The Ears Are EyesThe Ears Are Eyes
WSM took Tuesday off and switched on again Wednesday afternoon. Opening-night announcer Jack Keefe sat before a microphone in the velvet opulence of the WSM studio and described game one of the World Series, based on a steady stream of balls, strikes, hits, and outs from a news wire. A few blocks away, police had shut down Commerce Street for a promotion sponsored and hyped by the Banner. Men in boater hats and boys in knee britches listened to Keefe’s broadcast over loudspeakers and watched the game unfold on a mechanical Playograph scoreboard. Animated players cycled about the bases as hits and home runs were announced. The Washington Senators took the first game from the Pittsburgh Pirates. As the series went to seven games, throngs listened and watched as the shadows grew long on cool autumn evenings and trolley cars clanked up and down Third Avenue. They cheered when Kiki Cuyler—a former Nashville minor league star—broke a 7–7 tie in the eighth inning of the final game with a ground rule double. The Pirates upset the Senators after trailing three games to one.
Ball games had been narrated at a distance since 1922, and legendary Nashville sportswriter Grantland Rice had called the nation’s first live on-the-scene baseball game that same year. Though Keefe had heard such broadcasts, he’d never announced one, so the forty-year-old attorney relied on his knowledge of baseball (he’d lettered in the sport at Harvard) and his savvy as an entertainer to make it up as he went along. His improvisation kept with his life story, that of a renaissance man inclined to try anything once.
Born in Boston, Keefe graduated from a leading music conservatory at seventeen. Then, with a degree from Harvard’s education program, he uprooted and became superintendent of schools in Pendleton, Oregon. There, he cultivated his skills as an entertainer and helped organize the Pendleton Roundup, a famous Western rodeo. He obtained a one-year leave to tour with a musical production troupe and “never returned after playing an engagement in Nashville,” the Banner wrote years later, for he seems to have fallen in love. Keefe married in Nashville in 1915, then took a completely new turn as a chemist and professor of bacteriology at Vanderbilt’s medical school. Meanwhile, he sang about town in theatrical productions and with a glee club. He could reel off hundreds of popular songs and novelties at the keyboard. Apparently not feeling his time was full enough, he entered Vanderbilt law school, graduating in 1925 with the school’s highest academic honors. Although he went immediately into practice, he also spent many evenings at WSM, where his voice became an aural signature of the new station.
“He had a very unusual voice,” recalled early WSM announcer David Stone. “It was just like a Gatling gun, [with] a strange gargle in his throat. People called up frequently to find out who he was and what he was.” When Keefe moved out of the studio and began doing live play-by-play from local football games, he became a sensation. “I get quite a kick out of your details and enthusiasm,” wrote Virginia Garrott, a shut-in at the Watauga Sanitarium in the hilly country north of Nashville. “I’ve actually learned more football from listening to your details than I ever did in watching the game played.” Tennessean sports writer Blinkey Horn, laid up in a hospital during a Vanderbilt versus Georgia game a year later, rhapsodized about Keefe’s announcing.
“Across my mental vision, Jack Keefe—over WSM—guided me through the gridiron epic in Dudley Stadium,” he wrote. “With painstaking attention to every detail, with rare grasp of the intricacies of play, through my ears, he ‘showed’ me that moleskin masterpiece.” When Peck Owen caught a pass and scored the winning touchdown after a seesaw game, Horn felt “a typhoon of emotion.” Vanderbilt beat the Bulldogs 14–13, and Horn almost believed he’d been there. “[Keefe] showed me that the ears are eyes, and I am very grateful to him.”
Besides Keefe and two engineers, WSM employed a program director and “radio editor” named Bonnie Barnhardt. Known on-air as “The Lady o’ The Radio,” she had come to Nashville with a following as a musician and storyteller from Atlanta’s WSB, where she had been program director under Lambdin Kay. Twenty-three years old, plain but for her deep blue eyes, and not much of a typist, she set about building a schedule of local volunteer artists and rebuilding her fan base of “kiddies” who tuned in by the thousands for her 7:00 p.m. bedtime stories.
For a time in the 1920s, before male radio station owners fully understood the gravity or potential profitability of their enterprise, women were frequently assigned to manage what was seen as an administrative role. Although several important female broadcasting pioneers emerged from that short-lived window of semi-opportunity, Barnhardt was unfortunately not one of them. Craig seems to have wanted an anchoring announcer and manager with national prestige, and around the time WSM went on the air, he recruited George D. Hay of WLS in Chicago.
Craig, an avid hunter, could have gone after no better prey. Hay had already been with two powerful stations (WLS and WMC in Memphis), and in 1924 he had earned the Radio Digest cup as America’s favorite announcer. Born in Attica, Indiana, in 1895, Hay may have inherited some of his showmanship from his father, a jeweler who staged publicity stunts. When his father died, George was moved as a third grader to Chicago. But as an adult, he took to newspaper work and moved to Memphis, where he covered municipal courts for the Commercial Appeal. When the paper launched WMC in 1922, a reluctant Hay was recruited into radio. Once committed, he followed the fashion of the day for announcers by taking on a nickname, adapted from his comic serial newspaper column “Howdy Judge.” He proved good at radio, matching an original style with substantial accomplishments, including breaking the news over the air that Warren G. Harding had died in 1923. He developed a low, mantralike style, heavy with aural punctuation, and he highlighted his broadcasts with the dark tones of a wooden riverboat sound effect whistle he bought at a music store. Hay had never much cared for Chicago, but he moved back in 1924 when WLS offered him a job. The riverboat whistle became a train whistle, and he coined the on-air idea of the “WLS Unlimited” coursing along “the trackless paths of the air.”
Hay once said that Craig approached him two weeks after the October opening of WSM at a broadcasting convention in Texas to offer him the top job at WSM. Hay accepted on November 2 and drove his family to Nashville about a week later. The Banner heralded his arrival, noting that Hay was “neither solemn nor old . . . his personality radiates the sunshine of youth . . . He is planning to make Nashville his permanent home and to give to the local station that part of his personality which has made other radio stations famous throughout the land.” He took the title “radio director in charge.” Barnhardt continued her bedtime-story slot through the end of the month, but then slipped away, from WSM and apparently from radio altogether.
