Air Castle of the South

FOUR Air Castle of the South

Late in the fall of 1933, WSM transmitter engineer Jack Montgomery stirred himself at about ten minutes to five in the afternoon and left the white transmitter house in the meadow in Brentwood. The sun was setting early now, heralding the nightly coming of the skywave that would amplify WSM’s signal over thousands of miles. The tower soared above his head, poised as if for take off, caught in the sunset like a tall flame against a darkening sky. Gravel crunched beneath Montgomery’s feet as he walked out the gate and down Calendar Road toward the road cut. A half mile away he arrived at a white shed with a shingle roof, adjacent to the tracks of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, an iron artery running south to New Orleans and north to Cincinnati. He unlocked the shed and found the microphone, uncoiled its cord, switched on its amplifier, and hung it on a hook outside the shed next to the tracks.

From a field telephone in the shed, Montgomery called the WSM studios at Seventh and Union. Aaron Shelton took the call and checked the line to the amplifier in the shed and confirmed the connection. A few minutes later another expected call came. An engineer from the L&N at a switching house six miles south of Nashville confirmed that the locomotive Pan American was on time, heading south under full steam. Six minutes later the train tripped a switch on the track that rang a bell in the shed. Montgomery informed Shelton in the studio. He gave a visual cue to the announcer on duty, David Stone, and he signaled Marjorie Cooney to wrap up her piano interlude. It was 5:07.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Stone said, “we now take you to a point twelve miles south of Nashville where the L&N’s crack passenger train, the Pan American, is about to pass the 878-foot tower of station WSM on its journey south from Cincinnati, Ohio, to New Orleans, Louisiana.”

Listeners with very good radios might have heard the engines against the background white noise, but most first heard the bell, then the whistle letting go a regulation grade-crossing signal of two long blasts, one short, and a final long blast. A rhythmic click of iron wheels against the track seams grew along with the churning of the steam engine. Montgomery watched the eye of the locomotive get brighter and its belching, steaming iron bulk grow like a charging dinosaur. Then it passed, with a blast of wind, shaking the broadcast house and forcing a roar through the microphone that pushed radio sets around the nation past their distortion point. The whistle hovered on top and suddenly dropped in pitch in a Doppler-effect downshift that marked the passing of the locomotive, followed in a swoosh by the coal tender, six passenger cars, a Pullman car, a dining car, and the caboose, chattering away toward its southern vanishing point.

Montgomery recoiled the mike cable, switched off the amplifier and locked the shed while an engineer mixed Stone back in over the fading rumble: “And there goes the Pan American, L&N’s crack passenger train speeding south to the Crescent City.”

For more than ten years, beginning in 1933, the passing of the Pan American was a daily feature on WSM and indeed one of its signature programs. The idea may have grown out of a friendship between C. A. Craig and L&N Railroad executive J. B. Hill. Conceived as a special promotion, it proved—like the Grand Ole Opry—too popular to cancel. Though it took three audio engineers and at least that many train employees some effort every day, the Pan American resonated with listeners from farms, factories, and fine homes. Trains were the era’s most potent symbol of progress and adventure, the fastest ticket to points elsewhere, besides radio signals on their “trackless paths of air.” The lonesome sound of a whistle drifting across open country inspired countless country songs. And the Pan American itself had already been musically enshrined by DeFord Bailey, who still dazzled listeners with his harmonica impression of the locomotive in “Pan American Blues” most weeks on the Opry.

Over the years, WSM listeners came to know the Pan American’s engineers—oily-fingered veterans of the waning steam locomotive era. Tom Burns had entered railroading in 1880 and had been an engineer for forty-eight years. Jack Hayes joined L&N in 1887. Bill McMurry had been a railroader fifty-three years and an engineer for seven. They received bags of fan mail and requests for pictures, care of WSM. Some listeners could identify the engineers merely by the way they blew their whistle and rang their bell. The train earned a cult following as far away Cuba, and a mining crew of two hundred in Pennsylvania reported using the Pan American broadcast as their signal for dinner time, over a radio speaker run down into their mine.

