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$1 a day premium based on 2024 average new policyholder data for accident and illness plans pets age 0 to 10. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. Nashville is known as Music City for good reason. Eight out of every 1,000 residents are involved in the music industry. which pumps $5.5 billion into the local economy each year.
But beyond the raw statistics, it's the birthplace of country music. And a big reason for that is WSM and the Grand Ol Opry. Here to share the story of country music's most famous stage, the radio station that created it, and the men and women who put Nashville on the map. is Craig Havickhurst. Take it away, Craig.
Music City. was named on the air. But it would not have been in a position to be named Music City USA or have the name stick without WSM and the Grand Ole Opry starting in 1925. From Nashville, Tennessee, here's your junior Grand Ole Opry. The origin of the station has to precede the origin of the show because there's no show without the station.
WSM was a flight of imagination by a guy named Edwin Craig. Edwin Craig was a Tennessee native. His dad was one of the founding managers and owners of a company called the National Life and Accident Insurance Company. The company was still kind of getting on its feet, but they were building a fancy new headquarters building in downtown Nashville. Edwin Craig was working for the company at the time, coming up through the ranks as a walking the beat insurance salesman to a regional sales manager.
His father's like, you got to come up through the ladder like anybody else. And by the time he's in his late 20s, he has a senior position in the office in Nashville, and he is now a radio enthusiast.
So, thinking something on the order of we need a website in 1925. Uh Edwin had to sell this idea to his dad and to the board of directors, which were all old guys who didn't understand where radio is going. They would say, well, why do we need this? And he would say, To spread our brand, to spread goodwill, to give back to the community, and then that will come back to us as business and political alliances and all kinds of things. Long story short, he makes the sale, and they said: if we're going to do this, National Life does everything the best.
They put a radio tower up on a big hill on near where Belmont University is today. They get a Steinway piano, they have the best microphones, they have the best broadcast equipment. They throw the equivalent, as I recall, the equivalent was about a million bucks. They didn't give him. A few bucks in the closet.
This is WSM in Nashville, and this is the Big South. And They go on the air in the evening of October 5th. 1925 with a full-scale multi-part show. They have live bands in two different hotels. They had bands on the roof of the new building on the sixth-floor roof.
The station is on the fifth floor, above four floors of insurance teletypers and secretaries and claims guys. I mean, it's just the operations of the insurance business are going on right below them. And they invite the mayor and the governor of Tennessee, and they have a shriners band, and they have all these festivities.
So they had this big festive opening and got the station off on the right foot, high profile. Uh So, once WSM goes on the air, they have this responsibility to have content all day. They were not 24 hours at the beginning. But There were no records to play.
So imagine the challenge of having live acts stepping to a microphone. Constantly from like six in the morning until 11 p.m. And they have to do this every day. Edmund Craig is in charge of this, and he has several people he worked with initially, but the big one that he has his eye on from the day that they go on the air. is a fellow from Chicago named George D.
Hay. He was a newspaper columnist, so a good writer. But he got into radio in Chicago with Sears and Roebuck's big powerful radio station. And he created a show, a variety show, called the National Barn Dance. Hello, hello, hello, everybody, everywhere, and a special hello to our boys in the service, wherever they may be.
Well, well, welcome to your old Alka Selzer National Barn Dance's 10th anniversary, folks. Yes, tonight's party marks the 10th full year since these old cowbells first rang out on the network to welcome all our good friends and neighbors to the old WLS hayloft here in Chicago. That had a sort of rural rustic country music or hillbilly theme, as they would call it in the day. What we would have, you know, came to be country music, but also comedians or lighthearted banter. And Kay, as the MC of the show, grew to the point where he had national magazine readers' polls saying that he was the most popular broadcaster in America.
Hey, except a few weeks after they go on the air. But It was not an easy fit, not a natural fit for the WSM as it started because the community heard a radio station playing popular music, classical music, string quartets. Formal solo recital piano, but also like lectures from Vanderbilt professors and politicians would come in and give addresses. They were trying to be a full-service radio station and by no means a country radio station. There wasn't even such a thing until way later in the 50s and 60s were there anything called quote-unquote country music radio stations.
This was an all-purpose public interest radio station. But that happens because on a Saturday night, he needs time to fill, and he had heard about this elderly fiddle player who was the uncle of a woman who was already on the air doing some pop vocals.