Hay found a station in step with national trends in broadcasting. The signal was strong, the talent was decent, and all the programming was live. Prestige broadcasters of the day disdained the idea of playing Victrola discs into a microphone, and once the musicians, announcers, and engineers were set in motion (most evenings that happened at 6:00 p.m.), they were “on,” just as surely as if they’d been on stage in a theater, until about 11:00 p.m.
Musically, WSM featured what some have called “potted palm” music—light orchestral and operatic fare played by efficiently small and sufficiently cultivated ensembles. One of Nashville’s early exemplars was a swarthy young man with hooded eyes and coarse black hair combed back to reveal a grand widow’s peak. Vito Pellettieri looked as Italian as a Neapolitan fisherman, but he’d been born in Nashville to an Italian father and a Swiss mother. He attended Hume-Fogg High School, a prominent landmark on Broadway, and studied violin. In his teens he thought about a law degree but “drifted into music.” As early as 1906, he assembled a locally innovative combo of violin, piano, and drums. For years, he found regular work in hotels, including the Andrew Jackson. He was also tapped to entertain over the Baptist-sponsored WCBQ, but now Hay sought him out for regular WSM broadcasts. Pellettieri’s “Radio Five” (or Three or Seven) could play Vivaldi, popular songs, or a polite simulation of the blues, including such staple tunes as “Sitting on Top of the World,” in a stiff and formal style.
Music schools provided armies of early radio entertainers, and Nashville had a particularly good talent pool. Gaetano de Luca, who had played his opera records over Jack DeWitt’s first radio station at Ward-Belmont School, directed music studies there for nine successful years. In 1927 he left to direct the new Nashville Conservatory of Music, which was launched by a group of musicians and business leaders, including Joel Cheek, the Maxwell House coffee baron, and Luke Lea and James G. Stahlman, the publishers of the Tennessean and Banner. They raised a quarter of a million dollars and told de Luca to do what it took to make “Nashville the musical center of the South.” Before and after the move, de Luca’s pupils streamed through WSM, offering swooning art songs and gentle classics.
Still, with no records allowed and no network to draw from, filling the hours could be a challenge. Craig’s daughter Elizabeth remembers Miss Daisy Hoffman, her piano instructor and a WSM prime-time regular, taking her up to the fifth floor of National Life’s headquarters at Seventh and Union. “When they couldn’t fill it up any other way, they would call my piano teacher,” she said. “She always insisted that I go. And I was scared to death . . . [An announcer] always said what our names were, how old we were, and how many years of music we had had with Miss Daisy. I remember that one of the pieces I played was MacDowell’s ‘To a Wild Rose.’ ”
The new station made its microphones and studios available to Vanderbilt chancellor James Kirkland so he could invite alumni to the school’s upcoming, four-day, fiftieth-birthday campus reunion. An entire show was built around promotion of the event, with music and a substantial speech by Kirkland, who was fully aware that he suddenly had a platform from which he could reach across the entire South, calling his graduates home. The Banner editorialized with enthusiasm about the National Life’s “vision, courage and civic enterprise” and pointed to Kirkland’s talk as the kind of public service it appreciated and expected from its new local tribune. Millions, it anticipated, will tune in and “be reminded anew and in an agreeable manner of Nashville.”
Other groups embraced WSM as a promotional tool. The Nashville Shriners offered a live, on-air preview of their minstrel show to attract people to an upcoming three-night run at the Orpheum Theater. When a hurricane hit Miami in 1926, WSM made appeals for American Red Cross donations and helped with emergency communications in the faraway disaster. Closer to home and on a smaller scale, WSM was able to act like a community bulletin board and emergency response service. In one case, when attempts to reach a Nashville traveling salesman by telegram failed, Keefe put word out over the air that he was needed at home. The salesman heard of the plea and called from High Point, North Carolina, to learn that his daughter had died in an accident.
Ultimately, however, it was music that best showcased WSM’s highbrow aims, and few WSM artists got more early airtime than another of Edwin’s relatives, first cousin Francis Craig. When he was eight years old, Francis passed by a pool hall in Clarksville and heard ragtime piano for the first time. Family lore has it that he headed home, ascended the piano bench, and so convincingly played a facsimile of what he’d heard that his strict Methodist parents were torn between admiration of his gift and concern that he’d been irredeemably corrupted. Heeding a biblical admonition in the book of Matthew to nurture talent, the Craigs offered Francis piano lesson and heavy doses of formal church music. Then at an early recital for the Ladies Missionary Society, Francis whipped his mother’s favorite hymn “Brighten the Corner” into a ragtime tune. The ladies loved it. “Mother Craig,” wrote Craig’s biographer Robert Ikard, “was crushed.”
When Francis Craig started at Vanderbilt in 1919, he joined Phi Delta Theta, where he was briefly a fraternity brother of Jesse Wills and Allen Tate. Both Wills and Tate were well-known poets, and Wills was also a future president of National Life. But Craig was a terrible student, who was in and out of Vanderbilt over the next two years. During this time, he organized his first band, matching three students with five local professionals to play a Sigma Nu dance for forty-five dollars. James Kirkland, the larger-than-life chancellor of Vanderbilt, welcomed Craig into the Jazz Age by dressing him down over his group’s name, the Vanderbilt Jazz Band. At the time, the very word jazz evoked sex and licentiousness to men like Kirkland. He ordered Craig to change the name or leave the school.
Craig did both in 1922, ditching campus life for good and changing his group’s name to Francis Craig and His Orchestra. The new name better suited the music Craig would conduct over the coming years anyway, for it was not jazz, but popular tunes pitched for polite social dancing or atmosphere in hotels and dining rooms throughout the South. It was convivial, conservative, and at least somewhat lucrative, so Craig spent most of the next decades of his professional life in a tuxedo or dinner jacket, working a good deal harder than he had as a student. Francis Craig’s groups showed up on time, and he paid his players reliably. They jobbed in ever-widening circles beyond Vanderbilt, including the prestigious Belle Meade Country Club, where most of the senior National Life brass were members. The group also traveled to North Carolina, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama, where it found steady work at the Cascade Plunge Pool, a dinner club with swimming.
