by Colin Escott
Ott Devine (at podium) leads the Opry cast in a remembrance of Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Randy Hughes, Cowboy Copas, and Jack Anglin
We ask that you in the audience stand and join us for a moment of silent prayer in tribute to them.
One minute of silence followed.
Thank you. Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Jack Anglin, and Randy Hughes never walked on this stage without a smile. They would want us to keep smiling and recall the happier occasions. I feel that I can speak for all them when I say, let’s continue in the tradition of the Grand Ole Opry.
MINNIE PEARL:
Roy Acuff struck up his fiddle and played a number for them. I stood in the wings trying not to break down, but the tears were hard to hold back. Roy called me out and I tried to compose myself. I recall swallowing my tears. I said, though not very loudly, “Howdee, I’m just so proud to be here,” but the rest is a blur. Grief and sorrow seem so alien to the Opry environment.
Some were beginning to say that the Grand Ole Opry was jinxed, and over the next two years there was a spate of accidents and fatalities involving current or former Opry members. Less than three weeks after Jack Anglin’s death, Texas Ruby, who appeared on the Opry with her husband, Curly Fox, died in a trailer fire while Curly played the Friday Night Opry. On August 27, former Opry executive Jim Denny died of a heart attack; he was 52. And on November 16 that year, Ernest Tubb and Jean Shepard were involved in a wreck near Durham, North Carolina, in which the driver of an oncoming car was killed. On July 31, 1964, Jim Reeves died in a plane crash, and on June 20, 1965, former Opry member Ira Louvin of the Louvin Brothers died in a car wreck. Three weeks after Louvin’s death, Roy Acuff was seriously injured in a car wreck near Sparta, Tennessee.
ROY ACUFF:
I’d sung “Wreck on the Highway” so many times, it flashed in my mind when I saw that car coming toward us. I just started to pray. I think the wreck was a warning that my luck—my traveling luck—was running out. Any game you play, you’re gonna lose sometimes, and I’ve been traveling thirty years about a hundred thousand miles a year.
ERNEST TUBB:
Ol’ Roy’s retired five times. After that bad wreck in the summer of ’65, he said, “Ernest, I’m quitting that road. You better get off it too before it kills you.” I came back in that Christmas, and I didn’t see Roy. I asked someone where he was, and they said, “He’s up in Alaska.”
The number of travel-related incidents was surprisingly low for a cast that traveled as a way of life. The road was a problem for the Opry, but in another way. Because most Opry performers made their living on tour, it was hard to meet the Opry’s requirement of twenty-six appearances a year to retain membership. If an artist had a hit, managers and bookers insisted that they not work the Opry on the most lucrative night of the week, and it’s a testament to the lure of the Opry that so many artists still wanted to be on the show anyway. Several artists, though, wanted to work the Opry on their own terms, and the conflict came to a head in December 1964.
CLARA HIERONYMOUS, journalist, in the Tennessean:
Twelve top country and western music stars will not appear on the Grand Ole Opry in 1965 and have been prohibited from using the Opry name in their outside billings, it was learned yesterday. Another entertainer, long-time favorite Minnie Pearl, has been given a leave of absence from the show for the coming year, but will continue to use the Opry billing in her current contracts. Others leaving the Opry roster were George Morgan, Don Gibson, Billy Grammer, Johnnie Wright, Kitty Wells, the Jordanaires, Faron Young, Ferlin Husky, Chet Atkins, Justin Tubb, Stonewall Jackson, and Ray Price. According to WSM officials, the move was in keeping with a longstanding Opry rule that performers must appear in 26 shows a year in order to be retained. “Nobody is mad at anybody,” said WSM public relations director, Bill Williams, “it’s just that periodically we have to take stock. These entertainers will be allowed to return any time they wish.”