So they sort of almost on the fly invite Uncle Jimmy Thompson, 70-some years old. Absolute classic old man middle Tennessee fiddler. The tradition. Going back to the 19th century roots, this guy would have learned his craft around the Civil War, right? He's that old.
Hello, folks. This whole other gibbet town. I'm gonna play you a fine quadrille. I learned fourth day of August in 1866. That's a long time.
How old are you, Uncle Jimmy? 82. I've got grown-grandchildren and great big great-grandchildren. Running cars and stuff shit. And a playing the fiddle yet.
And I left her look at the pretty woman just as good as I ever did. I bet you do. Sure. Let's hear that quadrille. All right, here she comes.
Uh Mm-hmm. He comes on, he starts playing fiddle music one after the other, sawing away. And while some people in Nashville are probably like, What is that? Turning off the radio station, a lot of people heard their music, their sort of hometown music, their personal, what they grew up on for the first time. And so they started sending those cards and letters and telegrams to WSM.
And Hay and Edmund Craig realize this is a thing. Let's get him back.
So they have him back, and then they begin to flesh out their lineup. And they bring in musicians from the region who were noted for their prowess in traditional old-time music. One of them is Uncle Dave Macon, who at the time was pushing 60 years old, but he was a banjo player and a songster whose day job was driving a moving wagon. He was a mule driver. But he's a known musician, so he's on the air.
And the public starts to go into the studio and watch it play out live on Saturday nights. They start to crowd around the studio, they start to fill the the stairwells, and then they bring in some other guys, a guy named Humphrey Bate, who was actually a physician by David. He was a traditional musician, a picker, you know. Yeah. Oh, how many biscuits can you eat?
Oh, how many biscuits can you eat? Oh, how many biscuits can you eat? Four bullets, you didn't have And Hayes, like, well, let's play the part. Let's have Humphrey Bate, who's a surgeon, dress up in overalls and a floppy hat and look like a hillbilly, and his guys should be like that too. And he starts giving the bands names like the fruit jar drinkers.
And they play up the artifice of it a little bit, even though the music was authentic. But they got this thing going as the Grand Ole Opry. And the rest is history. And you've been listening to Craig Havighurst, and he's a musician, but also a professional writer, covering the music business, the art, the commerce, the tech, all of it in Nashville for over 25 years. when we come back.
More of Craig Havighurst's storytelling, more about the origins of the Grand Old Opry. Here. on our American stories. 10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points. You are the fittest of the fit.
Only one of you will leave here with an IFIT contract for $250,000. This is where mindset comes in.
Someone will be eliminated. Pressure is coming down. This Watching a prime video starting January 8th. Then the space hamster flew his hot air balloon all the way to the bottom of the ocean. Where did that story come from?
Book? Dream? Nope, it came from a conversation. Meet Miko Mini Plus, the AI companion that co-creates personalized story adventures with your child in real time. What color was the hamster's cape?
And what did he pack for lunch? Unlock your child's imagination. Discover Miko Mini Plus and the magic of AI exclusively at Costco. Come for the Black Friday seasonal savings. Stay for the award-winning reporting.
For a limited time, access to the Washington Post is just 99 cents. That's unlimited access to all of the posts for only 99 cents every four weeks. That's a great deal for the first year. After that, it'll cost $12 every four weeks. You can cancel any time.
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Every generation, every sacrifice, our nation's service members have stood up for our freedom, our families, and our future.
Now it's our turn to stand up for them. This year, you can honor their service in a deeply personal way by sponsoring a $17 Veterans Wreath. Each wreath is more than a symbol. It's a heartfelt tribute to the heroes who served and to the families who carry their legacy. Visit WreathsAcrossAmerica.org to sponsor a wreath today.
This isn't just a wreath. It's a personal gift to an American hero. And we return to our American stories and the story of the Grand Ole Opry. When we last left off, Craig Havakhurst was telling the tale of WSM's early days, a radio station that launched country music's most famous stage, explaining how a station built to serve the general public, airing everything from Vanderbilt lectures to highbrow classical music, somehow became the beating heart of foot-stomping folk. That unexpected shift didn't thrill everyone.
After all, Nashville wasn't yet music city. It was the Athens of the South, proud of its universities, its culture, and its refinement. How did the transformation take root? Let's return to the story here again. This is Craig Havinghurst.
