecca for religious institutions, with more churches per capita than any city in America. It also became headquarters for operations by various denominations of Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists. The association has not always been positive. In 1925, the state came under ridicule when public school teacher John T. Scopes of the east Tennessee town of Dayton was put on trial for teaching evolution, which was against state law. H. L. Mencken, who had earlier branded the South the “Sahara of the Bozart,” reported from Dayton that it was “the bunghole of the United States, a cesspool of Baptists, a miasma of Methodism, snake-charmers, phony real-estate operators, and syphilitic evangelists.” Grandiloquence aside (though with a catchy tune, Mencken’s words could have made a good country song), the image he described has never quite disappeared. The week of Minnie Pearl’s funeral, Nashville once again found itself on the front page of national gaping when the state legislature nearly passed a new version of the old Tennessee “Monkey Law” that would have again outlawed teaching evolution as fact. Not long after that, the state senate did, in fact, pass a bill that urged Tennesseans to follow the Ten Commandments and to post them in their homes.

  From its inception, this struggle for Nashville has always, to one degree or another, come down to class. Nashville has long been dominated by a large ruling elite, made up of families in finance, banking, and insurance. The centerpiece of their world was Belle Meade, a former horse plantation turned residential community. Belle Meade had been one of the most storied names in American equestrian history. In 1881, Iroquois, racing under the plantation’s maroon silks, became the first American horse to win the English Derby. In the early twentieth century, suffering financially, Belle Meade was sold to a group of investors, who auctioned the horses, freed the elk, and converted the deer park into tracts of land. Soon socialites (and socialite wannabes) were flocking to this new enclave of magnolias and exclusion, where they shielded themselves from their backwoods neighbors. Gentrified Nashvillians were particularly concerned that the Scopes Monkey Trial had darkened their reputation. The image-conscious leaders of Vanderbilt even announced a so-called “answer to Dayton” in which they would “advance the South” by building more laboratories and teaching more science. But just as blue-blooded Nashville had beaten back the stench of Dayton, another cultural hurricane arrived from rural Tennessee to muddy their dinner party.

  In a sense, the early history of country music can be told as a simple story: Country comes to town. It’s the story of rural Americans who left their agrarian roots for greater opportunities in the city, then used music as a way to preserve and to reclaim what they’d left behind. The music that came to be called “country” first came together about a century ago from an eclectic array of sources, including Irish and Scottish string music, Mississippi blues, Christian hymns, and, later, jazz. At the time few people considered any of this music more valuable than, say, nursery rhymes. By the 1920s, when the phonograph was becoming a common household item, big-city businessmen eventually realized the financial potential for selling this kind of music. The “Big Bang” of country music, known then as “old-time music” or “hillbilly music,” occurred in August 1927 when Ralph Peer, an admittedly condescending carpetbagger from New York, recorded songs by the Carter Family and Mississippi crooner Jimmie Rodgers within days of each other in Bristol, Tennessee. Eventually this music found a home on burgeoning commercial broadcasting outlets, especially after rural listeners flooded myopic big-city programmers with letters of appreciation.

  As contradictory as it seems, one principal reason for the success of country music at this time was that vast numbers of people were actually leaving the countryside. The 1920s brought the beginning of a wholesale migration of rural Southerners from the country to the city. They came for jobs, education, and fun. Nashville was particularly changed by this migration. Thirty thousand migrants moved to Nashville in the 1920s—that in a city that began the decade with only 150,000 people. Country music, with its the
mes of religion, family, and home, became a link to the places these people had left. “It evokes a warm image of the culture of the common folk in the South and a plea to preserve it against incursions of the modern world,” wrote Andrew Lytle, one of a group of radical thinkers at Vanderbilt in the twenties known as the Fugitives, who advocated a return to Southern Agrarianism. “Throw out the radio and take down the fiddle from the wall. Forsake the movies for the play parties and the square dance.” The performers who joined the Opry in those early decades, the Delmore Brothers from northern Alabama (1932), Roy Acuff from eastern Tennessee (1938), and Bill Monroe from western Kentucky (1939), embodied this sense of nostalgia. Many of Monroe’s classic songs, like “Uncle Pen,” were in deference to the family he left in Kentucky after he moved to Illinois during the Depression.

