Walk out of this bar, turn the radio on in my car and listen to that Grand Ole Opry show . . .
People disagree about Jimmy Snow. Some say he’s a holy man, and some say he’s just another of those dime-a-dozen radio God-salesmen who have made a pretty fair living off the souls of Southern white people for almost as long as men have known about the airwaves. But whatever he is, it didn’t much matter on the night of March 15, 1974, for the spirit was moving inside Jimmy Snow, and there was a fire in his belly and a quiver in his voice. He knew it was his kind of crowd, and knew too that there might never be another one quite like it. He was ready.
Jimmy Snow had heard the call of the Lord, he explained, one cold winter night a dozen years before, when he had found himself in his front yard, alone and on his knees, no shirt on his back, listening to voices from above. Because of that night, and because his daddy happens to be Hank Snow, a pillar of the Grand Ole Opry for decades, it fell to Reverend Jimmy to preach maybe the last sermon that would ever be heard in Nashville’s ramshackled old Ryman Auditorium. The Ryman is a creaky, magnificent monument to a lot of things—to the conscience of Tom Ryman for one; for it was Ryman, a hard-living, liquor-dispensing riverboat operator, who had had his own encounter with the Divinity a little less than a century ago and decided to build a downtown tabernacle to honor the event.
In the years that followed, Ryman’s brick and stained-glass edifice shook with the thunder of many an evangelist, and the crowds would swarm in on muggy summer evenings to listen to Billy Sunday and the rest of them, shouting their amens and standing up for Jesus. But gradually economics got mixed into the picture, and the Ryman Auditorium evolved into an entertainment center—a metamorphosis culminating in 1943 in the Grand Ole Opry’s choice of the Ryman for its permanent quarters.
There was logic in the choice, of course. For the same people who had come to hear Billy Sunday were just as likely to come hear Hank Snow and Roy Acuff and Sam McGee. They felt comfortable there, and for upwards of thirty years they arrived in droves.
But March 15, 1974, marked the end of that era. It was the Opry’s last performance in its old home, and when it moved on the following evening, the President of the United States came down to celebrate, and the crowd that was there to celebrate with him consisted not of the poor whites whose music was being performed onstage, but of the Nashville business people, who appreciated the economic possibilities if not the twanging guitars.
The night before, however, had belonged to Jimmy Snow and the country people. And in place of the President, there was Johnny Cash in his ruffled white shirt and long-tailed coat-looking like a Civil War-vintage U.S. senator, but singing like what he is: a man who has seen both the bottom and the top, and who was probably right at home in both places.
Cash was the closing act for Jimmy Snow’s “Grand Ole Gospel Time,” a popular Friday-night feature of the Opry, and that night’s show was one of the best. It featured the traditional gospel renditions of the LeFevres, the more upbeat compositions of a young Johnny Cash protege named Larry Gatlin, a rollicking, foot-stomping performance by country-rock singer Dobie Gray (who was one of the few blacks ever to appear at the Opry), and then the whole Cash clan.
By the time Dobie Gray was through it was late at night, and though it was cold and rainy outside, it was stuffy and humid within. The air was musty with mingled sweat fumes, and the people were tired. But they came abruptly to life and the flashbulbs popped like a psychedelic light show when Cash appeared on stage. And when he and his venerated mother-in-law, Maybelle Carter, led the entire cast through the country-folk classic “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” even the hard-bitten newspaper reporters in the crowd had to admit they were probably seeing something special. At least a few eyes were not entirely dry.
Then Cash left the stage and Jimmy Snow, as is his custom late in the show, launched into his Friday-night fire-and-brimstone message—mingling his exhortations for Jesus and America and the good ole days, and forgetting, it seemed, that immortal sermons don’t have to be eternal.
Meanwhile, a very different scene was taking place across the alley from the Opry’s backstage door—in the beer-sloshing pandemonium of Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge.