The broadcasts proved to be an appropriate tip of the cap to the L&N itself, for the railroad had helped shape Nashville as surely as the Cumberland River. Late in the nineteenth century, Major Eugene Castner Lewis, the eccentric president of the L&N company, found himself and his railroad in poor standing with Nashville, after years of fighting over service. In a stroke of public relations enthusiasm and generosity, he proposed and built Nashville’s Parthenon, the inspiration for and centerpiece of Nashville’s Centennial Exposition of 1897. As part of this elaborate undertaking, Lewis acquired detailed plans from the British Museum and specific approval for the construction from the king of Greece. Lewis, restored to public acclaim, further served the city and his own interests by building Union Station at the top of Broadway. It was a tabernacle of travel, built of stone and Tiffany glass in high Romanesque opulence. Lewis built in several eccentric features that did not survive long, including an enormous digital clock that never really worked and a pool stocked with live alligators. But he also lent the depot, which opened October 9, 1900, a grandeur that helped the city earn its place in the twentieth century.

The train shed—a vast arc of ornamental steel and glass—held the curious distinction of being the largest single-span roof in America. Topped with Greek architectural ornament, it echoed the roof of the nearby Parthenon, and ten locomotives could sit side by side beneath it. Every day, it accommodated two dozen long-distance passenger trains, several dozen freight trains, and numerous locals. When Franklin Roosevelt arrived for a famous four-hour visit to pitch his New Deal on November 11, 1934, he arrived at Union Station on the Presidential Special. That same fall, Huey Long disembarked amid throngs to attend the LSU/Vanderbilt football game and to campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Vanderbilt students swarmed the shed with seasonal regularity. The depot and its trains were as central to Nashville’s relationship with the world as WSM itself, and the marriage of broadcasting and steam moved Hank Williams a few years later to capture the train and its place on radio with his plainspoken poetry.

She leaves Cincinnati headin’ down that Dixie line

When she passes that Nashville tower you can hear that whistle whine

Stick your head out the window and feel that southern breeze

you’re on that Pan American on her way to New Or-leans.

For younger radio fans like Les Leverett, the daily Pan American broadcasts blended seamlessly and spiritually with the sounds of DeFord Bailey’s musical Pan American, with the Grand Ole Opry itself and with the rapidly changing world he inhabited. Leverett, who became staff photographer for National Life and the Opry in the 1960s, remembers hearing the Pan American on the radio and then, hours later, outside his window as it howled through his hometown of Perdido, Alabama. It made Nashville seem a bit less far away, but no less mystical. In this, Leverett was typical of thousands of small-town southerners of the era for whom a simple appliance opened up a manifest destiny. WSM and electricity arrived in his life at the same time, when he was seven years old.

My daddy somehow came up with the money to buy a Stewart-Warner radio. And he had electricity put in the house and we got rid of the lanterns. They came in and put a little white wire and a little black wire across the ceiling with those little cast ceramic insulators. You could pull a string in each room and get a light. And they brought a wire down with a plug for the radio.

On Saturday nights certain neighbors that he really liked would come up and listen to the Opry. And in the summertime Daddy would make homemade ice cream. And we’d sit around and eat ice cream listening to the Opry. My momma put a palette on the floor for my kid sister and I. We thought we were staying up all night. I know that she put us to bed by 9:30, because we had to be in Sunday school the next morning. But I remember listening to all those old guys—Sam and Kirk McGee, Louie Buck, and David Cobb, never having any idea I would come to dreamland and get to know those people.

WSM’s listeners needed escapism like the Pan American and the Grand Ole Opry because when the Depression hit, it hit like a locomotive. The bellwether in Nashville came when local financial powerhouse Caldwell & Company declared bankruptcy on November 14, 1930, as part of a chain of southern bank failures. National Life’s record of sustained and rapid growth ground to a halt. Sales fell and lapses on policies blossomed. Business bottomed out in 1932, giving National Life executives plenty of excuses to think about canceling its commitment to higher power and an expensive new transmitter for WSM. Instead, they embraced the station, asking if they were doing all they could with WSM to sell insurance.