Robert Craig, Francis’s father, had grown increasingly critical of his son’s chosen profession. It was simply beneath the family’s stature, and “jazz” (he could not see the difference) was a wastrel’s music. Uncle C. A. joined in the campaign, offering wayward Francis a post at National Life. But the young bandleader proved as willful in the pursuit of his passion as Edwin Craig (“Cud’n Edwin,” as he would have said it) had been in his. In October of 1924, Francis married Elizabeth Gewin and moved to Birmingham. Her family managed to talk him out of music briefly, connecting him to a job in sales with a marble company. But he was “ill fitted and miserable,” Ikard wrote, and he “persuaded Elizabeth to return to Nashville.”
Francis Craig may have surprised his families—and himself—when he was offered a regular job at the Grill Room at the luxurious Hermitage Hotel, one block from the capitol and National Life. The Hermitage had opened in 1910 to great acclaim as the city’s jewel. Craig’s band played lunch and dinner in a warmly lit downstairs restaurant, where white-jacketed waiters served the city’s business and political elite. Though the band included reeds, piano, drums, banjo, and tuba, it swung lightly without getting too hot. The job earned Francis legitimacy in his own heart, in Elizabeth’s eyes, and even in his father’s estimation. And when Robert heard his son’s music coming over the remarkable new radio, he began to understand the choices his son had made.
If jazz constituted the opposite of civilized music in the eyes of chancellors and ministers, Tennessee old-time music was only marginally more respectable, and yet fiddles and banjos found a place on WSM almost from the start. Back in the summer of 1925, a National Life employee had informed a musician friend about his company’s new radio station. The friend, Dr. Humphrey Bate, was a part-time bandleader and a full-time country doctor who made house calls, often in exchange for produce, poultry, ham, and molasses. A distinguished, well-dressed man some fifty years old, he held medical credentials from the University of Nashville and fighting credentials from the Spanish-American War. Besides his work and his family, Bate loved fishing and his band. The six-piece group featured a fiddle and banjo core, complimented with cello or string bass and his own harmonica.
Bate’s local renown earned an invitation to play WDAD, another local radio start-up, as soon as it went on the air in the late summer of 1925. After checking with National Life to make sure the engagement wouldn’t preclude appearances on WSM, he led his group forty miles to the city to play. Then, during the first month of WSM’s life, Bate was given his own hour-long slot there as well. Historian Jack Hurst quoted Bate’s daughter Alcyone, then the band’s pianist: “We played [at WSM] before Mr. Hay came. We would drive to Nashville and perform on WDAD in the afternoon, then we would walk up the hill and play WSM later in the evening.”
During the first week of November, Bate and other WSM regulars were part of a gala evening at the Ryman Auditorium—a fund-raiser for the Policeman’s Benefit Association. The eclectic slate of local talent looked like a match for WSM’s ambitions, so its newest engineer, Jack Montgomery, hired in late October from WCBQ, was charged with setting up the microphones and telephone lines that would connect the studios to the city’s venerable concert hall. On a Thursday, one night after Will Rogers had played the Ryman to standing ovations, WSM’s Jack Keefe presided as master of ceremonies. After Mayor Howse greeted the thousands of policemen, families, and guests crushed in the hall’s pews, Keefe sat down at a piano to accompany a soprano. Beasley Smith’s Andrew Jackson Hotel orchestra followed, as did another WSM regular, the Knights of Columbus Quartet.
Then the program took a hillbilly turn. Bate led his band on his harmonica, followed by a character whom Charles Dickens might have invented, had be been a Southerner instead of a Londoner. Uncle Dave Macon, billed as “the struttinest strutter that ever strutted a strut,” had a mouthful of gold teeth, a portly carriage, and a vaudevillian’s whoop-de-do. Like Bate, he had for years been a professional man with a music habit, but his Macon Midway Mule and Wagon Transportation Company of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, had been wiped out a couple of years back by things called “trucks,” and he’d more or less retired into a life of professional entertaining. In 1925 he was fifty-five years old and a star of the Lowe’s theater circuit. He’d even made a record a year before in New York. And he’d already enjoyed radio exposure on WDAD. Uncle Dave’s frequent partner, fiddling Sidney Harkreader, also played with Bate. When Uncle Dave took the stage, seated as if on a bouncing chair, with a banjo tilt-a-whirling in his lap, Sidney cut away on “Sugar Walks Down the Street” and “Turkey in the Straw” to enthusiastic whoops and applause.
It was this broadcast, aired just as George Hay was making his move to Nashville, that most directly anticipated the birth of the Grand Ole Opry. The oft-repeated story goes that a few weeks after Hay’s arrival, on November 28, 1925, he invited country fiddler Uncle Jimmy Thompson to play for an hour on a Saturday night. The crotchety seventy-eight-year-old had come to Hay’s attention through the fiddler’s niece, Eva Thompson Jones, a regular WSM pianist. His old-time fiddling struck a chord. Telegrams, calls, and letters poured in from rural Tennessee and beyond, cheering and begging for more of the same.
“The Barn Dance program was not formally established on that night, though Uncle Jimmy returned the next week to play again,” wrote Opry historian Charles Wolfe. “In neither case did Hay bill it, through the newspapers, as any sort of special old-time program. Probably during December the idea for such a program was taking shape in Hay’s head.” About that time, Hay reportedly told a local old-time musician that “he was going to start something like the National Barn Dance in Chicago and expected to do better because the people were real and genuine and the people really were playing what they were raised on.”
Edwin Craig appears to have endorsed the old-time turn early on. “We were looking for something which would give us national identification,” he once said. “Hay had become acquainted with string bands when he worked in Memphis, and he thought there was a great future for folk music . . . He met with us, and we decided to feature a Saturday night folk music program.” Hay also would have learned that Craig had been a mandolin player in a string band during his prep school days. “He liked the music played by rural people,” wrote Opry historian Jack Hurst. “He knew its heritage.” Neil Craig agreed that all that is true, but he noted another motivation: “The Grand Ole Opry was put on the air to try to get into the white [insurance] business.”
Bundles of mail and telegrams proved an audience was out there. Saturday night was the best time to reach working people (the “industrial” class targeted by National Life’s Shield Men) at their most relaxed, as they hovered in a carefree limbo between six days of toil and Sabbath-day propriety. In late December a story in the Tennessean said that “because of this recent revival in the popularity of the old familiar tunes, WSM has arranged to have an hour or two every Saturday night, starting December 26.”