Tootsie’s is a typical-looking downtown dive with a garish purple front, presumably approximating the color of an orchid. In the front window are two neon Stroh’s Beer signs, one of which works. Neighboring establishments include a pawnshop, a skin-flick theater, and the Magic Touch Massage Parlor, which generally finds itself locked in a chronic life-and-death struggle with the local D.A. The inside walls of Tootsie’s are papered with thousands of photographs and autographs of musicians, ranging in stature from Elvis Presley and Faron Young to such lesser lights as Billy Troy and Ken Allen.
As its inner decor suggests, the thing that sets Tootsie’s apart is its clientele. Over the years, country musicians have made it a part of their ritual to duck out the back door of the Opry House and grab a quick beer with Tootsie, rubbing shoulders in the process with the truck drivers, downtown drunks, Opry fans, and other everyday beerdrinkers who are, in fact, the blood and guts of country music.
The first time I was a part of that scene was around 1971, when I was with a group of half a dozen tourists that happened to include several high-powered newspaper editors from my home state of Alabama. Our table was being attended by an enormously obese waitress, who reminded me somehow of the Wife of Bath and regaled us with a wide assortment of mildly off-color jokes. As she served the second round of beers, she placed one of them too close to the edge of the table. It teetered precariously for a moment, then toppled neatly into one of the editorial laps. “Oops,” she said matter-of-factly in her flattest cracker twang, “did I get it on your dick?”
The editor stared helplessly from his lap to the waitress and back to his lap, trying to decide what response was appropriate under the circumstances. And then with his pretensions pretty well devastated, he collapsed in helpless laughter. It was typical of the sort of ribald egalitarianism that prevails at Tootsie’s, presided over by Tootsie herself—Tootsie Bess, a worldlywise little lady known around Nashville for her acts of maternal kindness toward anyone down on his luck.
Tootsie’s is one of those collateral country music institutions that have nurtured the Grand Ole Opry for years. And though such things are difficult to measure, the Opry is somehow a little bit different now that it has moved from its old building and severed its back-alley affiliation with the orchid-colored lounge.
The lounge itself, to the surprise of a few people around Nashville, has developed enough institutional momentum over the years to survive very nicely. The crowds, though smaller than they used to be, are still respectable, and the only difference is that Tootsie’s one-of-a-kind jukebox—still crammed full of songs from the lesser-knowns as well as the stars—now competes with live, hard-country bands on Saturday evenings.
But if a sizeable handful of Opry fans have refused to abandon Tootsie’s or their other traditional stomping grounds like Ernest Tubb Record Shop across the street, it is also true that the biggest crowds have shifted their allegiance to the Opry’s new home. By any objective standards of comparison, the new place is a great deal nicer than the Ryman. It is bigger, it has more comfortable seats, its acoustics are more scientifically coordinated; and it’s in what would be an idyllic pastoral setting on the winding banks of the Cumberland River. The only problem is that the Opry people also plopped a large amusement park down on the same spot, and it doesn’t quite fit. It’s a nice amusement park, with a hair-raising roller coaster ride and lots of animals and things for the kids to look at, but there is nothing much left of the beer-guzzling, God-fearing milieu of white-man’s soul that used to surround the Ryman.
The Opry folks, however, seem to like it. The press kit handed out to reporters on hand for the grand opening was jammed full of quotes from various stars on the virtues of Opryland, as the new place is called: “I am very much impressed with the structure of the new Opry House,” said Roy Acuff. “I think it is the greatest thing that has happened since the Grand Ole Opry was born,” added Roy Drusky. “The move will be a great thing for country music,” offered Hank Snow. And so on.
No doubt the quotes were for real, but whether they were or not, nobody could deny that the Opry got off to a spectacular start the first night in its new home. On hand among others for the dedication performance were one President, two senators, at least three governors, and a basketful of congressmen. The President, who clearly enjoyed his temporary retreat from the pressures of Watergate, played “God Bless America” on the piano. Roy Acuff tried unsuccessfully to teach him how to yo-yo. And the specially invited crowd, which was a Nixon crowd—not country, but spiffy, big-business, fund-raising Republican—loved every minute of it.
