The Grand Ole Opry

by Colin Escott

  BUD WENDELL:

  I met him at the old RCA studio on Saturday afternoon. I talked to him, gave him some guidance on what to do or how to do it on the Opry . . . that it was a live show and don’t use any four-letter words, you’ll have four or five minutes and it’s a timed show, and that we didn’t have all night.

  JUSTIN TUBB:

  George D. Hay would be turning over in his grave.

  JAMES BROWN:

  They treated me like I was a prodigal son. They treated me so nice, I felt guilty. I felt I got as much praise as a white man who goes into a black church and puts a hundred dollars in the collection plate.

  The mail that followed included this from the “Greater” Memphis Citizens Council, dated March 15,1979.

  We consider it almost sacrilegious [sic] that the Grand Ole Opry stage (the last bastion of Southern white culture) should be open to soul singer James Brown, as well as other blacks who are not a legitimate part of country music. . . . We protest this infiltration of country music, which represents white roots—white culture. For, if blacks are allowed to move into country music, it will lead to its demise. What has made it special to white people will no longer exist.

  top: Porter Wagoner welcomes James Brown to the Opry as his special guest.

  below: James Brown performed “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Georgia on My Mind,” and “Tennessee Waltz” before launching into a five-song medley of his hits, including “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.”

  Hal Durham replied:

  Your letter concerning the recent appearance of James Brown on the Grand Ole Opry has been brought to my attention.

  Since Mr. Brown’s appearance represented neither an endorsement of his music by us, nor indicated any change in the direction of the Opry, one wonders why some were so affronted by it. The list of non-country acts that have appeared on the Opry is quite lengthy, and includes Perry Como, Dinah Shore, the Pointer Sisters, and Ivory Joe Hunter. We don’t anticipate any change in this policy of occasionally introducing these non-country performers who are internationally acclaimed in their field.

  Obviously, the Grand Ole Opry does not determine who enters the field of country music, nor did it ever. The Opry reflects, to some extent, the broad spectrum of country music, from the traditional sounds of the Crook Brothers to the modern music of Larry Gatlin and Barbara Mandrell. We have never considered the Opry the “last bastion of southern white culture.” The Opry is a 53-year-old radio show that features country music (with occasional non-country guests). Nothing has happened recently to alter that fact, despite efforts by some who would create controversy where there is none.

  Hal Durham.

  March 20, 1979

  Marty Robbins with one of his race cars.

  Running overtime, Marty ate into Ernest Tubb’s Midnite Jamboree.

  He would talk to Ernest on the air. “Just a couple more songs, Ernest, then we’ll turn it over to you.” One night, we taped a thing with Tubb so that when Marty said that, we’d punch in a tape with Tubb saying, “Okay, Marty, you’ve had your time. Now it’s my turn.” Eventually, we’d punch in a closing of Marty singing “El Paso,” and went to sign-off. At the Opry House, they’d still be watching a Marty Robbins concert, but the radio station would switch over to Tubb.

  Hal Durham’s fears for his aging cast were soon realized. Marty Robbins’s health was more precarious than anyone knew, and he died of a heart attack on December 8, 1982, at just fifty-seven years old. On August 14 that year, Ernest Tubb made his last appearance at the Grand Ole Opry and the Midnite Jamboree. His voice had shrunk to a croak and he couldn’t move without an oxygen tank. Too sick to work, he retired, and died on September 6, 1984.

  LORETTA LYNN, Ernest Tubb’s former duet partner:

  The Grand Ole Opry has never been the same. Today, everybody wants to be Ernest Tubb. All those boys try to look like him. Those hats, those boots, singing about how their ex’s live in Texas.

  Bill Monroe was hospitalized with colon cancer in 1980, prompting a reconciliation with Earl Scruggs. Roy Acuff’s wife, Mildred, died in June 1981, and in April 1983 he moved to a house on the Opryland grounds.

