A century of the Grand Ole Opry

April 14-20, 2025

By Jay Edwards

It’s a pretty easy five-hour drive from Little Rock to Nashville, if you don’t have too many of those rude 18-wheelers slowing you down in the left lane. But either way, it’s a trip worth taking sometime this year, to enjoy the stars at the Grand Ole Opry, which is celebrating its centennial year.

It all began for the iconic venue in the fall of 1925 when executives of the National Life & Accident Insurance Company in downtown Nashville started a show for country musicians. The credit for the idea originated with Edwin Wilson Craig, whose father was the owner, C.A. Craig. The elder Craig had purchased the company in 1901, on the steps of the Davidson County Courthouse, for $17,250. His son believed that a company radio station would be good for business and a way to advertise, and WSM (From the company’s motto, We Shield Millions) was born.

The feature program was the WSM Barn Dance, which followed an hour of classical music.   The Barn Dance eventually became the Grand Ole Opry after host George Hay said into his microphone, “For the past hour, we have been listening to music largely from Grand Opera, but from now on, we will present the Grand Ole Opry.” 

Hay had previously been a reporter for the Commercial Appeal in Memphis and while on an assignment at Mammoth Spring, Arkansas in 1919, he attended a hoedown where he watched and listened as three musicians played the fiddle, banjo and guitar all night. He never forgot the experience and a seed was planted.

One of the early bands to play on the Opry radio hour was “Dr. Humphrey Bate & His Possum Hunters.”  Bate was from Castallian Springs, Tennessee and as a boy would make a little change by playing his harmonica on the steamboats on the Cumberland River. While ambitious and persistent enough to graduate from Vanderbilt Med School and later serve as a surgeon in the Spanish-American War, Dr. Bate never lost his love for music and started his string band around the turn of the century.

Another pioneer entertainer on WSM was Deford Bailey, who is considered to be the first African American country music entertainer. Born in Smith County, Tennessee at the end of 1899, Bailey grew up around the sounds of banjos and harmonicas, or what he liked to call, “black hillbilly music.” He was a small and frail boy, mainly from the effects of polio contracted when he was three, so he began using most hours in his days becoming proficient with a harmonica and imitating sounds around his rural home, like birds and trains. He moved to Nashville when he was 18 and was working as an elevator operator at the National Life & Accident building when Dr. Bate offered him the chance to audition for the Opry, where he soon became a regular. He toured around the south with different Opry acts like Bill Monroe, Roy Acuff and Uncle Dave Macon, and had to find his own places to sleep because he wasn’t allowed in hotels. He was fired by the Opry in 1941 over a licensing contract and spent the rest of his life operating a shoeshine stand and renting out rooms in his home to make a living.

Acuff later said about Bailey, “I was an unknown when I began touring with DeFord. He could draw a crowd, not me. He helped me get started.”

In 1934 the Opry had outgrown its space at National Life & Accident and moved into what was then the Hillsboro Theatre. Two years later they took up residence at the Dixie Tabernacle in east Nashville. Another move took them to War Memorial Auditorium, where they began charging a quarter admission to try and quell the crowds. Four years later, because those crowds were rowdy at times and had done a lot of damage to the upholstered seats, the Opry was asked to move on. They did and found the building that would last for 30 years, the Ryman Auditorium.

The iconic landmark at 116 Rep. John Lewis Way North had opened in 1892 as the Union Gospel Tabernacle, the idea of local entrepreneur Thomas Ryman, who wanted the structure for revivalist Samuel Porter Jones, who railed against the evils of alcohol and idleness and whose catchphrase was, “Quit your meanness.” Ryman, who owned saloons and riverboats, attended a revival by Jones in 1885, not because he was religious, but rather to jeer at Jones and expose him as a fraud. But instead of causing the ruckus he intended, Ryman left the revival a changed man and soon after became a devout Christian. 

The tabernacle took seven years to complete, at a cost of $100,000 (about $3.5 million today).