BILL ANDERSON:
That was a surprise. I’d never signed a contract saying that I would be in twenty-six times a year. I had the same manager as Faron and Ferlin, and I just felt that they made the choice to work the road. Hubert Long was our manager, and I remember him coming to me at that time and saying, “Do you realize how much money it’s costing you to be on the Grand Ole Opry? I could book you out on the road and you’re down there making eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents.” I considered leaving, but my father, who knows nothing about show business but a lot about human nature, gave me as good a piece of advice as I’ve ever gotten. He said, “Son, look around you.” The Opry was owned by National Life, and he said, “Maybe the Opry isn’t at the very top, but these people haven’t gotten to the level they’re at by being stupid. They’ll turn things around, and you’ll be glad you stayed.” I took his word and it’s some of the best advice I’ve got in my life.
Johnny Cash had left the Opry in 1958. He returned in 1964, but was asked to leave the following year for a very different reason.
JOHNNY CASH:
The band kicked off a song, and I tried to take the microphone off the stand. In my nervous frenzy, I couldn’t get it off. That was enough to make me explode in a fit of anger. I took the mic stand, threw it down, then dragged it along the edge of the stage. There were fifty-two lights, and I wanted to break all fifty-two, which I did.
Johnny Cash on the Opry stage with Roy Acuff.
CARLENE CARTER, country singer and Johnny Cash’sstepdaughter:
He was banned from the Opry for a long time. He kicked out all the floor lights . . . the floodlights at your feet. I don’t know what came over him. I don’t know what upset him so much. I think he was just bein’ Cash.
Ott Devine eventually relaxed the requirement to twenty weeks per year, and explained the situation in a letter to Earl Scruggs.
It has not been and never will be possible to stage the Grand Ole Opry as we know it and compete with the road shows in talent fees. The talent fees have doubled since 1962 and as you know, each weekend we schedule several times the number of musicians that a road show would carry. The number and cost of firemen, policemen, ushers, ticket takers, etc. we are forced to employ has increased each year.
It was never our intention to ban for life those persons unable to meet our requirements as to the number of Saturday nights at the Opry House. We were not angry with them then or now. . . . Some felt we were too harsh in not allowing the acts to even guest with us in 1965. Some felt we were not strict enough. In my opinion, all were treated as fairly as possible. . . . We feel that the twenty week requirement settled upon last year is fair to the artist who wishes to remain a member of the Grand Ole Opry and fair to the audience which travels hundreds of miles to see you here in Nashville. We will continue maintaining and improving the Grand Ole Opry, and hope that you will continue to appreciate its value to you.
The Opry still had an irresistible allure for many up-and-coming stars.
JEANNIE SEELY:
The Opry might not have been as important to the industry as it had been, but all of us grew up listening to it, and we grew up wanting it. In fact, the Opry was the biggest reason I moved to Nashville. Once I got a record that charted, I wanted the Grand Ole Opry. I was out in California. I met Dottie West out there. I said, “Dottie, I don’t know enough to try for the Grand Ole Opry yet.” She said, “Jeannie, that’s where you learn.” Boy, was she right. I had a record climbing the charts, and they were calling me saying, “We took over this market and that market,” and I said, “Well, did anyone talk to Mr. Devine yet?” ’Cause I wanted the Opry.
Another of the Opry’s new hirees, Willie Nelson, came to Nashville in 1960. He’d made plenty of records, but everyone around Nashville thought of him as a songwriter because none of his own records had sold as well as other artists’ recordings of his songs, like Faron Young’s record of “Hello Walls” or Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” or Ray Price’s “Night Life” or Jimmy Elledge’s “Funny (How Time Slips Away)
.” All were Willie Nelson hits, but not for him.
WILLIE NELSON:
November 28, 1964, was when I made my first appearance on the Grand Ole Opry, for which I was paid thirty-five dollars. And I cohosted a television show with my old hero, Ernest Tubb. The whole enterprise was supported by my songwriting royalties. But I love the Opry. The family tradition there is very similar to the family tradition I grew up with. It’s very important to keep family units together, and that’s the kind of life that the Opry was trying to set an example for. The show represents the people to themselves.
Ott Devine welcomes Willie Nelson to the Opry.