Nashville’s tiny radio community had to coexist with the suddenly powerful WSM. Initially, cooperation was the rule. Stations shared talent and observed “silent” nights in deference to one another. Jack DeWitt’s former collaborator Harry Stone continued to build a broadcasting career quite literally out of thin air. Working part-time at WCBQ and part-time at a radio store, he impressed potential customers by calling the station and having the operator there play a record over the air at the customers’ request. He reportedly arranged Nashville’s first sponsored radio show, a Maxwell House Coffee program with the Fisk Jubilee Singers and a small Beasley Smith–led combo.
In the spring of 1926, WCBQ changed hands, from the unquiet First Baptist Church to a joint venture of the Braid Electric Company and Waldrum Drug Company. Around that time, Stone became station manager. With new call letters WBAW to reflect the new ownership, Stone set up studios in an old theater at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Church Street, a block from National Life. The station, Jack DeWitt recalled, “eked out a living by transmitting commercial messages along with musical selections from recordings or from live talent.” When a department store hired Uncle Dave Macon do to a series of daily programs from one of its show windows, Stone ran a microphone line across the street and broadcast until the police came to break up the crowd that gathered. When an expensive radio tube blew out, Stone had to stay off the air several weeks to raise money to replace it and improvise a cooling system for the tubes with a garden hose. When some drapes caught fire and destroyed the broadcasting gear, WSM helped him rebuild.
Another Nashville station that would shape WSM took to the air just days before National Life. WDAD belonged to charismatic Fred “Pop” Exum, who ran Dad’s Auto Accessories, which also sold radios and radio parts. WDAD immediately began playing music that was more down-home and low-down than its local competition. Dr. Bate and Uncle Dave were early regulars. And on at least one occasion, Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, two years into her wildly successful recording career on Columbia Records, visited the city and played with her orchestra over WDAD. The event was previewed with some acclaim in the Banner, promising listeners “one of the most wonderful treats they have ever listened to over radio.” The coverage marked a rare instance of mainstream Nashville celebrating black blues, which locally was as segregated as the record bins delineating “hillbilly” and “race” or “sepia” music.
More propitious for the future of country music and WSM were the WDAD origins of another black performer, the Harmonica Wizard, DeFord Bailey. Pop Exum first knew Bailey as an odd-jobs fellow who traveled chiefly by bicycle and acquired parts at his store. Besides being an agreeable young man, he was the best harmonica player Pop had ever heard. Bailey’s family was steeped in old-time and folk music, including songs like “Lost John” and “Old Joe Clark,” which would have been popular among rural whites. His grandfather, Lewis Bailey, who had been a slave until 1863 and who served in the Union Army, was renown as a fiddler. One of Bailey’s aunts played guitar. An uncle played harmonica. The Bailey family band became an annual highlight at the Wilson County Fair, and area barn dances relied on them.
Bailey had been born into a new century, on December 14, 1899. Instead of a baby rattle, he was given a harmonica. At age three, he contracted polio. Stuck in bed, he plunked a banjo his father made out of a groundhog skin stretched over a hoop from a cheese box. Bailey survived the ordeal, but grew to scarcely five feet tall. He also recalled making fiddles out of corn stalks, whistles from cane, and percussive bones from cow’s ribs dried in the sun. But the harmonica became an extension of his hand and voice box. When he at last began to play beyond the boundaries of his family, word spread fast. In a county loaded with harmonica players Bailey became famous quickly.
Nineteen-year-old Bailey became a house servant for J. C. Bradford, a pioneering Nashville investment banker. Mrs. Bradford discovered his harmonica talent and had him play, in white coat, black tie, and white hat, for high society company. After that, Bailey worked a variety of jobs—helping in the kitchen of the Maxwell House Hotel, working at a motion-picture house, shining shoes at a barber shop on Third Avenue, and running an elevator in the Hitchcock Building. Everywhere he could, including the elevator, he’d play his mouth harp. One day a secretary to Runcie Clements, the new vice president and comptroller of National Life, heard Bailey and invited him to play at a formal dinner at the company’s new headquarters. He made five dollars.
Bailey was invited to be one of the first entertainers on WDAD. Besides his regular spots, he was coaxed into entering an on-air harmonica contest. Nobody objected to a black man in an otherwise all-white competition, until he outplayed everyone. Exum, against his own best instincts, named Bailey runner-up to avoid trouble. Despite such obstacles, fellow WDAD entertainer Humphrey Bate prodded Bailey to come along with him to WSM, and convinced Hay to let Bailey play one Saturday night without an audition. It didn’t take much for a delighted Hay to realize he had a spectacular musician on his hands. “We’re going to use you,” he told Bailey.
At one year old, WSM could point to a competent record as a new broadcaster in the South. It had showcased local talent, brought the Nashville Symphony and Vanderbilt football into thousands of homes, and spotlighted local businesses, hotels, and civic organizations. It had opened up local concert halls, like the Ryman Auditorium and the new War Memorial Auditorium, to new audiences. It had made a regional star out of James I. Vance, pastor at the First Presbyterian Church, whose sermons were broadcast every Sunday and who announced that he was convinced the radio was saving souls and boosting church attendance. Station publicity noted that WSM had broadcast music “ranging from the most austere of the operas to the popular songs of the day, including musical comedy numbers and operettas.” It even touted its barn dance, “which has received a large amount of applause from the radio listeners throughout the country.”
A birthday show called on some 130 entertainers who had been a part of the station’s first year. The studios filled with gifts from well-wishers: fruit baskets, sweets from the Union Ice Cream Company, and scads of flowers, including an arrangement made to look like a broadcast station with two tiny aerials. Radio stars Leo Fitzpatrick and Lambdin Kay returned, as did political ally Major Van Nostrand. Local radio mover and shaker Harry Stone was also on hand.
Edwin Craig thanked the city and its musical talent for a year of support and entertainment. He noted that the station, now with three full-time engineers, was growing. He thanked Martha Rowland Brown, who had taken over the bedtime story slot and its large fan club. And he gave special kudos to George Hay and Jack Keefe for holding down the announcing duties during more than 1,200 hours of broadcasts. “WSM has demonstrated two things,” he said. “First, that Nashville is in the very forefront of all cities of America of like population in the number of its artists, in the merit of its artists, and in the versatility of its artists. Second, that its artists, without exception, gladly and graciously give of their talent to the great radio public.” The commemorative broadcast ran until well after 3:00 in the morning.
