by Colin Escott
One of the very few surviving photos of the classic lineup of the Blue Grass Boys. Onstage at the Opry for Purina, from left: Lonzo Sullivan of Lonzo and Oscar clowning to the side; Chubby Wise, Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, and Earl Scruggs.
BILL MONROE:
I dress the way a lot of Kentuckians used to dress years ago. I think it was a help to the music to dress as we did. I never would have dressed up like the other bands. I wanted to let people know that my music was up where I wanted it. It wasn’t no low, down-to-earth music. I want people to listen to it. I want people to know I’m playing it for them, right from my heart to theirs.
In 1945, Bill Monroe hired Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, and bluegrass music began to take shape on the Opry stage.
Bill Monroe: “The Opry goes out over WSM, and those are my initials, William Smith Monroe.”
Ricky Skaggs: “I think, on some level, Bill really believed that the station needed a powerful good name, and they named it after him.”
BILL MONROE:
Back in the early days, Stringbean was the first banjo picker with me. I’d heard the banjo back in Kentucky, and I wanted it in with the fiddle and the rest of the,instruments. Stringbean give us a touch of the banjo, but he quit. He went into”the service. When I heard Earl, I knew the banjo picking would fit my music. He could take lead breaks like the fiddle. Without bluegrass, the banjo never would have amounted to anything. It was on its way out. Fiddlers would have been mighty scarce without bluegrass, too
RICKY SKAGGS, Opry star:
He was looking for a sound he could call his own, and with the addition of Flatt and Scruggs, his music had the drive that he’d been looking for. It had taken a while, but he’d found his sound. It was old-time music on steroids. It was old, but it was cutting edge. It would please the old-timers, but it appealed to a younger generation, too. The gospel quartet numbers really solidified their following. They may not have lived the life they were singing about, but, man, could they sing about it.
JAKE LAMBERT, bluegrass musician:
Monroe’s band became one of the hottest groups working the Opry. Bill purchased a stretch automobile and they were on the road almost seven days a week. When they finished a Friday night show they would head for Nashville and the Opry. Most of the time they would leave as soon as the Opry was over and travel the rest of the night to do a Sunday matinee—maybe four hundred miles away. Flatt said that there were many times [his wife] Gladys would bring his clothes to the Opry and he would never go home. For both Lester and Earl, the road seemed to be endless. The personnel of the Blue Grass Boys in 1946 and’47 was Monroe, Flatt, Scruggs, Chubby Wise, and Howard Watts. This band would go down in bluegrass history as being probably the best ever assembled.
After just two years, Flatt and Scruggs became disenchanted.
JAKE LAMBERT:
Flatt and Scruggs, as well as the rest of the boys, were making about sixty dollars a week, and that wasn’t bad money, except for the long hours. Earl was the only one in the group with a high school education, and he took care of the money. He told me that on many Saturdays, when the Blue Grass Boys rolled into Nashville for the Grand Ole Opry, he would be carrying between five to seven thousand dollars. So both Flatt and Scruggs could see where the money was. They knew it would never be as sidemen.
In 1948, Flatt and Scruggs left to form their own band, but Bill Monroe recruited literally hundreds more Blue Grass Boys. Many, like Flatt and Scruggs, would eventually lead their own bands, and some would attempt to take bluegrass in new directions, but Bill Monroe’s vision of his music was unbending, and he would always remain caustic and dismissive of those who deviated from it.
BILL ANDERSON, Opry star:
The thing about Bill Monroe and his music is that he was very creative and flexible to a point, and then he became very rigid. I watched him one time in the dressing room. He was working on a new song, an instrumental. The Blue Grass Boys were feeling their way through it, improvising and changing it, but once they got it to where he liked it, he didn’t want it changed at all. He let his guys be flexible until they got it to where he wanted it, then he set it in concrete.
Minnie Pearl: November 1940
Opry stars had told jokes... plenty of them, but there had been few comedians on the show until Sarah Ophelia Colley brought her alter ego, Minnie Pearl, to the Opry stage. Born into a prosperous middle-class family, Sarah Colley aspired to be a professional actor until she developed her Minnie Pearl character on the rural theater circuit. In the fall of 1940, she appeared as Minnie Pearl at a bankers’ convention in her hometown, Centerville, Tennessee.