The Opry performers themselves were in pretty glittery form. Comedian Jerry Clower told some of his funniest down-home Mississippi stories. Porter Waggoner was dressed in one of his gaudiest sequined suits. And blond-haired Jeannie Seely offered a knock-out version of “Don’t Touch Me If You Don’t Love Me, Sweetheart,” dressed at the time in a svelte, tight-fitting pants suit, with a bare midriff and the kind of plunging neckline that would have knocked many a country matron dead in her tracks from shock.
Backstage the reporters were swarming around, snatching interviews where they could, and during the course of it all, a Voice of America man cornered Minnie Pearl just outside her dressing room. “Would you tell us, please,” he said, “if you think perhaps that the Grand Ole Opry has lost its innocence?”
Minnie Pearl paused thoughtfully before answering, for contrary to her “Howdeee” public image, she was one of the brightest, most reflective members of the cast. “Well,” she said quietly, measuring her words, “there are a lot of people who would argue that the Opry lost its innocence some time ago—back when the music started to change.”
“Lordy, I reckon it has changed,” echoed Sam McGee, and he had ample reason to know. McGee, then seventy-nine years old and the oldest featured performer on the show, joined the Opry on its third or fourth radio broadcast back in 1925, when it was still called “The WSM Barn Dance” and performed in a small hotel room. Those were the days when country music was in its commercial infancy. Record producers and radio broadcasters were just beginning to grapple with the notion that an art form as crude and backwoodsy as hillbilly music could have any sort of commercial possibilities. A few of the producers, in moments of studied open-mindedness, could appreciate the fiddlers and the glib-fingered guitar and banjo pickers, but the singers—with their sentimental lyrics and piercing harmonies—simply could not be taken seriously.
But at one radio station, WSB in Atlanta, that point of view crumbled quite rapidly in the late spring of 1922. Soon after the station went on the air in mid-March, it began to feature country performances by such artists as the Reverend Andrew Jenkins, a blind gospel singer, and Fiddling John Carson, a high-pitched vocalist who later become one of the first country musicians to record commercially.
The audience response to these programs was heartening, to say the least, and the same was true the following year, some fifteen hundred miles to the west in Fort Worth, Texas. On January 4, 1923, station WBAP featured an hour and a half’s worth of square-dance music by a spirited fiddler and Confederate veteran named M. J. Bonner. WBAP had not been on the air very long, but never in its brief history had it received so many ecstatic phone calls from listeners demanding more of the same. As a result, the station soon began a regular program—reportedly heard as, far away as New York and Hawaii—called “The WBAP Barn Dance.”
At about this time, record companies began getting into the act, but almost by accident. Seeking an antidote for plunging sales, recording director Ralph Peer of Okeh records in New York began putting on tape a number of urban blues musicians who, along with scores of other blacks, had migrated north in the years just after World War I. The experiment met with immediate success, and Peer ventured south in the hope of recording still more blues musicians in the quainter confines of their native habitat. His travels took him to places like Atlanta and station WSB, and there he discovered and decided to record the other side of the Southern folk scene—country-singing white artists like Fiddling John Carson.
Other record companies soon followed suit, and in the late twenties and early thirties the number of country records on the market began to proliferate rapidly. A few ministars emerged—people like Pop Stoneman and Charlie Poole—but those were also the days when a depression was looming, and as the economy crumbled around them, many record buyers simply retreated to their radios where the music was free. Record sales quickly fell to one-fortieth of their level a decade earlier—at a time just after the purchase of radios had increased by well over one thousand percent.