Ott Devine faced yet another problem: in September 1963, after twenty years at the Ryman Auditorium, the Opry’s parent company, National Life, had to decide whether to leave the family home, or buy it.
DAVID HALL, journalist, in the Tennessean:
The Opry’s lease expired. National Life said it was considering a move to the Fairgrounds. The difficulty had been over price. WSM had sought to rent the Ryman for one year at a price of $30,000 with four one-year renewal options at an annual increase of $1,000.
After purchasing the Ryman Auditorium, WSM officially renamed the building the Grand Ole Opry House. Stoney and Wilma Lee Cooper, George Morgan, unknown, Roy Drusky, Loretta Lynn, Bill Carlisle, and Roy Acuff watch as Ott Devine hangs a temporary banner.
JACK DEWITT:
The people who ran the Ryman, including Horace Hill and the others, decided that the thing to do was to sell the Ryman Auditorium to us. I was on a committee to deal with Dan May, who was in charge of selling the Ryman. We’d meet and we’d trade a whole lot of jokes back and forth, and they started out at $700,000, and we got them down to $220,000, and bought it. It took weeks and weeks to get the deal done. The problem was, how do we cool the place in summer? In the wintertime it was cold, but we could take care of that with the furnace they had in there. Summertime was just unbearable. I had fans put in the windows to try to cool it off some. I got a price from an air-conditioning outfit, but they said there was no place to put the equipment. The roof wouldn’t hold it, and we didn’t have the land around there to put it outside.
From the beginning, the Grand Ole Opry had been part of WSM and WSM had been part of National Life, but by the 1960s the Opry was slowly distancing itself from both. The managers who took over after Ott Devine’s departure in 1968 saw a future for the Opry that had nothing to do with insurance or even radio.
HAL DURHAM, Opry announcer and later manager:
For many years, the Opry manager was a part of the radio station staff, and the Opry was simply another program of the radio station. It was not a separate entity. It was just another live music program. Up until the 1960s, WSM had live classical music, live pop music, and the Opry. The manager of the Opry was also a program staff member of WSM. Only after Bud Wendell took over the management of the Opry in 1968 did the Opry become a separate entity. Then the manager of the Opry reported to the president of National Life.
JACK DEWITT:
Bud Wendell was my executive assistant. When I retired in 1968, Irving Waugh took over as president of WSM. He fired Ott Devine as manager of the Grand Ole Opry, and he made Bud Wendell in charge of the Opry. Irving was always afraid of Bud Wendell. He was afraid that I would make Bud president of WSM, but I didn’t do it because Irving had been vice president and ought to be promoted. Bud called me and said, “Jack, I’ve been put aside. I’m in charge of the Grand Ole Opry. What should I do?” I said, “Bud, it’s the best thing in the whole company. Just hang in there and do it,” and he became very good at it.
Bud Wendell cuts the Opry birthday cake, 1969.
JEANNIE SEELY:
Bud Wendell developed a vision for the Opry, a very important vision. Bud had a strong business background, but he came to understand what made it click between us and the audience. He was easy to work with. During that time, we had the credit system where you had to work a certain number of dates at the Opry to earn credits or be suspended. One year, Jack Greene and I were out on the road together. We were both on the charts, and we were working all the time. I got to figuring out what we had on the books and we were going to come out a credit and a half short. I went in to talk to Bud and asked him if we could make up this credit after the first of the year. He just listened and raised his eyebrow, and he said, “You tried, and I think we can bend the rules here. We’ll see what next year brings.” He knew that sometimes you couldn’t go strictly by the rule book, and he knew we were sincere.
Bud Wendell’s vision would take the Opry into the twenty-first century, but, one month after he took over, the man who’d had the original vision for the Opry died. On May 11, 1968, at 10:00 p.m., Opry announcer and Hay protégé Grant Turner, along with the rest of the Opry, paid tribute to founder George D. Hay, who had passed away three days earlier.