MINNIE PEARL:
I got a call from Harry Stone. He said that Bob Turner, a Nashville banker who was a friend of my father’s, had seen me do a country girl character at a convention. “He says, you ought to be on the Opry. Would you like to audition for us?” I won’t pretend that I always wanted to be on the Opry. I’d never thought about it one way or another, except I didn’t particularly like the music. I auditioned in my street clothes. I still wanted to be Ophelia Colley, dramatic actress, doing a comedy part. I wasn’t yet ready to be Minnie Pearl. The first night I was so scared. Judge Hay gave me the very best advice any performer can get. “Just love them, honey, and they’ll love you right back.”
Minnie Pearl became the small-town gossip and chatterbox that most of her listeners knew only too well. Her routine included regular updates on her brother, her Uncle Nabob, and her boyfriend Hezzy. Minnie’s imagi- nary family became p1ended family for many listeners
left: Sarah Ophelia Colley aspired to be Ophelia Colley on Broadway, not Minnie Pearl on the Grand Ole Opry.
right: “How-dee!”
MINNIE PEARL
Minnie started out as a gentle, very authentic girl from the mountains, but she’s more brassy than when she started. I created the character in 1938. I had a job producing amateur plays around the Southeast, and I began to collect country stories and I created this character. I thought “Minnie” and “Pearl” were the two nicest country names I could think of. I’m from Centerville, Tennessee, and my father had a lumber business. There was a railroad that had a loading switch three miles from Centerville. It was called Grinder’s Switch because the largest family that lived there were the Grinders. When WSM let me come on the Opry, they said, “We think you ought to have a locale,” so I picked Grinder’s Switch because I didn’t think anybody would be offended because so few people lived there. I’ve peopled it with my own people. I’m the only person who can see and hear the sound of the people who live there whom I’ve created. Minnie’s a mountain girl and she has never worried about her education, and she has never been intimidated by educated people. I just love to put on her white cotton stockings and one-strap Mary Jane shoes.
When I first brought Minnie Pearl to the public on the radio, I used a very different type of salutation. It was “How-dee, I’m just so proud to be here,” but the decibels were different.
Minnie Pearl held her own with the predominantly male Opry cast.
From 1948 until 1958, Minnie Pearl had a successful comedy partnership on the Opry with Rod Brasfield. They referred to their style of comedy as “double comedy” because there was no straight man.
PEE WEE KING:
Early on, she was working for Roy Acuff [on the road], and she hadn’t perfected her introduction. She said, “How-dee. I’m just so proud I could come.” And Acuff told her she’d have to change the last bit.
MINNIE PEARL:
Now I scream it out loud. When I went on the Prince Albert network portion of the Opry in 1942, the agency in New York suggested that I scream it as a promotional stunt. The announcer said, “When Minnie Pearl says ‘How-dee,’ say ‘How-dee’ right back.” Over the years, I got louder and louder, and the audience got louder and louder.
MINNIE PEARL and ROD BRASFIELD routine:
MINNIE: How-dee! I’m jes so proud t’be here!
Hezzy was over to see me on
Wednesday and he brought a s’prize! (When Hezzy brings anything, it’s a s’prize!) He brought over a box of candy and a box of nuts. He says to me, “I know you don’t care about sweets, so I brung the candy over to your mammy, and nuts to you!”
Then me and Hezzy went in the front room and set down on the double settee. Oh, it was so romantic! He was a-settin’ there and I looked into his eyes... and he looked into my eyes... and then he says...
ROD: Hi-dy, Minnie!
MINNIE: Well, Rod Brasfield! You come right in between me and Hezzy!
ROD: I did, Minnie? You mean I was caught in the big squeeze?
MINNIE: Yes, I was jes’ about to tell about Hezzy kissin’ me...The Star System
ROD: Why, Minnie Pearl! You mean to say you’re one of them gals that kiss and tell? MINNIE: Why sure, Rod, what’s wrong with that?
ROD: I thought it was only the fellers that kiss and tell.