  Few people understood the class tension that many of these agrarians faced when they got to town better than Sarah Colley. Sarah was born to money. Her mother, Fannie, the “epitome of a Southern lady,” grew up in a home with Oriental rugs, Shakespeare, and white-coated servants. Fannie horrified her parents by marrying a lumber company operator, Thomas Colley, and moving with him to Centerville, fifty miles to the south. The couple thrived, though, eventually having five children (Sarah Ophelia was the youngest). Like many such families in the South, musical taste was tied to social status. Sarah’s mother disliked hillbilly music, preferring symphonies and show tunes. When traveling theater troupes passed through town, she would accompany them on the piano at the local opera house. Sarah’s father, by contrast, loved rural music, particularly the Grand Ole Opry.

  Sarah, spoiled, a clown from the beginning, fancied herself on stage, but it was clearly the stage of her mother. During the Depression, she bypassed college for two years at Nashville’s Ward-Belmont finishing school (cost: $1,200 a year), known for its training in dramaturgy, where she “worshipped at the feet of Katharine Hepburn, Lynn Fontanne, and Bea Lillie,” and dreamed of Broadway. Located at the top of what is now Music Row, Ward-Belmont (started by two women from Belle Meade) was headquartered in an 1850s Venetian-style mansion. “While America was in the throes of a major financial depression,” Minnie remembered, “Ward-Belmont remained aloof, untouched, an oasis of Bourbon opulence. My first night in the dining room, where round tables had been set with lovely linens, beautiful china, sparkling crystal, and gleaming silverware, I sat with girls who talked of debutante balls, vacations in Europe, winter homes in Palm Beach, English nannies, and upstairs maids.”

  After graduating, Sarah Colley shunned that gilded legacy and set out in pursuit of a career in the theater. Over the objections of her parents (“Show people were still considered wild and bohemian,” she recalled), she joined a theater troupe her mother had accompanied on the piano, the Wayne P. Sewell Company of Atlanta. For ten dollars a week, she traveled the Southeast performing in stock productions. It was during one such trip that Sarah became stranded in a snowstorm on Sand Mountain in northern Alabama, then, as now, one of the poorest areas in the country. The school principal asked an elderly woman who lived in a nearby cabin if she would house their visitor. “I’ve had sixteen young’uns and never failed to make a crop,” the woman told her. Ten days later, she had found what she considered a seventeenth. “Lord a’mercy, child, I hate to see you go,” she told Sarah. “You’re just like one of us.” For weeks afterward, Sarah mimicked the woman, slowly developing her into a character of sorts. Looking for a suitable name, the actress chose two familiar Southern names: Minnie and Pearl. “She didn’t mean to be funny, she just was,” Sarah Colley said later in the habit she had of speaking of Minnie in the third person. “I found it very interesting that I carried so much of her persona and character. That’s when I said good-bye to Katharine Hepburn.”

  In 1940, out of work now and penniless, Sarah was encouraged to audition her character for a guest spot on the Grand Ole Opry. She was accepted, but officials were so worried that her privileged background would make her act seem like a putdown that they scheduled her first appearance for 11:05 P.M., after most listeners would have turned off their radios and most guests at the War Memorial Auditorium would have gone home. Following a classic Opry commercial for Crazy Water Crystals Company (a white concentrate of mineral water taken from the Crazy Well in Texas that claimed superhuman laxative powers), Minnie told jokes for three minutes. Asked for her appraisal afterward, Sarah’s mother said, “Several people woke up.” In the days that followed, though, three hundred people mailed letters of support to the station. The next weekend Minnie Pearl was offered a permanent job as the only female act in the Opry, “the first woman to scramble with my fingernails up the side of a wall to try to get some recognition in a man’s world.”