In March 1932 company vice president Eldon Stevenson wrote to President Ridley Wills: “For some time we have been of the opinion that more efficiency is needed in sales promotion work for our Company.” He laid out the beginnings of a coordinated plan to use territorial managers, the company newsletter and WSM to “carry our message to the people.” Edwin Craig, thinking along the same lines, set about reinventing the recruitment, training, and deployment of the National Life sales force. Radio had been an indirect identifier and brand management tool for the Shield company up to that point. It could do more, and to get there Craig hired a dashing twenty-five-year-old advertising man named Edward Montague Kirby in March 1933.

Kirby grew up in New York and Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, before graduating from officer training at Virginia Military Institute in 1926. After the service he became a reporter for The Sun in Baltimore, where he briefly befriended H. L. Mencken after splattering him at a bar while cracking a steamed crab. He pursued marketing, advertising, and statistical analysis work in Detroit and then in Nashville, where he was named account executive for the General Shoe Corporation. There, in the face of early radio’s codes of conduct, he demonstrated cleverness under pressure. Stations that aspired to network stature in those days refused to mention prices in on-air advertising. But General’s “Friendly Five” shoe stores built their identity around selling five-dollar shoes, and they wanted to make that clear. Since Kirby couldn’t say they cost five dollars, he cooked up a jingle around the line, “I’ve got five dollars.” This passed muster, and the ad ran on 120 network radio stations.

Once hired by National Life, Kirby made quick use of the Shield newsletter. Distributed to the sales force weekly, it was full of inspirational rhetoric about company values, letters from company leaders, and detailed tabulations of individual sales accomplishments. Top Shield Men were spotlighted in the “Go-Getters” column. To underscore that the company paid claims promptly, it regularly ran pictures of checks made out to families of unfortunate victims—a man electrocuted or drowned when an electric fan fell in his bathtub, a nineteen-year-old whose boat sank on the Cumberland River, a gun-cleaning accident in Los Angeles. Juxtaposed against that, children born to salesmen—the “New Shield Babies”—were pictured regularly, and features like “What Can I Do to Sell More Ordinary?” were ubiquitous. There were even articles commending the virtues of a good “shield wife.” She didn’t, for example, honk the horn while waiting for her husband to close a sale.

Only a month into Kirby’s tenure, Our Shield began to preview new WSM shows he was developing “to help the 2,500 Shield Men.” The first was simply called the National Life Variety Show, a potpourri of WSM stalwarts like the Piano Twins, the Vagabonds, Francis Craig, Johnny Payne, John Lewis, Christine Lamb, Madge West, and the WSM Players. The announcer was Harry Stone’s brother David, now an integral part of the staff. Even before the variety show had a chance to prove itself, National Life brass announced how pleased they were. President Wills wrote in an open letter to the sales force that “I am being made happier than in a long time by the fine way in which our Radio Station WSM is being tied in with the work of the Shield Man . . . It appears to me that Mr. Kirby, under the direction of Mr. E. W. Craig mainly, has begun a fine work.”

The New Year’s Day issue of Our Shield for 1934 proved that any hesitation about using the radio as a ramrod through doors across America was now history. National Life announced a new weekly half-hour show about the company itself. The Third Century of Progress Program began January 3. Shield Men were urged to “invite every policyholder to tune in . . . invite every prospect . . . it will tell them the story of The National . . . it will help you place the business.” The same issue reported in detail on the company’s first-ever Shield Family Christmas Radio Party, a two-and-a-half-hour show from Studio B featuring the company top brass, calls from field agents, Francis Craig’s orchestra, and Judge Hay. On Christmas Eve at 9:30, Harry Stone said “Ladies and Gentlemen of the general radio audience, three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, the facilities of WSM’s 50,000 watts and the tallest radio tower of the world have been devoted to your entertainment and pleasure. But tonight, on this Christmas Eve, we are asking your indulgence.” He explained the show would be “dedicated exclusively to our Shield Family.” Nearly all of the company leaders took turns on the microphone. Edwin Craig marveled at the fact that he likely had more field agents listening to his voice at once than ever before. Agents were encouraged to call or send telegrams, which they of course did by the hundreds, paralyzing the company switchboards.