MINNIE: Uh-uh, Rod... it’s the fellers that kiss and exaggerate! But ain’t it funny, Rod.... I’member the time when if my pappy caught a feller kissin’ me he’d almost shake the feller’s teeth out. ROD: And what does he do now, Minnie?
MINNIE: Almost shakes his hand off!
ROD: I know just what you mean, Minnie. When I started to call on my gal, Suzie, Her poppy used to stand a shotgun in the corner with a lily in both barrels. MINNIE: And he don’t do that no more, Rod?
ROD: Nope... He puts a travelin’ bag in the corner with two tickets to Niagara Falls!
(From the Prince Albert Grand Ole Opry, February 13, 1954)
Ernest Tubb: January 1943
Ernest Tubb, like Bill Monroe and Roy Acuff, pioneered a new style of music. Tubb’s gritty honky-tonk music had its origins in Texas and Okla-homa barrooms in the years after the repeal of Prohibition. He was the first to bring beer-joint music to the Opry stage, and his addition to the cast proved that the show was looking beyond its traditional base in the Southeast. Tubb had already recorded his signature tune, “Walkin’ the Floor Over You,” and was on the point of taking his career to the np1 level when he appeared on a 1943 New Year’s Day show in Gadsden, Al-abama, with Pee Wee King. J. L. Frank proposed to Ernest that he come to Nashville to join the Opry, and Tubb readily agreed.
ED LINN, journalist, in Saga magazine:
Ernest Tubb began singing in the oil-field honky-tonks of Texas in the late 1930s. It was a poor Saturday night that didn’t produce a couple of interesting brawls. Tubb had to meet the competition as best he could. “The harder they fought,” he says, “the louder we played.” One night, a friend took a five-minute break and came back to find a bullet-ridden body sprawled across the wreckage of his guitar. It was disconcerting. Good guitars were hard to come by in those days.
ERNEST TUBB:
I don’t read music and I’d fight the man who tried to teach me. I don’t care whether I hit the right note or not. I’m not looking for perfection. Thousands of singers have tried that. I’m looking for individuality. I sing the way I feel like singing at the moment. I never sang for the dollar. I sing because I want to sing.
Ernest Tubb.
PEE WEE KING:
Ernest knew he was taking a big chance when he quit his job at the radio station in San Antonio and gave up the good-paying gigs he played at the honky-tonks around there. But he hedged a bet. He left his wife and children behind and told them he would try out Nashville first. It didn’t take long for Ernest to become popular. Within a few weeks he was getting bushels of mail. He had a certain spark that set the Opry on fire every time he played.
Wartime crowds gather on Nashville’s Broadway to hear Ernest Tubb and Whitey Ford—the “Duke of Paducah” (with his arm in the air). Eddy Arnold awaits his turn, sitting to the right.
JUSTIN TUBB, Opry star and Ernest’s son:
To me, that’s when he became a star, to be that far away, and pick him up on the radio. Being made a member of the Grand Ole Opry was the most important thing in my dad’s life. It was his badge of having made it. This was the tops in radio when people would listen to radio like they watch TV now. It was very important to him to be back here every Saturday night for the Opry. He traveled more than anyone on the show, except maybe Little Jimmy Dickens, but he bent over backwards to be in for the show.
WILLIE NELSON:
The first songs I ever learned were out of Ernest Tubb songbooks. I was as big an Ernest Tubb fan as people ever were Elvis fans or Beatles fans. I grew up with him back in the 1940s.
The Ernest Tubb Midnite Jamboree, 1940s.
HAL SMITH, Texas Troubadour:
I remember women keeling over in Louisville when he sang there. They had to take them away on stretchers. He was as big as Sinatra, only with a different, country audience.
Distressed when fans told him they couldn’t find his records, Tubb opened the Ernest Tubb Record Shop on Commerce Street, Nashville, in May 1947. Although it was within walking distance of the Opry, more than seventy percent of the store’s business was mail order. Tubb bought air-time on WSM after the Opry finished, and his Midnite Jamboree soon became a showcase for younger talent.