From the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, the country music capital of the world, it's your grand old Opry starring the Texas troubadour Ernest Tubbs. Yeah. That yellow rose in Texas. That I'm gonna see Nashville's upper crust and society, the establishment, if you will, that sort of thought of Nashville as the Athens of the South, the nickname that the city had given itself, as a place of culture, higher education with Vanderbilt and many other colleges and universities. I was told that there had been sort of a rebellion against the early Grand Ole Opry on their radio station.
And because Edwin Craig and the Craig family are part of the establishment in Nashville, the family had clearly heard from some of their peers, some of their other rich folk friends at the country club, that it was kind of awkward to hear this hillbilly music on the otherwise wonderful and marvelous WSM. But it turned out that this revolution was much smaller than it had been made out to be. It was a few letters to the editor, a few sly remarks. But indeed, at one point, one of the two newspapers, I think the banner, did a kind of informal poll and said, you know, is the Opry something that you all, the people, want to hear? And should WSM keep it?
And the overwhelming, like 99% of the letters that came in and the responses were, yes, we love this show.
So there was never a threat to the Grand Ole Opry for real. But that dynamic played out over the years. Even into the 50s and 60s and 70s, as the country music business grew, as the first seeds were planted on Music Row, the studios, the beginnings of the record industry, the publishing industry, and it becomes something that Nashville is doing and doing well and getting a national reputation for. There was still the element of uppercross Nashville that thought, well, this is very awkward and strange for us. This is not part of our culture.
This is sort of an interloper kind of a thing to the point where songwriters couldn't get bank loans in the 60s. You know, well, that's not a real job kind of attitude. And interestingly enough, Minnie Pearl, the great and famous Minnie Pearl, the greatest comedian of the Grand Ole Opry's history. Was a blue blood herself. We're kind of.
She'd come up in some money, and then as the family lost some money in the Depression, but she knew culture. And so she's a big famous star.
So she lives in Belmead. She knows these people, and she became like a go-between. For whenever the hillbilly roughneck musician crowd needed a kind of a translator for the establishment, she was there, whether it was fundraisers or parties or country club events with a country band. She was there to mollify and to make it all feel like part of Tennessee culture, part of real America. She had a great role in that.
But there was always that tension. It went back to the origins right around the same time that the Grand Loppery got its name, which I recall being 1927, 27-ish. The story there is well told. It's well known, but they would get a feed from the network from New York and a music appreciation hour with a guy named Walter Damrosch, who would give lectures about symphonic music. For the first time in my life, I have heard My office truck?
Playing. That's an overture. I've done Giovanni's, my Mozart. Then the redemption by Saint La France and ending with the written round. They had a series of shows on one night that featured operatic singing.
And George Hay maybe had started to germinate an idea about this little play on words, but where maybe just totally spontaneously said, You've been listening, folks, as we come back to the Nashville studio and they're live with DeFord Bailey waiting to play his opening theme song. He says, Folks, we've been listening to themes from Grand Opera.
Now we're gonna keep it down to earth and listen to the grand old Opry. Just a little hillbilly twist on the word, and it stuck. People like it. But the Op Reed could not stay in WSM's studio forever. The fans began to show up before they even had a way to crowd control.
They were coming into the studio and, oh, sure, sit there and crowding in. And they just adapted over the weeks and months and years. But eventually it became too much, and they did go looking for a home, a theater home, a proper home to broadcast from. They first came to the Hillsborough Theater, which is now the Belcourt Theater, an art movie house in Nashville. But it was there at the time, and they moved to the Hillsborough Theater for a few years.
They moved into a timber tabernacle building that was quite big in East Nashville. That is where they began to actually sell tickets for the first time and started to charge for admission and have some souvenirs and make more of a proper show out of it. Then they went from there to all the way to the top to the War Memorial Auditorium, which you can still go see concerts in today. It was a Tennessee-built, state-owned theater, a very beautiful place. They were there into the beginnings of World War II.
And the moment that they went on the air of the NBC network and the Opry got its segment. Nationwide on NBC in the late 30s with Roy Acuff was a huge move for them. They'd been on the NBC network since the late 20s, but putting the Opry on nationwide was a big deal. And that happened at War Memorial, but also the first couple years of World War II, the soldiers came through and were kind of like overdoing it. They were too rowdy.