One week later, Kirby’s vision for WSM was set forth in detail. In a Shield column, he announced that the sales and promotions department was widening its functions to apply “to all things which might be of help to you in gaining entrance into new homes” including pamphlets, prospect lists, standardized canvas talks, and publicity distributed to local papers. WSM, Kirby said, “has a very definite position in this aggressive promotion. The coverage of WSM is available to ninety-five percent of the Field . . . The Company programs, heard in an ever-increasing number of homes, spread the name and the fame of your Company before you call.” He continued, emphasizing the synergistic tie between the content of the station and the message of the sales force. “Any given radio program of the Company is built to do a job for the Company in itself. But, in addition to this, every Company program is also built to be a provocative agent for you on your Debit [door-to-door circuit]—to cause attention to be directed to the Company and to you before the program goes on the air, when the program is on the air, and after the program has been on the air.”

Kirby had ushered in two new facets of WSM’s mission and means: large, ensemble radio productions and vigorous cross-marketing. His late 1933 series about collegiate life involved fifty radio performers, an augmented orchestra, and a male chorus. It featured a different southeastern school each week, giving “immediate access to one million graduates, former students, students, and their parents—who had a direct sentimental interest in the program.” Kirby tied specific broadcasts to homecoming weekends at Indiana University, the University of Illinois, Texas A&M, Tulane, and others. He broadcast graduation ceremonies. And he found the schools more than happy to plug WSM’s shows in their local markets. Ohio State lined up 150 alumni banquets around the country to coincide with its broadcast. Oklahoma sent out 11,000 notices to its graduates.

At the same time, Our Shield began running house ads to help the Shield Men tie Kirby’s new shows to their insurance pitches. In one, an insurance salesman in his crisp suit and hat is about to walk down a typical suburban street, where the sounds of WSM shows are coming out of the houses like cartoon bubbles. Another pictured the radio tower, with the copy: “WSM is a tireless worker for the benefit of the Shield Company and Shield Man . . . from early morn to late at night. Make it your strong ally out on your Debit!”

What National Life didn’t talk about in the Shield—at least not yet—was how potent the Grand Ole Opry was becoming as a promotional tool. About 1933, the company published a slim magazine called Fiddles and Life Insurance, which Shield Men carried for years. It supplemented other trinkets: National Life sewing kits shaped like a shield, nail files, and packets of seeds. Edwin’s son Neil recalled that the methods of Shield Men were little changed when he began walking a debit in San Antonio in 1951. “We’d go knock on the door and introduce ourselves. And as often as not we’d say, ‘We’re from WSM.’ Fiddles and Life Insurance had pictures of the stars of the Opry. And on the back cover it said there’s another program you might be interested in. And that’s how we’d make the transition from the radio to the life insurance.” As the months went by, the Opry’s selling power became increasingly clear to Craig, as it did to hundreds of other agents. “None of the houses had air conditioning,” said Neil. “Our agents were trained to walk around the neighborhoods at night and listen to what was playing on the radio. And when they found a house playing the Grand Ole Opry they’d make a note of it and go back Monday morning. It was a godsend.”

Using the Opry as a sales tool appears to have been something Shield Men adopted on their own. The company’s official manuals and The Shield newsletter didn’t mention the Opry as a likely door-opener during this period. In fact, in an early 1930s National Life training guide, salesmen were encouraged to approach farmers with a line like, “Isn’t that your herd of pure-bred stock that I have heard so much about?” And while many Shield Men were using Kirby’s noncountry shows and promotions on their debits in the 1930s, Neil Craig couldn’t recall using any other hook twenty years later.

If the Grand Ole Opry was a sales tool to an army of Shield Men and a Saturday night mainstay for fans, it made WSM and indeed Edwin Craig himself a magnet for a growing number of hillbilly musicians. Neil Craig says that string band musicians sought out his father in the uncanniest places—on his vacations and during his precious hunting time in Cajun country near the Texas border. “When everybody in Southwest Louisiana heard Mr. Craig of the Grand Ole Opry was there, they’d all come by,” Neil said. “We were just staying with a family down there. And all the pickers came out.” Once during a golf game at the a North Carolina resort near Linville, Edwin hit his tee shot down a gulley. “And when he got down there,” Neil said, “there was a string band standing around [the ball] just picking like hell. He had many experiences like that. They all wanted to go on the Opry. And his deal with them back in the early days was boys if you can get yourself over there, we’ll put you on the Opry. He’d done it many times. He wasn’t going to pay their way over there. But you’d be amazed how many of them came.”