WSM spawned the sincerest form of flattery when National Life’s most formidable competitor, Life & Casualty Insurance Company, launched its own 1,000-watt radio station in November 1926. Despite their business rivalry, WSM stayed off the air for WLAC’s debut and shared many of its regular talents. Coincidentally, WLAC also had its studios on the fifth floor of its company headquarters, on Fourth Avenue, and it was run by a company vice president, one J. Truman Ward.
Meanwhile at Seventh and Union, Edwin Craig and Runcie Clements, appointed as the elder overseer of the radio service, were thinking about ways to further develop WSM’s profile and prestige. Though Clements was also the company’s comptroller, there seems to have been little concern about cost. After spending about $40,000 to get WSM on the air, the company dropped $50,000 more in 1926 and more than that in 1927 with nary a dime in commercial revenue, for it did not run advertisements. But to grow, besides solving persistent interference problems, WSM would need to be part of the emerging radio networks being built among the cities of the East. At the hub of the most important network was New York’s WEAF, the station that had pioneered sponsored shows. Owned and operated by AT&T, it’s not surprising that WEAF also pioneered shared programming among stations tied by telephone lines. By 1925, AT&T had networked twenty-six stations. Because the company’s maps connected the stations with red pencil lines, the web became known as the Red Network.
The other key corporate players in early radio—General Electric, Westinghouse, and RCA—were at war with AT&T over access to those lines and the use of certain disputed patents. Huge projected fortunes in a brand-new medium were in the balance; they’d even begun to contemplate the inevitability of television at that point. This so-called radio group made a stab at a chain, building its own Blue Network centered around New York’s WJZ. But because they were forced to lease antiquated telegraph wires, the sound quality couldn’t compete with AT&T’s tube-amplified lines. Finally, after years of acrimony, peace was made possible when AT&T decided the controversial new field of “toll” broadcasting was too uncertain and full of potential pitfalls for them to continue as a radio network. AT&T sold WEAF and its web of connections to the radio group for $1 million in early 1926. The networks were bundled together under a new corporate entity, creating the first of many acronyms that would populate the mediascape over the next century: NBC, the National Broadcasting Company.
Craig wasted no time. He and Runcie Clements took the train to New York that winter and came back with, evidently, an oral agreement making WSM the first NBC station in the South. The first feed to WSM, at 6:20 on a Sunday night in early January 1927, brought a live variety show from the Capitol Theater in New York, followed by the Atwater-Kent Hour, a showcase of grand opera and other vocal stars sponsored by a prominent manufacturer of radio sets. Initially, WSM broadcast NBC programs only on Sunday and Tuesday nights, but before long the network became part of every broadcast day.
New York and Nashville drew closer in other ways. Between 1926 and 1928, WSM saw its first homegrown talents graduate to the big time. Obed “Dad” Pickard of nearby Ashland City performed a one-man-band novelty act on the Opry and soon added his family members to the show. An audition in Detroit led to an NBC contract for a show called The Cabin Door. The Pickard Family would occupy a national stage for years after getting its start at WSM. A very different talent, bass-baritone Joseph MacPherson, was invited to join the Metropolitan Opera early in 1926. By the summer, he’d been slated for a series of roles and was in New York being coached in various languages.
Nashville fussed over and adored none of its hometown heroes, however, so much as James Melton, a singer who worked the boundary between popular and classical music. He had approached Francis Craig in about 1923 at an engagement at the University of Georgia, where Melton, a student, asked about a saxophone slot. Craig didn’t need another reed, but when he found out how well Melton sang, he made the kid the band’s featured vocalist. Melton moved to Nashville, where he struggled at Vanderbilt but thrived studying voice with Ward-Belmont’s Gaetano de Luca. He grew into an operatic-quality tenor who could sing an aria or a romantic ballad with equal aplomb. When he struck out for the Great White Way in late 1927, Francis Craig went with him for support. A seemingly fruitless week ended in discovery. After being repeatedly denied an audition by the prestigious Samuel Lionel “Roxy” Rothafel, Melton burst into song in the impresario’s lobby. Roxy reconsidered, and Melton was hired at $250 per week to sing on NBC’s popular variety show Roxy and His Gang. Before long, Melton was voted America’s favorite radio tenor. Nashvillians bragged on him for decades. WSM carried Roxy locally, further stoking community pride. It earned WSM a surplus of local goodwill, which a certain Saturday night show was starting to tax.
George D. Hay’s Saturday-night radio hootenannies lacked a name or a consistent identity. During its first year and a half, it was listed variously in the newspapers as “the Saturday night program,” “the popular and barn dance program,” and “general good times and barn dance party,” and the show ebbed and flowed in length. At various times it featured Hawaiian music, barbershop and gospel quartets, popular tenor singers, Dixieland, and the Castle Heights Military Orchestra. Even announcer Jack Keefe’s piano playing made it on several times. Uncle Jimmy Thompson, Dr. Humphrey Bate, and DeFord Bailey made up its core, playing generally half-hour-long sets. But as Wolfe described it, the show initially was a “rather confused, locally aimed, and informally structured radio presentation.”
During these early months, WSM’s country music leanings first attracted local controversy. In mid-1926, the station held an informal referendum over whether to keep fiddlers and other rustic sounds on Saturday night. The results were published in the Tennessean on May 9. “While some listeners seem to prefer the so-called popular tunes . . . they have not indicated their wishes in the mail to any extent,” the station announced. Indeed a follow-up story in The Shield said that mail ran “about fifty to one” in favor of keeping the barn dance on the air. Despite that lopsided ratio, WSM compromised, most likely because it had to balance enthusiasm coming from out of town with local objections to having the Athens of the South represented by hillbillies. “Several letters have been received from Nashville expressing a decided opinion against the barn-dance programs,” it explained. “In an effort to please as many people as possible, WSM will continue the barn-dance programs on Saturday night; but the time allotted to the old-time music will be cut down considerably, and a program of so-called popular music will be given during the later hours of the evening.” Some loyal listeners felt snubbed. Thomas Martin wrote from Toronto: “I think you would make a mistake to change your Saturday-night program to any other class of music than old-time barn dance, as it is the best program that is broadcast by any other station on the map, and I have listened to a great many.”