Radio, therefore, became the primary medium for country music, and few of the stations that chose to dabble in it were disappointed with their decision. One station that wandered into the field, almost timidly at first, but then with considerable gusto, was powerful WLS in Chicago. A year and a half before the birth of the Grand Ole Opry five hundred miles to the south, WLS had booked a fifteen-minute country show by a young, college-educated Kentucky guitarist named Bradley Kincaid. Kincaid’s rollicking renditions of traditional mountain ballads drew what was rapidly becoming the typical audience response—dozens of calls and letters demanding an encore—and the WLS executives decided to launch their own barn-dance program similar to the pioneer show in Fort Worth. The program quickly caught on, and for more than a decade WLS was the most-listened-to country station anywhere in America.
It didn’t take long, however, for the Grand Ole Opry to gain considerable respectability of its own. It received its name from a chance quip by its founder and master of ceremonies, George D. Hay, shortly after the program went on the air. Hay’s broadcast followed NBC’s “Musical Appreciation Hour,” and tradition has it that one night early in 1926, the network show ended with a symphonic composition depicting the rush of a speeding locomotive. Hay, whether to make a point or simply to poke some fun, decided to open his program with DeFord Bailey, a popular harmonica soloist, and his arrangement of a driving and equally graphic train song called “Pan American Blues.”
“For the past hour,” Hay is reported to have said in introducing Bailey’s number, “we have been listening to grand opera. But from now on we are going to hear the Grand Ole Opry”—which is what it has been ever since.
Virtuoso instrumental performances by people like Bailey, the Crook Brothers, the Fruit Jar Drinkers, and Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith dominated the Opry in its early years. One of the few performers whose singing was as important as his picking was a zesty old banjoist named Uncle Dave Macon, who often performed with the able backup support of Sam and Kirk McGee. Macon had turned pro in 1918 when a farmer paid him fifteen dollars to play for a party, and his reputation had grown steadily between that time and his first appearance on the Opry in 1926.
Many of his songs were compositions he had picked up just before the turn of the century from laborers in the mines, railroad yards, and riverboat docks throughout the upper South. The tunes were almost invariably up-tempo and escapist, but the lyrics—especially in songs like “Buddy, Won’t You Roll Down the Line”—contained some undisguised social commentary on the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the workers of the South.
Macon died in 1953, and with his passing the Opry lost its most important link with the past. The subject matter and the sound of the music began to change, to lose at least a little of its edge, as vocal performances and backup instrumentation became more and more polished, and the formulas for commercial success became more and more apparent.
Lovesick singers had already begun to overshadow the other Opry acts, beginning with the arrival of Roy Acuff in 1939 and continuing over the next several decades with the appearance of sophisticated country crooners like Eddy Arnold and Jim Reeves. Uncle Dave Macon, however, was survived by a few of his early-day cronies, and a stubborn handful—Herman Crook, Claude Lampley, and Sam and Kirk McGee—were still alive and picking when the Opry moved to its new location.
The oldest of the old-timers was Sam McGee, who in 1974 was living outside Nashville on a five-hundred-acre cattle and tobacco farm that he still worked himself. The road leading to it wound its way randomly around the steep Tennessee hillsides, constantly and casually doubling back on itself, until finally you arrived at a rust-spattered mailbox jammed into a milk can with the words “Sam F. McGee” hand-painted on top.
Inside the sturdy stone farmhouse the rooms were moderately cluttered with the trappings of his work—two guitars and a banjo stashed away in the living-room corners, an ASCAP silver service award “for over a half-century of constant and heart-rendering contributions” hung on the wall, and records strewn on the dining-room table. Next to the living-room fireplace was a smaller table with a Bethlehem manger scene permanently in place and an unframed, autographed picture of George Wallace leaning next to it.
On the day after the Opry left the Ryman, McGee leaned forward in his creaky old rocking chair and began to expound in his genial and self-effacing way on the changes he had seen. “It’s just so different today,” he said. “You have about fifty musicians for every one we had back then, but you know I honestly believe the music in those days was better. You had nothing but the pure sound. Now you have all sorts of drums and amplification and all that. I don’t know, I may just have an old fogy attitude, but I do know I still get a lot of letters from people asking, ‘Why can’t we get more of the old style country music like you play?’