That loose and open atmosphere gave way to a more formalized audition process in the early 1930s, as Hay’s benevolent overseer approach gave way to Harry Stone’s tougher managerial style. Stone later wrote that hundreds would come to the station directly, and that he could not afford to be as charitable as Mr. Craig. The Opry became more structured after the early 1930s, ruling out drop-in guest artists, he said. “They felt that they could play as well, if not better, than the ones who were on the air and should be given a place. One of the biggest headaches in those days was having to tell these people to go back home.”

Harry Stone knew something about headaches. Though he had nominal control over WSM, engineer Jack DeWitt and program producer Ed Kirby answered directly to Edwin Craig. This irregular chain of command did not sit well with Stone, amplifying the complexities and paradoxes of his generally stern personality. Musician Alton Delmore described him as a “tall man with a dark, serious complexion” who “looked like a lawyer.” Stone, he said, was stern and “poker-faced” at his (ultimately successful) Opry audition in 1933, and he and brother Raybon clashed with Stone for a decade over pay and Opry policy. In the end, Alton said Stone was “fair” even if he wasn’t kindly.

Irving Waugh, a 1940s announcer who rose to WSM’s presidency in the seventies, called Stone “a very solid broadcaster” who could handle all aspects of the business, from basic engineering to sales, promotion, and production. But he also said Stone could be a perplexing man. “When I went into sales, we’d travel together. He was open, effusive, friendly,” Waugh said. “The minute we were back at WSM, he might pass me in the hall and not speak.” Stone’s niece, Sandra McClure of Springfield, Missouri, remembered in Harry a regimented and disciplined man who “didn’t suffer fools gladly.” On the other hand, DeFord Bailey seems to have admired Stone a great deal. He told David Morton that he had planned to name his youngest child, born in late 1936, after him, had it been a boy. (As it happened, it was a girl, and he named her for Christine Lamb, one of WSM’s earliest artist/employees and a white vocalist who worked in both formal music and a pop version of the blues.)

Marjorie Kirby, widow of Edward Kirby, remembers friction between Harry and her husband, perhaps not surprising given that Kirby had freedom to produce shows while answering to Craig and Clements. “Ed had trouble with him,” she said. “He was a nice guy. But he was just . . . what shall I say . . . he played by the rules strictly. He didn’t see the possibilities of being creative. You did it this way because the book says. So it was hard to deal with him.” On the other hand, Ed Kirby related with admiration an anecdote about Harry Stone’s steadfast adherence to principles and his broadcasting professionalism.

“A group of Jehovah’s Witnesses arrived in his offices one afternoon to buy time,” Kirby said in a speech in the early 1950s. “Harry explained religious time was not for sale [but] was distributed fairly through the Council of Churches to fit the desires of the community. They offered to double the card rate. Harry declined. Then they threatened that unless he gave or sold them time, they would picket his local sponsors and boycott his advertisers. Harry held firm in the face of both a bribe and a threat. Then the committee invoked their Jehovah along these lines: ‘Stay your hand, oh Lord. Do not let your anger leash a bolt of lightning from the blue and strike this man’s transmitter to the ground. Let nothing happen to his children. Let him but see the light so that we may broadcast our message.’

“They then turned to Harry, now ashen. ‘Well, Sir, you see, it’s out of our hands now.’ ”

He may have engendered mixed emotions, but Harry Stone shaped the Opry in ways that would last into the modern era, especially the addition of a studio audience and the changes in location and staging that followed. The tight quarters of WSM’s Studios A and B made it difficult for anyone other than family and guests of the artists to be let into the studio. But once an audience had been accommodated for the Union Ice Cream shows of 1932, the idea of a first-come-first-served crowd for the Opry would have seemed like a natural evolution. And in early 1934, WSM built appropriate space with the opening of a new studio on National Life’s fifth floor. Built to double as an auditorium for the Shield Men during special events and as a professional soundstage for WSM, Studio C could seat several hundred people. It had an arched ceiling to prevent clanging echoes, indirect lighting, acoustic tile walls, a black-and-white checked floor, and a control room behind glass high and to the left on the back wall. An “On The Air” sign hung over the main entrance.