  ROY ACUFF:

  Someone said, “Roy, you ought to get Bud Wendell to move out of his office on the top floor of the Roy Acuff Museum at Opryland, and make it into a home.” Bud said, “Better than that, Roy, we’ll build you a home.” I had nothing to do with it. If I’d designed it, it wouldn’t have cost so much. I was leading a very lonely life in a big house all by myself. I came in at night and it was lonely. I woke up in the morning and it was lonely. Now I’ll be someplace where there’s people. I can straighten out my life and get out of this loneliness I live in. I sit on the bench in front of my house and sign autographs, then I go back in the house and rest a while. You can’t let ’em [tourists] in the house. If I let one in, they’d go tell the others, and I’d end up makin’ enemies rather than friends. The house belongs to Opryland. I’m just a lifetime tenant. When I die, the key will be in the door with no strings attached.

  The Opry was doing right by its long-serving artists, but the problem of replacing them was more urgent than ever. Hal Durham and Bud Wendell also knew that they must attract younger fans, redoubling the need to bring in younger artists. At the same time, the new artists mustn’t alienate the longtime fans. It was a delicate balancing act, and a solution would come when country music went in search of its roots. In the meantime there was some urgent business that consumed everyone’s attention: the Grand Ole Opry was for sale.

  15

  UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT

  In 1968, National Life became part of NLT Corporation. The following year, WSM’s founder, Edwin Craig, died. In 1982, a rival insurer, American General Corporation in Houston, launched a hostile takeover. The board of NLT went as far as trying to convince investor Warren Buffett to buy NLT to ensure its independence from American General. Then NLT tried to turn the tables on American General by launching a hostile bid, but that only had the effect of ratcheting up the price that American General eventually paid. The debt incurred in purchasing NLT ensured that American General would place National Life’s entertainment properties on the block.

  MARGARET ANN ROBINSON, daughter of WSM founder Edwin Craig:

  It was the biggest blow I have ever survived and the biggest blow my family has ever survived. It was a terrible, crushing personal blow because we were so closely involved with the people who worked at National Life and their families. National Life was run like a family.

  top: Nashville Banner, July 1, 1983.

  below: Bud Wendell and Ed Gaylord announce the sale of the Opryland properties to Gaylord Broadcasting.

  SONIA L. NAZARIO, journalist, in the Wall Street Journal:

  “It’s the mother church of country music,” says Tom T. Hall. “Who goes and sells off your church?” The answer is American General Corp. of Houston. Minnie Pearl, who has been bemoaning her ill-fated attempts to “ketch a feller” since 1940 sees little humor in the proposed transaction. “It’s our Opry, our womb, our cocoon. We’re like children who’ve always had the same babysitter.” But American General says it needs to drum up between $400 million and $700 million to help offset debts that triple to $950 million with the $1.5 billion NLT purchase. Besides, “businesses that are off our main thrust probably don’t fit,” says Harold Hook, chairman of American General. Whether the locals like it or not, it will be hard to find a parent as attuned to the Opry as NLT’s National Life.

  When American General spun off WSM, the Grand Ole Opry, Opry-land, and its other media properties in July 1983, it was to Gaylord Broadcasting of Oklahoma City, a company very much attuned to the background and core values of National Life’s entertainment group. Gay-lord was already producing Hee Haw at the Opryland complex.

  BILL ANDERSON:

  American General couldn’t have cared less about the Grand Ole Opry. All they wanted to do was get rid of it. Mister Gaylord had gotten involved in Nashville th
rough Hee Haw, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if some of the Hee Haw stars, like Roy Acuff and Minnie Pearl, didn’t twist his arm a little bit.

  The turmoil came just as Bud Wendell was finalizing a bold plan to take National Life’s entertainment group into cable television.