  From the beginning, though, it was Sarah’s class, more than her gender, that was an issue. Minnie was clearly a rube. She wore a pair of one-strap Mary Jane shoes, cotton lisle stockings (“You never saw country girls wearing silk stockings. They couldn’t afford them…”), gingham dresses, and what she called a “tacky straw hat” with the plastic flowers and the price tag still dangling from its brim: $1.98. In later years, the hat and price tag would become so famous that a letter addressed only with a drawing of her hat eventually made its way to the Grand Ole Opry. The act itself was also based around rural humor, specifically Minnie’s “family” in fictitious Grinder’s Switch: “Uncle Nabob takes a drink every now and then to steady his nerves. He gets pretty steady. Sometimes he doesn’t move at all.” “I remember the first time we bought Uncle Nabob a store-boughten suit. It had two pairs of pants! That was nice for the winter, but wearin’ both pairs got awfully hot come summer.” Minnie also made fun of herself, particularly her misfortune with boys. “The robber said, ‘Gimme your money.’ I said, ‘But I haven’t got any money,’ so he frisked me and said, ‘Are you sure you ain’t got any money?’ I said, ‘Nossir, but if you’ll do that again, I’ll write you a check.’”

  Sarah, however, grew uncomfortable with this pose. “I was embarrassed about what I was doing,” she said. “I was twenty-nine years old, a mature young woman, and I just couldn’t see my way clear to cut loose and act a fool.” Her embarrassment was made more acute by the fact that her friends from Ward-Belmont looked down on the Opry as a haven for country bumpkins. “When I first came to Nashville, country music was not welcome in this town,” she said. “Many of the local citizens wanted to sweep us under the rug. They felt that the Opry was a demeaning image for their city, which they were promoting as the ‘Athens of the South.’” They looked down on women even more. “Would a nice girl be traveling all over the country with a bunch of hillbilly musicians? Certainly not!” The musicians, she confessed, harbored a similar prejudice. “In all honesty, we didn’t care that much about Nashville either,” she said. “We only came here because of the Opry. But when they started talking down on us, we developed a saying: ’Nobody likes us but the people.’ It made us stronger and more determined than ever to prove them wrong. What finally changed their minds was that we brought all that money back and started spending it here. That they didn’t mind.”

  That didn’t happen until after World War II.

  As it was for the entire South, World War II was a boon for country music. First, it only heightened the rural migration of the previous two decades. The war brought millions of Northerners to the South for military training and brought millions of Southerners into service with Northerners. Country music was uniquely suited to telling the stories of these soldiers. “I’ll Be Back in a Year, Little Darlin’” became “Have I Stayed Away Too Long,” giving way to “Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima,” then “The Soldier’s Last Letter.” This exposure, coupled with huge population shifts, led to unprecedented growth when the war was over and to a golden era of traditional country music. In 1944, Billboard magazine estimated that there were six hundred regular country radio shows in the United States and that they played to a combined audience of around 40 million people—one third of the population at
the time.

  As would be the case throughout its history, country grew by adapting to the times. While early country music had been based around fiddles, harmonicas, and assorted backyard instruments, the new sound (called “honky-tonk” after the new breed of beer joints located on the outskirts of Southern towns) included brasher instrumentation—string bass, more rhythmic guitar, even electric guitar—and edgier, more modern themes. There were fewer songs about pastoral dislocation and poor Grandma back on the farm and more talk of sex, drinking, and families falling apart. With new stars—Hank Snow, Hank Thompson, and the prince of urban dislocation, Hank Williams—the Opry, in particular, reached more listeners than ever. Country was also popular in the Far West, with Okies who had come to California during the Dust Bowl, and in the Northeast. A group of Opry stars even played Carnegie Hall in October 1947 and sold out. “The barriers were coming down,” boasted Minnie Pearl, one of the performers on that show. “I think that was the first time I realized how far-flung country music had become.”