Engineer Aaron Shelton remembered that the earliest Opry crowds acted more bewildered than boisterous. “These people were not the kind to respond wildly, even with [musician] Uncle Dave Macon’s encouragement,” he wrote. “They seemed to be in awe—almost never changing expression—exhibiting the reserve of the real Anglo-Saxon stock from which most of them came. It was almost as if they were sitting on their hands at the conclusion of a song. I am sure that they enjoyed the show to the fullest—as witness the ever increasing number that came each Saturday—but their enjoyment was tempered by their natural reserve.”

Soon however, younger and more excitable crowds began arriving at Seventh and Union every Saturday, parking on the downtown streets and streaming up the stairs and elevators. To accommodate them, Stone divided the evening into two shows, at 8:00 and 10:00 p.m. “This worked reasonably well except that we had to flush out people who had hidden in closets and offices to keep from having to leave,” he wrote later. It also meant one crowd had to wait outside while the first show wrapped up, and that caused trouble. One Saturday night, Runcie Clements and old C. A. Craig, whose offices were on the first floor, came to Seventh and Union about 10:00 p.m. and literally couldn’t break through a rowdy crowd. “When I saw them later they looked like they had run into a tornado,” said Stone. The order came down: No more audience.

A threshold had been crossed, however. Stone and Hay realized that the Opry needed a live audience as much as it needed country music, which meant it needed a new home. The Opry’s first refuge in the city was the Hillsboro Theater on Belcourt Avenue, a conventional community auditorium several blocks west of Ward-Belmont School that hosted live shows and movies. Accounts of its size vary. Stone said it held about 750 people. “It was a great relief to the audience and to the performers,” wrote George Hay. “We had a few dressing rooms and we acquired a staff of ushers to handle the front of the house. Because it was small, we played to two audiences from eight until midnight. There was no charge for tickets. The three thousand agents of our parent company were allowed to distribute a limited number of them.”

Now Stone truly focused on professionalizing and regularizing the Opry. As an intermediary to work with Hay, Stone recruited Vito Pellettieri, who had returned to WSM in 1934 as a music librarian, working with music director Oliver Riehl. Vito’s orchestra had fallen victim to the hard times, and the musician remembered Edwin Craig personally inviting him back onto the WSM staff out of Depression-era charity. Pellettieri kept sheet music organized and ready for requests from the orchestra leaders, and he took care of clearances on songs—making sure royalty payments were going to the right songwriter and publisher for performances. He’d once nearly gone to law school, and the work suited him.

Harry Stone called him “Cowboy,” and in the fall of 1935, Pellettieri remembered, Stone came to him and said, “Cowboy, you’ve got to go to the Opry to help Mr. Hay out.” Vito wasn’t interested in working with hillbilly musicians, but he and Hay liked each other. They’d met while collaborating on a show called History of American Music. “Mr. Hay had a lot of respect for me, and I had a lot of respect for him,” he said. “I don’t think there will ever be a man that could handle a microphone like Mr. Hay did.”

Pellettieri did go work with Hay, and he helped give the Opry its first real structure: half-hour blocks of time with scheduled performances. “I want to tell each one of the fellows when they’re supposed to be here, and if they’re not here, that’s it,” he said. In addition to his orderly stage management, he sold the Opry’s first sponsorship. The client, a laxative called Crazy Water Crystals, was one of numerous companies that found great success partnering with country music acts in the 1930s.

The Opry spent about a year and a half at the Hillsboro Theater, but it also proved too small. Hay tried two shows each Saturday night, but Stone wrote that “It just didn’t work. We simply didn’t have ushers enough to get all of the people out of the building so the ten o’clock crowd could get in.” Stone’s next site was on the east side of the Cumberland River, immediately across from downtown. In the middle of 1936, just a day after original Opry star Humphrey Bate died peacefully, the Opry moved into a large shed on Fatherland Street. Built for revivals, the Dixie Tabernacle perfectly fit the early Opry’s style. A stage backdrop depicting the inside of a cabin, with a stone fireplace, curtained windows, and timber walls, seemed to blend in organically with the building’s rustic wooden sturdiness. Two large loudspeakers were mounted on either side of the stage. Announcer David Stone likened its atmosphere to an old-fashioned carnival, with “sawdust on the floor, wood benches, and old hinged lights along the side. You’d have to go along on a hot night and put broomsticks under them to hold them up.” Conditions backstage were “miserable,” he said. “We didn’t have any room to do anything.”