“Back then, you didn’t figure to go into music as a profession,” McGee continued, warming to the subject, his clear eyes taking on a sparkle as the recollections came back. “No, in those days people just played for the love of music. During those first few shows, the solemn old judge [George Hay] couldn’t pay us anything because the program wasn’t making enough money. We didn’t care. We loved the music and we knew he would do the best he could if the program survived.”
By the time the Opry was doing well enough to spend forty-three million dollars on the new Opryland complex, its executives were paying McGee an average of thirty-six dollars a Saturday night, and so he still made his living, as he always had, from farming.
He generally played two slots on each Opry show—one as part of a group known as the Fruit Jar Drinkers, and the other in a featured performance with his brother, Kirk. The McGees often played their original compositions, and on Grand Opening Night at the new Opry house they chose a quintessential country song called “When the Wagon Was New,” which celebrates a simpler time when people were in less of a hurry and money was only a means to an end.
Sam and Kirk pioneered their own picking style, and among the more serious connoisseurs of musical talent it is the object of considerable awe. Most scholars agree that Sam McGee was one of the most influential guitarists in the history of country music, but a few people around the Opry will tell you that among the program’s current executives, he and his brother were not exactly considered hot commercial property. That assessment showed in a variety of ways.
For example Sam McGee, who believed that many of his fans were old people and farmers, who preferred to go to bed early, had been pleading for years for an earlier slot on the Opry, but without any success. “I hope if I live to be old enough, I’ll get it,” he confided in 1974.
But McGee never did. With his request for an early spot still pending, he was killed in a tractor accident in 1975.
Two other old-timers, Ed Hyde and Staley Walton, died about the same time, and in a way their passing was even more revealing than McGee’s. Hyde played fiddle, and Walton guitar, with a veteran group called the Crook Brothers. A few weeks after they died, the group’s leader, seventy-six-year-old Herman Crook, went to Opry manager Hal Durham to tell him who he wanted as a replacement for Hyde.
“Well, he [Durham) told me they weren’t sure if they were going to replace him or not,” Crook remembered bitterly, a few months after the conversation. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I said, ‘You mean you’re not going to let me have my fiddle player?’ Well, ’course I had to have a fiddle player, and eventually they did let me have the boy I wanted. But I never have gotten anybody to play the guitar. Only guitar player now is old Mr. [Bert] Hutchenson, and he’s eighty-three. I reckon they’re just kinda waiting for us to die off. Seems like, anyway.
“I don’t want anybody to boost me up,” he continued, talking backstage at the Opry, staring down at the rough wood floor. “I just want to be treated right. Right is right anywhere. It reminds me of a man raising up his children, and maybe they go against him, forget their parents. That’s kinda how it’s been.
“Fellows like us,” he concluded, “oughta be right in there. We were the backbone of the Opry. I’m worried that when we go, our music will too.”
It might. For country has always been an accurate reflection of the society around it, and that society has changed a lot since the glory days of Herman Crook and Sam McGee. But there are two ways the music can reflect the society: it can mirror its mass-produced and synthetic qualities, or it can penetrate deeper, to the joys and anguish, the sorrows and peculiarities of the modern time. Country music today is doing both. There is a rebellious class of musicians around places like Nashville, Austin, and Bakersfield, California—a feisty, sometimes temperamental bunch, who write with poetic fervor about nearly every aspect of the human condition: war, peace, growing old, dying, loneliness, love, tolerance, prejudice.
By the mid-seventies the best of these entertainers—people like Waylon Jennings and Tom T. Hall—had come to see the Opry as the classic victim of country music’s very popularity: a big-business, multimillion-dollar enterprise, curiously incompatible with the music itself, which has always sprung from the hopes and failures of a far different class of people.