While its main events would be for spiritual events, the structure was rented out to others so that it could pay off its debts. In 1904, a widow named Lula C. Naff became the chief booking agent for the Ryman, whose name had been changed that same year after the death of its visionary. Naff booked speaking engagements, concerts and even boxing matches and in 1920 she officially became the Ryman’s office manager, and would promote so well that famous entertainers wanted to perform there. Stars like Harry Houdini, W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin and Will Rogers, as well as Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, all appeared. The first sell out event, in 1913, was a lecture by Anne Sullivan and her student Helen Keller.

Naff, always the saleslady, believed the Ryman would be the perfect venue for the Opry. Besides being in the center of town, she reminded everyone it had wooden pews, so there wouldn’t be any upholstery damage to the seats like at War Memorial.  

The first broadcast from the Ryman was June 5, 1943, and it originated there every week for nearly 31 years. Every show sold out, and hundreds of fans were often turned away. One hour of the Opry was broadcast nationally each week by NBC Radio from 1939 to1956. On October 2, 1954, a 19-year old Elvis Presley took the stage for his one and only performance at the Opry. The crowd was polite but after the show the program manager told Sam Phillips that the young man’s style was not really for them.

The future “King of Rock and Roll” was not the only entertainer the Opry was less than thrilled with. One night in 1965 an intoxicated Johnny Cash smashed out all the lights on the front of the stage during his performance. “I don’t know how bad they wanted me in the first place, but the nights I broke all the lights on the stage with the microphone stand, they said they couldn’t use me anymore,” Cash said. “So I left and used that as an excuse to really get wild and wound up in the hospital with my third time I broke my nose.” Cash’s membership was eventually reinstated. 

Despite country hits like “She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye,” and “What Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me),” Jerry Lee Lewis never felt a whole lotta lovin’ from Nashville. When asked to perform at the Opry on Jan. 20, 1973, the Killer decided to break the two house rules they had laid down: no cursing or rock and roll. Lewis never became an Opry member and was banned from performing there after that ’73 appearance, though he did end up returning for a show in the early 1980s.

On September 14, 1946, Hank Williams auditioned for the Opry at the recommendation of Ernest Tubb but he was turned down. Less than three years later he was a star and the Opry invited him and his band, The Drifting Cowboys, to come perform. They received six encores. On May 21, 1951, Williams was admitted to North Louisiana Sanitarium in Shreveport for treatment of alcoholism and his back problem, and was released on May 24. In November of the same year, he fell trying to leap across a gully on a squirrel hunting trip with his fiddler Jerry Rivers, in Franklin, Tennessee. The fall aggravated his congenital spinal condition, and on December 13, 1951, he underwent a spinal fusion at Vanderbilt University Hospital. He was discharged against medical advice on Christmas Eve, wearing a back brace and consuming more painkillers, to the detriment of his already compromised health. On August 11, 1952, Williams was dismissed from the Opry for habitual drunkenness and missing shows. He died on New Year’s Day, 1953, at the age of 29. In 2003, his grandson Hank Williams III started a campaign to have his grandfather reinstated into the Grand Ole Opry.

 When the Opry moved to the Ryman in 1943, the tabernacle had already been around over a half century and was showing its age. In the early 70’s support began to gather steam for a newer and more modern venue. One of the strongest proponents for a change was Roy Acuff, who told the Washington Post in 1974, “Most of my memories of the Ryman Auditorium are of misery, sweating out here on this stage, the audience suffering too... We’ve been shackled all of my career.” Acuff had even purchased a building near the Ryman so he could have a bigger dressing room. Interestingly, today in the preserved Ryman, there is a life-sized statue of Acuff (alongside one of Sarah Cannon as Minnie Pearl) in the lobby.

National Life & Accident purchased farmland nine miles east of downtown and a new Opry House with 4,000 seats opened on March 16, 1974, a day after the last show of the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman was held. President Nixon attended the grand opening and played a couple of songs on the piano. A six-foot circle of oak was cut from the corner of the Ryman’s stage and inlaid into center stage at the new venue. Artists on stage usually stood on the circle as they performed, and most modern performers still follow this tradition.

“That circle is the most magical thing when you’re a performer,” says Brad Paisley, “to stand there and get to sing on those same boards that probably still contain dust from Hank Williams’ boots.” 

For information on shows upcoming during this centennial year visit www.opry.com

Sources www.opry.com, Ryman Auditorium, Taste of Country, Wikimedia