GRANT TURNER:
George Hay not only created the Opry out of the fabric of his imagination, he nurtured and protected it during its formative years. He heard the heartbeat of a nation in the country music he loved. He taught us to measure our music by this golden yardstick: it must be eloquent in its simplicity. He called himself the Solemn Old Judge. If he was solemn, it was only to the face of those who sought to change or corrupt the purity of the barn dance ballads he sought to preserve. We, the performers and friends of the Grand Ole Opry, salute the memory of one whose influence is felt on the stage of the Opry tonight—the Solemn Old Judge, George D. Hay.
Among other contributions to the country music community, Bud Wendell (left) launched Fan Fair.
Five months later, on October 8, Judge Hay’s longtime nemesis, Harry Stone, died. The last years weren’t good for either of them. Judge Hay felt that the Opry had turned its back on him and his concept of the show. He left Nashville and died in Virginia. Harry Stone had returned to Nashville to help start the Country Music Association, but was working as an advertising salesman for a magazine published by the Tennessee Electrical Cooperative Association at the time of his death.
And then, on June 26, 1969, WSM’s founder, Edwin Craig, died. The three men who had steered the Opry through its earliest years had died within thirteen months of each other.
11
“ALL MY HIPPIE FANS”—THE BLUEGRASS REVIVAL
Opry stars like Bill Anderson and Marty Robbins were in the pop charts, and the “Nashville Sound” was on everyone’s lips. No one quite knew what the “Nashville Sound” was (producer Chet Atkins famously rattled his change when asked), but everyone knew what it wasn’t. It wasn’t bluegrass.
Country music had irrevocably changed, but bluegrass hadn’t and wouldn’t. Until the mid-1950s, bluegrass records had been played alongside other country records and bluegrass stars toured alongside country stars, but, as country music changed, blue-grass held fast to its old ways and distanced itself from country music. Several blue-grass artists, including the Stanley Brothers, lost their major-label deals, and the music retreated to smaller record labels, smaller stations, and smaller venues. Only Flatt and Scruggs were doing well, while Bill Monroe struggled along with everyone else.
Lester Flatt (left) and Earl Scruggs (right) on stage for Martha White with announcer T. Tommy Cutrer.
KENNY BAKER, Bill Monroe’s fiddler player:
There was a few years there, about the time this rock ’n’ roll came in. It wasn’t only bluegrass music, but all of country music shot its wad. Why they just disbanded left and right there in Nashville. Bill kept an outfit going, but he damn sure didn’t make no money with it.
BUCK WHITE of the Whites, Opry stars:
I saw Bill Monroe in Wichita Falls right around that time. He could only afford to bring two men. We got a boy from the Light Crust Doughboys to play banjo with him, and you gotta believe he played a different kind of banjo. But Bill put on a show. He never complained. He was sufferin’ along with a lot of others.
RALPH RINZLER, musicologist and later Bill Monroe’s manager:
Although it was commonly believed that Bill Monroe hadn’t spoken to Flatt and Scruggs since the duo left his employment in 1948, they’d worked together in the early 1950s, and it wasn’t until Flatt and Scruggs’s sponsor, Martha White Flour, began pressing for the duo’s inclusion on the Opry that the fallout occurred.
JAKE LAMBERT, bluegrass musician:
Knowing WSM always paid attention to the amount of mail a group could pull, Cohen Williams [of Martha White Flour] collected a huge mail bag full and took it to WSM. He dumped it out on the office floor of Jack DeWitt. Either they put Flatt and Scruggs on Martha White’s half hour of the Opry or he would pull his company’s advertising off the station.
Bill Monroe’s case was that the Opry wouldn’t hire someone who sounded like Roy Acuff or Ernest Tubb, so they shouldn’t hire another bluegrass act. He tried to get up a petition to keep Flatt and Scruggs off the Opry, and insisted that his sidemen not talk to Flatt and Scruggs or their sidemen. It wouldn’t be the last time Bill Monroe acted in that way, but while others like Flatt and Scruggs edged the music in new directions, Monroe kept it pure and simple for future generations.