In any event, the barn dance wouldn’t begin to have a genuine impact until it had a name. And as it turns out, its famous title was forged out of the very highbrow/common folks dichotomy that had begun to define WSM’s unique personality. NBC piped in a show called the Music Appreciation Hour hosted by Walter Damrosch, one of the radio era’s first great music popularizers and educators, the very personification of refined taste. As his show wound down one Saturday in 1927, Hay had the studio monitors on and could hear the host introduce a novel piece: “While most artists realize that there is no place in the classics for realism, nevertheless I am going to break one of my rules and present a composition by a young composer from ‘Ioway’ who sent us his latest number, which depicts the onrush of a locomotive . . .”
At that point, Hay wrote, “the good doctor directed his symphony orchestra through the number which carried many ‘whooses’ depicting an engine trying to come to a full stop. Then he closed his programme with his usual sign-off. Our control operator gave us the signal which indicated that we were on the air. We paid our respects to Dr. Damrosch and said on the air something like this: ‘Friends, the programme which just came to a close was devoted to the classics. Dr. Damrosch told us that it was generally agreed that there is no place in the classics for realism. However, from here on out for the next three hours we will present nothing but realism. It will be down to earth for the ‘earthy.’ In respectful contrast to Dr. Damrosch’s presentation of the number which depicts the onrush of the locomotive we will call on one of our performers, Deford Bailey, with his harmonica, to give us the country version of his ‘Pan American Blues.’ Whereupon, Deford Bailey, a wizard with the harmonica, played the number. At the close of it, your reporter said: ‘For the past hour we have been listening to music taken largely from Grand Opera, but from now on, we will present ‘The Grand Ole Opry.’ ”
Hay’s famous account probably embellishes the truth and elides events to some degree. Broadcasting histories, for example, say that the Music Appreciation Hour launched on Fridays in 1928 rather than Saturdays in 1927. Accuracy aside, as the story has echoed down through the years, it has perhaps overshadowed the fact that WSM was a general-interest radio station whose leaders identified more with Damrosch than with their local radio barn dance. Indeed, Hay wrote that, “The members of our radio audience who loved Dr. Damrosch and his Symphony Orchestra thought we should be shot at sunrise and did not hesitate to tell us so.” So he knew what he was up against, but at the end of the day he had the support of Edwin Craig, who believed in the worth of folk music. His endorsement alone was enough to keep the old-time show on the air. Hay seems to have seen himself in the role of a prairie populist ready to elevate the music of common people to a place of respect among the fine arts. The piquant contrast between the classical and the rustic, between opera and Opry, he said, “is part of America—fine lace and homespun cloth, our show being covered entirely by the latter.”
Just as country musicians had no idea of the import of the newly named Opry, Nashvillians didn’t hear the so-called Big Bang of the country music business, though history records that it happened a mere two hundred miles away in Bristol, Tennessee, in the summer of 1927. A few record companies had been flirting with old-time music for a decade or so when Ralph Peer, an executive with the pop and folk Okeh label, made a savvy deal with the much larger Victor Talking Machine Company. He’d scout for southern folk talent and let the company own the recordings if he could keep the publishing rights to the songs he committed to disc. Never mind that many of the songs he “discovered” were ages old; Peer staked copyright claims on a catalog of American folk songs that rapidly made him rich and made Peer Music one of the world’s largest music companies. In so doing, Peer took his portable disc-cutting equipment to numerous southern towns. One was Bristol, a city that straddles the Tennessee/Virginia border, where his newspaper advertisements attracted unknowns Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. The records made at those sessions sold in large numbers, launching two of the seminal acts of what would come to be called country music.
One year later, Peer’s traveling operation made its first stop in Nashville. He found an eager WSM talent pool, grateful to record close to home. Uncle Dave Macon, Sidney Harkreader, Obed Pickard, DeFord Bailey, and others had already made records, but chiefly in Atlanta or New York. Nashville was home to exactly zero serious recording studios. Peer’s studio was a room draped with blankets in the YMCA building just next door to National Life. Ten acts, including talent from WSM, WLAC, and WBAW, cut more than fifty songs over seven working days. And as a result, a couple dozen sides were issued for the Victor label encompassing string bands, DeFord’s blues, and the gospel harmonizing of the Vaughan Quartet. Though the Victor operation packed up and moved back to Atlanta, the sessions marked Nashville’s debut as a recording town.
Perhaps Edwin Craig’s most vexing problem during WSM’s first years on the air was interference. Though he badly wanted his station to meet the highest standards of broadcasting, he couldn’t control the airwaves, which were an overcrowded, unregulated cacophony of signals. Craig heard as much complaint about poor reception as he did praise for the high quality of the programming. Listeners got to know the technical term heterodynes, the squalls and whistles that resulted when two signals of nearly the same frequency crashed into and disrupted one another. When Craig got word that three different radio outfits—including one in Cincinnati—had been issued licenses to broadcast on exactly WSM’s frequency, he sent an urgent protest to radio official D. B. Carson: “We will suffer serious interference,” he pleaded. “We hope this report is incorrect.”
During his negotiations with federal radio officials, Craig had forged a particularly close relationship with Carson’s regional subordinate Major Walter Van Nostrand. In January 1926, Major Van Nostrand came to the station’s defense, arranging a three-way meeting in Nashville with Commissioner Carson. But half a year of meetings, memos, and waiting produced no solutions, and in July 1926, Craig blew his stack: “If it were not for the fact that my stenographer is a nice young lady I would be able to express myself in terms which would more nearly do justice to my feelings,” he vented to Van Nostrand. “It seems to me a disgrace to our form of government that an industry of so great value to the citizenship of this country would be laid open to the destructive will of any who wish to abuse it.” Craig said he’d just returned from a long trip through the South, up the Pacific coast and to Canada and found “reception greatly impaired and in places utterly destroyed by exactly those same stations which have always been responsible for our trouble.” He promised WSM would continue to abide by the law, stick to its assigned frequency, and hope for the best. “We hope very much that you will not altogether abandon in disgust the Field of Broadcasting but that you will pay us a little visit at some early date. With best wishes and kindest personal regards, I am yours very truly, E. W. Craig.”