They were putting their feet on the backs of the thing. They were leaving their gum on the seats, and it was punishing.
So the state actually said, guys, we've loved having you, but it's time to move on and find something else. And they were in a little bit of a desperate situation. And luckily, down the block almost was the Ryman Auditorium, which had had its own history by then. You know, started in the 1890s and had an incredible run as one of the great theaters of the South with all kinds of variety of entertainment, but it had kind of crested and it was looking for, it needed something to shake up the business model there. They went to the promoter there, the great famous Lula Knaff, a woman who made Music business history in Nashville before most other women were able to.
And they came up with a deal to be there on Saturday nights and eventually Friday and Saturday nights, and then they expanded the calendar. But it became the home of the Grand L'Appry in 1943, middle of World War II. and it would last there until 1974. When the rhyming simply got out of date, no air conditioning kind of falling apart. But those were what has been called the golden era of the Grand Old Opera.
An extraordinary stretch of time: the late 40s, the 50s, the 60s. Imagine what happened in country music. I mean, I'm getting, literally, got chills just thinking of it. Come and listen to my story if you will I'm going to tell About a gang of fellers from down at Nashville First I'll start with old Red Foley doing the chattinoonga shoe We can't farkin' Hank Williams with them good old hussy clues It's time for OE Ago to go to Memphis on his train With Minnie Pearl and Rod Frasville and Lazy Jim Dane. Turn on all your radios, I know that you will wait.
Hear little Jimmy Dickens sang, take an old quotator and wave. This is the era of Hank Williams, of the birth of bluegrass music with Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, Lester Flatt. It's Patsy Klein, it's George Jones, it's Johnny Cash, and even the Johnny Cash television show taped there in the early 70s. Just The reason we call it the mother church of country music, the reason it was renovated and rehabbed into a theater that every artist in the world wants to play, it is just an extraordinary place. They almost tore it down in the 70s, but They moved to the Ryman until it simply was not suitable for the place anymore, and they moved it to a new, grand old Opry house where it is their main headquarters today.
But in the winter months, the Opry for years has continued to come back to the Ryman and do the Ryman on Saturday night shows, some Thursday night shows, and be part of the Ryman so people can still see the Opry at the Ryman Auditorium. That's the brain. Ernest Tubbs number two wrongs won't make a right at the Grand Old Opry every Saturday night. Yeah. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by Monty Montgomery and Reagan Habib.
and a special thanks to Craig Havighurst. He's authored a book That everyone should get. It's called Musicality for Modern Humans. Buy it wherever you buy your books. And let's face it, There was a business interest that helped start WSM, a business interest that, well, wanted to monetize this new music.
And from that. We get the Ryman, and from that, we get those three decades that created the stars that forged. Country music, none of it could have been done without Edwin Craig and so many other innovators and artists along the way. The story of the Grand Ole Loppery. Here on Our American Stories.
10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points. You are the fittest of the fit. Only one of you. Will leave here with an IFIT contract for $250,000. This is when mindset comes in.
Someone will be eliminated. Pressure is coming down. This. It's Trainer Games. Watch it on Prime Video starting January 8th.
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Only at Costco. Come for the Black Friday seasonal savings. Stay for the award winning reporting. For a limited time, access to the Washington Post is just ninety nine cents. That's unlimited access to all of the posts for only ninety nine cents every four weeks.
That's a great deal for the first year. After that, it'll cost $12 every four weeks. You can cancel any time. But don't wait, this Black Friday seasonal offer won't be here for long. Go to Washington Post dot com slash iHeart and grab this deal before it's gone.
That's Washington Post dot com slash iHeart. Every generation, every sacrifice, our nation's service members have stood up for our freedom, our families, and our future.
Now it's our turn to stand up for them. This year, you can honor their service in a deeply personal way by sponsoring a $17 Veterans Wreath. Each wreath is more than a symbol. It's a heartfelt tribute to the heroes who served and to the families who carry their legacy. Visit WreathsAcrossAmerica.org to sponsor a wreath today.
This isn't just a wreath. It's a personal gift to an American hero. Ah. Greetings for my bath, festive friends. The holidays are overwhelming, but I'm tackling this season with PayPal and making the most of my money.
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