On this date in 1985, The Nashville Network began broadcasting Grand Ole Opry Live, a weekly program of live music from “country’s most famous stage.” While the program featured some of the biggest names in country music, including Dolly Parton, Roy Acuff, Hank Snow and others, it was hardly something new. In fact, when Grand Ole Opry Live premiered, the weekly performance showcase was already 60 years old.
The Grand Ole Opry began as a radio show on Nashville’s WSM-AM on November 28, 1925. At that point, radio was a relatively new phenomenon and stations were still trying to figure out just how to gain audiences. The station, owned by the National Life & Accident Insurance Company, hired big-time on-air personality and program director George D. “Judge” Hay from Chicago’s WLS-AM. Hay had launched the successful National Barn Dance program on WLS and was looking to recapture that magic in Nashville.
WSM had begun to find success in the genre a couple of weeks before Hay came onboard, featuring spots with “Dr. Humphrey Bate and his string quartet of old-time musicians” (whom Hay would later dub Bate’s “Possum Hunters”). When Hay came to the station on November 2, it was just a matter of booking the right artists to create the ultimate showcase of “old-time music.” He got his first bit of local talent at the suggestion of a station piano accompanist, who recommended her uncle, Jimmy Thompson, a local fiddler who learned to play songs as a boy from soldiers returning home from the Civil War. And so, with “Uncle Jimmy” Thompson booked, Hay launched the first WSM Barn Dance.
The performance began at 8 p.m. and was scheduled to run for an hour. Hay threw open the phone lines to take requests, which flooded in almost instantly. The hour flew by with several requests still to be played. Hay asked the 77-year-old Thompson if he’d had enough, to which Uncle Jimmy replied, “A man don’t get warmed up in an hour” and flashed a blue ribbon to Hay commemorating his victory at an eight-day fiddle contest in Dallas.
The show was an immediate hit with listeners and soon Hay was bringing in all the great players in the area, including Bate’s Possum Hunters, the Fruit Jar Drinkers, the Crook Brothers, Uncle Dave Macon and others. Very quickly, the Saturday night program became a national sensation.
Two years later, the WSM Barn Dance got its more famous name. At that time, WSM would broadcast programs from NBC, including the Music Appreciation Hour, hosted by the German-born conductor, Dr. Walter Damrosch. The program was an attempt to bring “serious” music to the masses (even providing textbooks and worksheets to school teachers who used it in their classes). This “serious” music included pieces in the Grand Opera genre of 19th-century opera. On December 10, 1927, as Damrosch’s show concluded, Hay came on the air and proclaimed, “Friends, the program which just came to a close was devoted to the classics. Doctor Damrosch told us that there is no place in the classics for realism. However, from here on out for the next three hours, we will present nothing but realism. It will be down to earth for the ‘earthy.’”
He then handed off the show to the “Harmonica Wizard,” DeFord Bailey, who played a foot-stomping version of “The Pan American Blues.” After Bailey was finished, Hay quipped, “For the past hour, we have been listening to music taken largely from Grand Opera. From now on, we will present the ‘Grand Ole Opry.’”
From that point on, the weekly concert was simply called The Grand Ole Opry. Within a few years, the Opry would move out of the studio to various venues housing live audiences, eventually finding a home at a former church built by a riverboat captain named Thomas Ryman. The Ryman Auditorium would house The Grand Ole Opry from 1943 to 1974, overseeing an explosion of country music that would include such legends as Hank Williams, the Carter family, Bill Monroe, Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, Johnny Cash, Hank Snow and others.
The Opry now resides at the Grand Ole Opry House, just a few miles east of Nashville, though it still visits the Ryman Auditorium on occasion. The Ryman itself continues to serve Music City as both a museum housing precious relics of days past and as a live venue, where artists to this day look up at the balcony that oversaw Elvis Presley, Hank Williams and so many others. The Grand Ole Opry is still broadcast live on Saturday nights on WSM-AM, 86 years after Judge Hay launched it. Tune in at 7 p.m. and you may just hear the legends of tomorrow play their first notes on “country’s most famous stage.”
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