A striking example of the difference in perspective between Opry fans and Opry executives (which illuminates, in addition, two divergent strains in American conservatism: one of them folksy and unsystematic, the other corporate and close-to-the-vest) occurred just before Christmas of 1973. It centered on the unlikely person of Skeeter Davis, a wide-eyed, attractive blond and long-time Ryman regular, who produced some enormous hits in the early sixties. The effusive Miss Davis had been struck by the irony of the Nashville police having arrested a handful of local Jesus freaks who, in their starry-eyed seasonal zeal, had managed to aggravate a number of harried Christmas shoppers with persistent affirmations that Jesus loved them. When she performed on the night of December 8, Miss Davis told the applauding Opry faithful:
“I appreciate it, and a while ago, I sang my record and everything. But we’re having a great thing happening in Nashville. The Jesus people are here. They’re having Jesus rallies every night out at Second and Lindsey Avenue. And a while ago—this is something I just feel like I should share it; I didn’t ask our manager—but they’ve arrested fifteen people just for telling people that Jesus loves them. That really burdens my heart, so I thought I would come to the Opry tonight and sing. Here we are, celebrating Jesus’s birthday. He’s liable to come before Christmas, before Santa Claus does. That’s something to think about. I would like to sing for y’all this song.”
When she completed her reedy-voiced rendition of “Amazing Grace,” the fans responded with warm, sustained applause. But once the show was over, Miss Davis was abruptly suspended from the cast for criticizing the police and infusing the Opry with unwanted political controversy.
Not long after the Skeeter Davis episode and the Opry’s departure from the Ryman, the controversy grew even more intense when one of the program’s best-known contemporary entertainers, singer and songwriter Tom T. Hall, withdrew from the cast. In terms of the credibility of the Opry, his defection represented a stunning setback. By the 1970s, Hall had established himself as one of the great song-writers in the history of country music. He was a story-teller from the hills of Kentucky, best-known for songs such as “Old Dogs, Children, and Watermelon Wine”—the poignant, true-life account of a melancholy night in a near-empty bar, when an old black janitor wandered up to him and offered a piece of homespun philosophy: In a world full of trouble, the old man said, there were not many things that a man could count on “but old dogs, children, and watermelon wine.”
Hall was riding the popularity of such songs when he decided to resign from the Grand Ole Opry. He didn’t say much about his reasons at first, but six months later he told one reporter: “As soon as we moved to the new place, I immediately and instinctively did not like it. The Ryman was different. It was almost an ego trip, really, standing on the same stage where Hank Williams once performed, and knowing there were people out there who appreciated what you were doing, who had driven in some cases a couple hundred miles to see it.
“But the audiences now don’t know what they are looking at. The old-time acts are being put down and dismissed. They’re playing to people who don’t know what they are seeing, who stop in at Opryland on their way to Florida, and take in a performance of the Opry and think, ‘What the hell is this guy doing?’”
Hall offered his criticisms late in 1974, and he was certainly not alone in holding that position. Within a few years, however, there were diverse signs that the Opry’s leaders, stung by the persistent bad press, had begun taking steps to repair the image. They had added to the cast such widely respected performers as Ronnie Milsap, one of country music’s top male vocalists throughout the mid-seventies, and Don Williams, a mellow-voiced Texan whose folky, low-key ballads have made him one of the most universally respected performers in country music.
There have also been guest performances by country-rock rebel Charlie Daniels, and others known for their musical innovations. And George Hamilton IV, whose close affiliation with the folk and protest singers of the sixties raised some eyebrows in country music circles, rejoined the Opry in the 1970s after an absence of several years. “I find much of the same spirit and enthusiasm,” Hamilton said, “that made the Opry such a great institution in the first place.”
George IV was no Pollyanna. He knew that the Opry had had its problems, but like Hall, he believed the same commercializing pressures were at work in country music as a whole. Whether they would prevail or not remained to be seen, but as the 1970s drew to a close, there were some outstanding pickers and poets who were striving—on behalf of themselves and their musical genre—not to be ruined by commercial success. To understand the tension under which they labored, you had to go back about a quarter of a century—back to the days when the Grand Ole Opry was still at the peak of its popularity.