From the earliest days, Opry shows were made up of regular performers along with guest artists, some of whom just happened to be in Nashville on a Saturday night. Over the years, the concept of membership evolved, and by the 1940s it was fairly formalized. In exchange for a commitment to perform regularly on Saturday nights at the Opry, members could use the Opry name to advertise their road shows during the week. Though many of the earliest country stars—the original Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Charlie Poole, Jimmie Davis, Gene Autry—did not appear on the Grand Ole Opry, the addition of Pee Wee King, Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, Minnie Pearl, and Ernest Tubb made Opry membership the topmost rung of the country music business.
Grand Ole Opry program, December 18, 1943.
GRANDOLEOPRY
NEW MEMBERS: 1940s
DAVID “STRINGBEAN” AKEMAN
EDDY ARNOLD
THE BAILES BROTHERS
ROD BRASFIELD
LEW CHILDRE
COWBOY COPAS
THE CACKLE SISTERS
JOHN DANIEL QUARTET
LITTLE JIMMY DICKENS
ANNIE LOU AND DANNY DILL
MILTON ESTES AND HIS MUSICAL MILLERS
RED FOLEY
THE DUKE OF PADUCAH (WHITEY FORD)
WALLY FOWLER AND THE OAK RIDGE QUARTET
PAUL HOWARD AND THE ARKANSAS COTTON PICKERS
JOHNNIE AND JACK
GRANDPA JONES
THE JORDANAIRES
BRADLEY KINCAID
LONZO AND OSCAR
CLYDE MOODY
GEORGE MORGAN
MINNIE PEARL
THE POE SISTERS
OLD HICKORY SINGERS
ERNEST TUBB
CURLEY WILLIAMS AND HIS GEORGIA PEACH PICKERS
HANK WILLIAMS
THE WILLIS BROTHERS
5
COAST TO COAST
From the time WSM station manager Harry Stone sold thirty minutes of the Grand Ole Opry to Crazy Water Crystals, there was no shortage of sponsors. Manufacturers with products aimed at rural consumers, like Allis-Chalmers, International Harvester, Penn Tobacco, and Carter’s Chickery, stood in line. But Harry Stone wanted to get at least a portion of the Opry on a national radio network. WSM’s fifty-thousand-watt signal was strong, but reception outside the South depended upon location and atmospheric conditions. If the Opry was on a network, it would be carried on local stations and come in clearly from coast to coast.
Harry Stone was especially keen to get a network slot because, in 1933, Alka-Seltzer began sponsoring a segment of the Opry’s rival, Chicago’s WLS Barn Dance, on NBC’s Blue Network. WSM was already an NBC affiliate, broadcasting NBC network shows such as Amos ’n’ Andy, Vic and Sade, and the Lucky Strike Dance Hour locally, but the Grand Ole Opry needed a sponsor to become a network show itself.
Page from a Prince Albert show script.
Anoth
er five years passed before one of the Opry’s newer sponsors, tobacco manufacturer R. J. Reynolds, approached NBC with the idea of bringing thirty minutes of the show to the network. It was a good moment to take the Opry nationwide. The new stars—Roy Acuff, Pee Wee King, and soon Bill Monroe and Minnie Pearl—were coming into their own. The country record business was recovering from the Depression, and pop singers like Bing Crosby were beginning to “cover” country songs. Country music was becoming a commercial force, and the Opry’s stars had just the right mix of modernity and tradition.
R. J. Reynolds’s Prince Albert brand sponsored the networked segment on what would become known as the Prince Albert Opry. Although Roy Acuff had only been on the Opry little more than eighteen months, he was chosen as the host.
Roy Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys (and Girl) celebrate the Opry going coast-to-coast.
JUDGE HAY:
Various portions of the show had been sponsored for many years, so we who work behind the mics attached no particular significance to the Prince Albert sponsorship at first. The arrangements were made by the William Esty Company, the New York advertising concern, which handled the [Reynolds] account. Mr. Marvin there had the idea in the back of his head to put the Opry on the NBC network. He came in for much ribbing [from] many members of his profession, but he stuck to his guns and found that there was considerable interest in our efforts to entertain with homespun music and comedy. Heretofore, we had not made any effort to produce the show in the accepted sense of the word, so we had to be snatched off the air at the end of our thirty minutes. With that exception, the half-hour went over pretty well. Before the next week rolled around, we had timed our opening and closing. The stations included in the Prince Albert deal were located all the way from the southeastern zone to the West Coast.