Grand Ole Opry

Grand Ole Opry

The Grand Ole Opry is a weekly Saturday night country music radio program broadcast live on WSM radio in Nashville, Tennessee, and televised on Great American Country network. It is the oldest continuous radio program in the United States, having been broadcast on WSM since October 18, 1925. The origin of the Opry is a well-known: On November 28, 1925, young George Hay sits an old white-bearded man before one of the station’s newfangled carbon mikes. He lets him play a few fiddle tunes. The switchboard lights up and telegrams pour in. The old man, Uncle Jimmy Thompson, plays an hour, and across the country listeners scramble for earphones to their old crystal radio sets. Hay gets an idea: why not have a regular weekly show of this sort of stuff? Soon he is besieged by pickers and fiddlers of every variety: “We soon had a good-natured riot on our hands,” he recalled. The show was off and running.

The Grand Ole Opry started out as the WSM Barn Dance in the new fifth floor radio station studio of the National Life & Accident Insurance Company in downtown Nashville on October 18, 1925, a 60-minute show at 10 p.m. The featured performer on the first two shows - before the name "Barn Dance" eventually stuck - was "Dr. Humphrey Bate and his string quartet of old-time musicians." On its third broadcast, WSM added future star Uncle Dave Macon with Sid Harkreader to the bill in a policeman's benefit at the Ryman Auditorium. On November 5, WSM hired long-time announcer and program director George D. Hay, known on the air as "The Solemn Old Judge," He was only 30 at the time and was not a judge, but was an enterprising pioneer who launched the Barn Dance as a spin-off of his National Barn Dance program at WLS Radio in Chicago. The first appearance of Uncle Jimmy Thompson, the 77 years old fiddler and “first performer” did not take place until November 28, 1925.

Some of the bands regularly featured on the show during its early days included the Possum Hunters (with Dr. Humphrey Bate), the Fruit Jar Drinkers, the Crook Brothers and the Gully Jumpers. They arrived in this order. However, Judge Hay liked the Fruit Jar Drinkers and asked them to appear last on each show because he wanted to always close each segment with "red hot fiddle playing." They were the second band accepted on the "Barn Dance." And, when the Opry began having square dancers on the show, the Fruit Jar Drinkers always played for them.

In 1926, Uncle Dave Macon, a Tennessee banjo player who had recorded several songs and toured the vaudeville circuit, became its first real star.

 The name Grand Ole Opry came about in December, 1927. The Barn Dance followed NBC Radio Network's Music Appreciation Hour, which consisted of classical music and selections from grand opera. Their final piece that night featured a musical interpretation of an onrushing railroad locomotive. In response to this Judge Hay quipped, "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 introduced the man he dubbed the Harmonica Wizard — DeFord Bailey who played his classic train song "The Pan American Blues". After Bailey's performance Hay commented, "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.'" The name stuck and has been used for the program since then.

The home of the Opry’s audiences to the live show increased, National Life & Accident Insurance's radio venue became too small to accommodate the hordes of fans. They built a larger studio, but it was still not large enough. The Opry then moved into then-suburban Hillsboro Theatre (now the Belcourt), then to the Dixie Tabernacle in East Nashville and then to the War Memorial Auditorium, a downtown venue adjacent to the State Capitol. A twenty-five cent admission began to be charged, in part an effort to curb the large crowds, but to no avail. In 1943, the Opry moved to the Ryman Auditorium.

On October 2, 1954, a teenage Elvis Presley made his first (and only) performance there. Although the public reacted politely to his revolutionary brand of rockabilly music, after the show he was told by one of the organizers (Opry manager Jim Denny) that he ought to return to Memphis to resume his truck-driving career, prompting him to swear never to return. Years later, Garth Brooks commented in a television interview that one of the greatest thrills of playing the Opry was that he got to play on the same stage Elvis had.

The Ryman was home to the Opry until 1974, when the show moved to the 4,400-seat Grand Ole Opry House, located several miles to the east of downtown Nashville on a former farm in the Pennington Bend of the Cumberland River. An adjacent theme park, called Opryland USA, preceded the new Opry House by two years. Due to sagging attendance, the park was shuttered and demolished after the 1997 season by the Opry's current owner, Gaylord Entertainment Company. The theme park was replaced by the Opry Mills Mall. An adjacent hotel, the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, is the largest non-gambling hotel in North America and is the site of hundreds of conventions annually.

Another controversy brewed in 2001 because of MTV. In 1997, CBS signed a five-year contract with the Opry to be the television broadcast home of the event, to air on The Nashville Network, as part of its acquisition of TNN and CMT from Gaylord Entertainment (which owns the Opry). The contract specifically carried a five-year requirement that TNN would be the broadcast home from October 1, 1997 until September 30, 2002. Gaylord eventually moved the Opry to a rival, GAC, in 2003. GAC continues to run one hour of the 2 1/2-hour Saturday night Opry program at 8 p.m. ET, concentrating on artists more popular with the network's younger viewers. Still, the Opry continues, with hundreds of thousands of fans traveling from around the world to Nashville to see the music and comedy on the Opry in person.