The problem persisted into 1927, and WSM’s only consolation was that it was suffering along with the entire radio industry. About the same time Edwin Craig was writing his angry letter, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover was notified by the courts that under the current law he had no authority to regulate who was using what frequency or signal strength, even though he’d been doing so, to a point, for several years. Hoover’s preferred solution was to get the radio business to come together and draw up its own scheme for the assignment and regulation of signals, but the industry’s proposals remained only theories without an act of Congress and an enforcement body. Stations began to pop on without licenses and jump around on the dial to find their own best frequency. Or they’d bump up their power without asking anybody’s permission. By 1927, the number of stations had grown from five hundred to seven hundred (scores of others simply failed), and chaos reigned in the ether. Hoover told an interviewer in mid-1926 that radio was acting like a “spoiled child . . . acting up before company.”
At last, the convoluted world of broadcasting rose to the level of presidential attention. Hoover’s boss, President Coolidge, asked in his December 7, 1926 address to Congress for a new legislative framework for broadcasting. “Congress,” wrote radio historian Daniel Garvey, “which had failed eight times in six years to enact such legislation, pushed through the Radio Act of 1927 in little more than a month.” The law created the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), a body with the power to assign or allocate stations to certain frequencies in a way that would minimize interference nationally. Intended to be a one-year transitional body that would issue broadcast licenses until the Department of Commerce took over radio, the FRC was in fact recast as the Federal Communications Commission in 1934, and the Department of Commerce never directly regulated broadcasting again.
During the radio conferences of the early 1920s, the major broadcasting and radio companies had proposed a system in which a limited number of stations would have exclusive rights to a specific frequency and higher power than others. The first cap imagined was 5,000 watts, but some eagerly wanted to proceed to 50,000 watts or even more. Tension between small stations and deep-pocketed broadcasting companies spawned debates about how much power should be concentrated in how few stations’ hands. A General Electric representative said at one conference that small stations should “learn to keep out of it,” and a Westinghouse representative proposed there should only be twelve to fifteen stations nationwide at very high power.
In the midst of these power plays, congressman Ewin Davis, a Tennessee Democrat with whom Craig had cultivated a relationship, was looking out for WSM. Also a Vanderbilt graduate, he and the National Life families ran in the same circles, and he was a good friend to have. He attached an amendment to the Radio Act that divided the country geographically into five radio zones, with the understanding that the FRC would allocate signals equitably within those zones. This critical break prevented WSM from having to compete for special designation with longer-standing northeastern stations. Against its regional brethren, WSM looked like and indeed was a leader, even if it was a latecomer. Several times in 1928, Representative Davis directly defended WSM against a proposed power reduction and campaigned for the station’s freedom to move on the dial. He complained at one hearing that he wasn’t able to get the station even in his home in Tullahoma, just sixty-nine miles from Nashville.
At last, WSM acted unilaterally to obtain a stronger, clearer signal. The station went off the air in early December 1926 and came back on January 7, 1927, with a new 5000-watt transmitter. Craig and Clements also appear to have jumped to a more advantageous point on the radio dial. By April, however, WSM was back to its original wavelength and power of 282 meters at 1,000 watts. Then in mid-June, a government order granted WSM official permission to move on the dial and boost its power back to 5,000 watts, which quickly improved its reach. But the final solution to the interference problem came in November 1928, when the FRC ordered a sweeping reallocation of the broadcast spectrum. WSM was placed at 650 kilohertz (expressed as a frequency, not a wavelength), where it would remain evermore. By virtue of its political connections through Representative Davis, Craig’s growing profile in the broadcasting world, his expenditure on WSM, and the station’s obvious position of influence in its federally set zone, WSM was one of only forty stations in the country to be given its frequency exclusively. It was a huge victory, giving WSM a national monopoly on the 650 signal. Reports of dramatically better reception poured in from all over the United States. A term was soon coined for these privileged signals; they were America’s clear channel stations.
The year 1928 was auspicious for WSM in other ways. In February, the station hired on Harry Stone from WBAW. Just thirty, Stone was now a well-known local radio voice who could manage any aspect of a station, from basic engineering and announcing to promotion and ad sales. His move merited a picture on the Banner’s Sunday radio page showing a confident, handsome man with dark hair slicked back in a sharp center part. George Hay remained director, and while Keefe divided his time between lawyering and appearing on WSM, Stone became the station’s first full-time staff announcer. About the same time, WSM made the leap into commercial broadcasting with “a limited number of sponsored musical programmes, representing several of the outstanding business houses of the city,” according to station publicity. Sponsors initially included investment bankers Caldwell & Company, Standard Candy, and Loveman’s department store.
In September, according to Clements, “we realized that in order to maintain the high standard of our studio programs it was necessary to compensate our artists and engage a staff of performers.” A local orchestra leader named Orin Gaston was asked to assemble and direct a studio group that could play anything from “opera to the ‘St. Louis Blues.’ ” He had appeared on WSM a number of times as leader of the Loew’s Theater Vendome Orchestra. When he arrived at WSM, he brought his library of sheet music, a vital resource for a growing station. Most ambitiously, WSM occupied more of National Life’s fifth floor, more than doubling in space. In a 1928 Radio Digest article, WSM was said to have “proved its real value to the community,” and a new Studio B “has been deemed in order.”
NBC feeds had allowed programming to grow from ten hours per week in 1925 to about fifty hours per week in 1928. Weekdays began about 11:00 a.m. with the Farm and Home Program followed by a luncheon concert by Vito Pellettieri’s Andrew Jackson Hotel Orchestra. Dusk on weeknights marked the juxtaposition of the closing market quotations and business news followed immediately by a bedtime story. NBC opened up the world to Nashville with a vividness it had never known in the newspapers. In 1927 Nashvillians listened with rapture to the arrival of Charles Lindbergh in Paris. Later, local man Bill Hart praised the station for its broadcast of Commander Richard Byrd’s address on his polar and transatlantic flights. “It was thrilling and inspiring to hear from the very lips of the man whose daring accomplished them, an account of these two adventures, and I thank you for it,” he said. The Republican and Democratic national conventions were carried in full that summer. “We had a large crowd with us the entire time and assure you that the courtesy of WSM is appreciated very much by all of us,” wrote C. L. Ferguson from his Pikeville, Tennessee, drugstore about the Republican event in June. Other NBC programs included the General Motors Family Party, the National Grand Opera Ensemble, the Philco Hour, and the Cliquot Club Eskimos, a sextet of very tan young men who played banjos while wearing huge fur coats (to believe their publicity pictures), all to bolster their sponsor, a ginger ale.