  BUD WENDELL:

  Ultimately as WSM, Inc., evolved into Opryland, we became bigger than National Life. We felt that there really was an opportunity to create a cable channel of country music. Cable was in its infancy, but we were watching it very closely and we just felt that there was an opportunity, so we went to our owners at National Life and said to them, “This is a high-risk proposal; a very high-risk proposal.” The business plan we put together [indicated] that if we did as well as we thought, it would take us five years to turn a profit, and in that five years we were going to lose about sixty million dollars. But if it worked the way we thought it would, from that point on it was going to be fabulously successful. And they believed us, so they said, “Okay. Go ahead.” So we built The Nashville Network, and we added one thousand rooms to the hotel. We were building the network and spending the money when National Life was taken over. American General saw what was going on and it scared them to death, so they put us up for sale. At the same time, I had been acquainted with Ed Gaylord, because we were producing Hee Haw for him . . . so as soon as American General said that they were going to sell us, [Gaylord’s] people came to me and said, “We really would be interested in looking at this.”

  BILL FLETCHER, journalist, in the Nashville Banner:

  American General handed the reins of the huge Opryland complex to Ed and Thelma Gaylord, but WSM Inc. chairman Bud Wendell will remain in the driver’s seat. A well-placed source said the sale price is “in the neighborhood of $270 million.” The source said that only American General and top Gaylord officials know the actual price. Dignitaries from Houston, Oklahoma City, and Nashville filled the Grand Ole Opry House. It was already decided that the destiny of the Opryland complex, including the Grand Ole Opry, the theme park, the Opryland Hotel, the tours, and the new Nashville Network will remain in the hands of local people. Gaylord pledged to become “one of the best corporate citizens in the Nashville area.”

  TNN made its debut on March 7, 1983, and, on April 13, 1985, The Grand Ole Opry Live began as a thirty-minute show on the network.

  HAL DURHAM:

  When we put the Opry out on TNN, a lot of people who were not familiar with the Opry could see what it was. After the NBC network dropped the Prince Albert show, we’d only been on WSM-AM, but with the addition of television we were able to be in homes all across the country, as we once had been at the height of network radio. And, as you might expect, there was additional exposure for the artists on the show. There was some reluctance at first, but we found that all the artists wanted to be on the televised portion because they’ve seen the results of what that exposure can do for them.

  BILL ANDERSON:

  If you look at some of the very earliest Opry television shows from the 1950s, you’ll see merry-go-rounds and things like that on there that were no part of the Opry then or any other time, but when they finally decided to televise the Opry just like it was—warts ’n’ all—that’s when the Opry began to succeed on television. The broadcasts on TNN had an enormously positive impact. In fact, a lot of people began thinking that the Opry was a television show. Television put a face on the Grand Ole Opry and took it to places where it had never gotten during the later years of AM radio.

  In June 1986, Opryland branched into another area of the music business when it bought Acuff-Rose Publications from Wesley Rose and Roy Acuff. The price was not revealed, but Acuff-Rose was valued at around twenty million dollars at the time. The company had begun in 1942 when Acuff guaranteed Fred Rose twenty-five thousand dollars.

  The Nashville Network arrived at a turning point in country music history. In 1981, at the height of the Urban Cowboy craze, country music accounted for fifteen percent of record sales, but by 1984, its share had dropped to ten percent or less. Just as the Opry had to solve the problem of its aging cast, country music itself needed new performers and new direction. The Opry’s problem was highlighted when seventy-three-year-old President Ronald Reagan visited the Friday Night Opry to celebrate Roy Acuff’s eighty-first birthday.

  JIM O’HARA and ED CROMER, journalists, in the Tennessean:

  A toe-tapping, singing Ronald Reagan brought his upbeat re-election campaign to the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. It coincided with Roy Acuff’s 81st birthday celebrations. Lee Greenwood broke into a rendition of “God Bless the U.S.A.,” with Reagan and others on stage and many in the crowd singing along as confetti dropped from the ceiling. The words to the song, which is featured in a Reagan television commercial, were printed on the backs of old-fashioned church fans passed out among the crowd.

  PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN:

  We’re here today to celebrate the eighty-first birthday of the King of Country Music. And, Roy, the other day I met with some senior citizens in the White House, and I told them the only way I could sum up my feelings about older folks is to greet them by saying, “Hi, kids.” I was thinking on my way down here in the plane: All of you are aware, I think, that there’s a great resurgence of patriotic feeling sweeping the country. And it’s heartening, and I’ve been moved by it. You could see it during the Olympics, how the crowds out in Los Angeles would wave the flag and sing along to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Now, there are a lot of reasons, I guess, why this good spirit has returned to our land. But it got a lot of encouragement from Nashville. It’s the people of this city who never forgot to love their country, who never thought patriotism was out of style. And I know you were just expressing how you felt; you didn’t know that you were doing your country a great service by keeping affection for it alive in your songs. But you were doing it a service, and I don’t know if anyone has ever thanked you. But if not, thank you. People like you make me proud to be an American.

  Now, the [Democrats] keep saying the answer to all [our] success is to start another old round of tax and tax and spend and spend. I think we all better remember that the [Democrats’] promises are a little like Minnie Pearl’s hat—they both have big price tags hanging from them.

  And nostalgia played a large role in the Opry’s sixtieth anniversary show in November 1985. CBS-TV taped a special that aired on January 14, 1986. A segment of the show was given over to the Opry’s veterans back home at the Ryman. Even Roy Acuff had become a little sentimental about the Ryman after ten years away.

  Roy Acuff decorated his dressing room door in honor of President Reagan’s visit.

  MINNIE PEARL:

  We reminisced a lot that night. When Roy Acuff walks out on that stage singing “The Wabash Cannonball,” and I stand in the wings and watch him, it’s as if I’m with him playing in rural Alabama on a rainy Monday night in the 1940s. To me, his voice hasn’t changed in its rendition, in his fervor, and in his love of that audience. And when I walk out onstage, I feel something special. The Opry audience is different from any other audience. They’ve sent in for those tickets and have come here especially for the show. The majority of them are there because they care. “The Ryman Remembered” is my favorite part of the show. We had such a feeling of déjà vu. I love the new Opry House, but back in the Ryman I felt the ghosts. I thought about what kind of person I was back then. I said to Roy while they were changing a camera angle, “What are you thinking about?” He was looking off so far away. He said he was thinking about all the people that had sat there in the Ryman in those old pews and what their hopes and dreams were.

  President Ronald Reagan wishes Roy Acuff a happy eighty-first birthday.

  Returning to the Ryman only emphasized how integral the Opry had once been to country music. It was still the most important stage in country music, but now the show’s managers had to find its new role.

  MICHAEL MCCALL, journalist, in the Nashville Banner:

  A typical live Opry
broadcast in 1957 might feature current hits by Kitty Wells, Hank Snow, Ray Price, Jim Reeves, Faron Young, Webb Pierce, Marty Robbins, the Everly Brothers, and a dozen other leading hit-makers. [This year] 1987, a Saturday night roster at the Opry bears little resemblance to a Top 40 chart. On February 7, for instance, the line-up included only one act—the Whites—that had achieved a major hit in the 1980s. Today, with television, video, and other means of promoting a new act, live radio does not carry the same strength. And the discrepancy between the Opry’s modest stipend and the income from a solo concert has grown ever larger.

  The Ryman Remembered. From left: Pee Wee King, Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, Minnie Pearl, Grandpa Jones, Little Jimmy Dickens, and Grant Turner.

  HAL DURHAM:

  Of course, the Opry doesn’t have the impact on careers that it once did. At one time, the Opry represented the only game in town. Today, the artist has a lot of other doors open to him or her, mainly through the business of records. When the Opry was booming in the 1930s and ’40s, the record business, especially country records, was very limited. Very few stations played country records, except at odd times, like five o’clock in the morning. Today, with thousands of country radio stations, it has opened the doors to so many people, and the Opry, as a live music place, is rare. So the Opry isn’t the only game in town any more, but it is the only game in town that can offer that tradition, going back to the roots. Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Red Foley, Roy Acuff. My experience has been that, at every show at the Opry, those spirits are there.