Locally, WSM looked for ways to grow more integrated into its community, largely with live remote broadcasts, a common practice at prestige stations around the country. Junior engineer Aaron Shelton worked his first remote “pickup” from a series of motor-boat races late that summer, which turned into something more illuminating. He took a rudimentary mixer and three microphones down to the Cumberland River wharf at the bottom of Broadway just after lunch on a Saturday and set up the gear on a viewing platform, hooking into the telephone system to send his signal back to the studios at Seventh and Union. George Hay arrived at a quarter to three to announce the event and found he had time to kill between races. “He described our location, the other adjacent buildings, the weather, the wind direction, the temperature and any other thing he could see across the river,” Shelton remembered. Eventually, “something upstream on our side of the river caught Judge Hay’s attention. One of the large Negro churches had brought what seemed to be the entire congregation down to the river for a Saturday afternoon baptizing ceremony.” He remembered Hay’s midtempo, midrange monotone: “The pastor has his flock all lined up on the river bank, and he and one of the brethren lead one of the sisters out into the river. The sister gives vent to several impassioned ‘Hallelujahs’ and ‘Praise the Lords.’ Those remaining upon the bank, awaiting their turn, answer back with equal enthusiasm. And now the pastor, holding the sister’s nose, dips her completely beneath the surface. He raises her back quickly and the whole congregation gives forth more ‘Hallelujahs’ but now at a much greater volume.” And so it went, as Hay transformed a broadcast from a regatta into an on-air sketch of Nashville life.
About this time, National Life reiterated to its sales force that “WSM is more than a radio station. It is a part of The Shield Company in ideals and aims, and it represents to a high degree all that the institution stands for as a benefactor of the people.” This commitment grew deeper and more expensive, with costs approaching $100,000 in 1929. For one thing, WSM took on its first staff “orchestra” (as distinguished from Orin Gaston’s all-purpose group) under NBC veteran Oliver Riehl to play light classical and popular tunes. Fortunately, joining a network was more than just convenient. It was a source of revenue. When NBC sent out commercial shows, it ensured the wide coverage it promised its sponsors by paying its affiliates to carry it. WSM ran $31,000 worth of NBC programming in 1929. Without it, that year’s net loss of $34,000 would have been almost twice as great.
Nashville was not only living with, but was also celebrating its thriving station. When Kappa Sigma, a so-called business fraternity, held its gala “advertising dance,” a Home Office Shield Girl named Elizabeth Kinney and her date, Vanderbilt student Joe Neuhoff, earned applause and long looks for their WSM costumes. “Miss Kinney was dressed to represent the microphone,” reported the company newsletter. “Her dress was of red, white and blue satin, trimmed in cut-out Shields. Her turban was fashioned in imitation of a microphone . . . and she carried on her arm a beautiful floral shield. Mr. Neuhoff impersonated the announcers, wearing a sash bearing our Company’s slogan, and on his hat an improvised radio antennae. He carried and blew ‘Old Hickory,’ the ‘Solemn Ol’ Judge’s’ famous whistle, which has been heard around the radio world.”
Meanwhile, WSM publicity started calling the Opry a “national institution.” The waterfalls of letters that came in from fans suggested that wasn’t overstating the case. They spoke in many voices, from scarcely literate to highly nuanced. Many shared common themes of home, nostalgia, and dancing. “Would you please send one of your agents down here to insure my carpets, floors, shoes, and everything in connection with the household?” wrote George Britting of Angola, New York. “Your Saturday-night ‘shindig’ has got my floors down to the second plank, and I am afraid someone will drop [through] on my barrel of preserves.” The Casey family from Spiro, Oklahoma, spoke of how the Opry attracted company. “We had a house full Saturday night past, two large cars full,” they wrote. “All enjoyed the program very heartily and said for us to look for them back again.” The writer added that “I have my two babies insured with your Company.” Many writers praised DeFord Bailey, and several indicated that the simulated dog yelps in his tour de force “Fox Chase” whipped their dogs into frenzies. Overturned pipe stands and busted back door screens were reported in all earnestness. And from New York City, Don Forrest reported the Opry helped his homesickness for Carroll County, Tennessee. “Our place of business is located at the very top of the bright-light district of Broadway, but I would leave the Metropolitan Opera any night for a good program from WSM. Those three letters spell home to me.”
In the fall of 1928, Jack DeWitt found himself deeply in love with Ann Elise Martin, who lived across the street. But by now he’d dropped out of two different colleges and didn’t have more than part-time engineering work at Nashville’s various radio stations. Without a proper career, his prospects, for Elise or anything else, looked dim. Salvation arrived in the person of R. E. J. Poole of Bell Telephone Laboratories, who visited Nashville to tour WSM. Jack’s father seems to have been paving a path for his son when he invited Poole over for dinner. Poole found himself impressed with Jack and wound up offering him a job in radio transmitter design at Bell Labs, starting in February 1929. For a young engineer, an invitation to work at Bell Labs was like winning a Rhodes scholarship. The institute had been founded in 1925 by AT&T and Westinghouse as a hive for basic and applied research across a series of campuses in New Jersey and New York, near where Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and others had done historic and inspiring work.
Jack successfully proposed to Elise then moved to New York. He spent the winter berthed at the Fraternities Club at Thirty-eighth Street and Madison Avenue. He walked through biting winds to work on West Street on the Hudson River, stopping in drugstores along the way to stave off frostbite. He worked on a new design for using quartz crystals to stabilize the broadcast frequency of a station, in much the same way that they control the timing of watches. He heard Yankee colleagues disparage the South, but he fell in love with the city anyway. A new mechanic friend at Bell Labs, whose cousin worked backstage at the Met, gave him access to two-dollar opera seats, and Jack became especially enamored of Wagner. Another colleague introduced him to astronomy, a passion that would play a large role in his life. In late April he and Elise were married, and they set up housekeeping in Whippany, New Jersey. Meanwhile, the deeper mysteries of waves and fields were opening up, and the world seemed full of possibility. He was getting a real education at last.