Hay began to notice a shift in the crowd. About a quarter of the cars parked outside were from out of state. Visitors would approach him before the show and tell him they were from Illinois, Florida, or Minnesota, hoping they could coax him to pass on greetings home over the air. But there were too many out-of-towners in the crowds of three thousand to do so. “A rule was made of necessity to refrain from such announcements, except in the case of Shield Men and their families,” Hay said. And at the Fatherland Tabernacle, Harry Stone remembered, was where the Opry first began to comtemplate charging for admission—something like a quarter—“to help slow down the crowd.” In fact the first Opry tickets were sold at its next home, War Memorial Auditorium, but that didn’t slow the crowd at all; they kept coming in droves.

Success bred new concerns. Artists were becoming stars thanks to WSM’s powerful signal, and Stone knew it would take more than $5 per show to keep the musicians loyal to the Opry over the long run. Stone and Hay couldn’t pay more, but they realized that they could attract and retain more professional and substantial artists if they made it easy for them to make a living between mandatory Saturday night appearances. This appears to have been the central impetus behind WSM’s Artist Service Bureau. Loosely organized in 1933, the name and model were likely borrowed from NBC’s in-house talent booking division. The agency would prove vital in expanding the Opry brand and cementing a codependent commercial relationship between the stars and the show, because stars could only bill themselves as “Grand Ole Opry” artists if they kept their Saturday night appointment on WSM, and an Opry billing on the road was like money in the bank.

The WSM artist bureau’s first show was at a black church in Nashville, but a large cross section of the Opry cast drew a disappointing crowd. A second, more ambitious road show on July 4, 1934, at a rural campground 150 miles from Nashville was better promoted and much better attended. The Gully Jumpers, Arthur Smith and the Dixieliners, and Uncle Dave Macon performed for a reported eight thousand people. Initially, Hay managed the artist bureau, arranging publicity photos into catalogs that could be presented to show promoters. He set up a system whereby the artists took home the gate receipts, minus 15 percent for WSM. Hay’s health issues prevented him from developing the agency for long, however, and the job fell to David Stone, Harry’s brother. The younger Stone recalled working out tours that cycled musicians around school houses, lodges, and county fairs between Saturdays, when they were required to be back in Nashville to perform on the radio.

Also around this time—perhaps even prior to the Hillsboro Theater move—Hay conceived of a new image for the show and its artists. He’d grown concerned that the Opry performers, who came in each week dressed as if for church on Sunday, didn’t look the way they sounded. The pickers and fiddlers, many of whom were craftsmen and laborers from the city, saw radio as a formal affair, and the lush studio surroundings only reinforced the notion. The handful of women involved wore dresses with stockings. But Hay took a notion that an “authentic” hillbilly music show ought to feature musicians who looked like authentic hillbillies. He put them in floppy hats and overalls, loose work shirts, and bandanas about the neck. Publicity photos from the era show an almost bizarre before-and-after quality. In one, average-looking Tennesseans seem to be dressed up a bit more than they’d like, and in the next, they’re in a corn field or sitting on a split-rail fence, passing a moonshine jar. Hay renamed the bands with cornball clichés, like the Fruit Jar Drinkers or the Gully Jumpers. Even the distinguished Dr. Bate was made over, his band redubbed the Possum Hunters. Only the dignified and dapper harmonica wizard DeFord Bailey ducked the wardrobe change, remaining in a black suit.

These changes in venue and style began to earn the Opry a place in the national radio pantheon and even some respect at home. In the summer of 1935, the show earned a medal from Radio Stars magazine, which (inaccurately) praised its “authentic hill-dwellers and dirt farmers with nary a professional among them” and said the Opry had “more fast friends than any other single air-show.” Previous winners had included such distinguished network fare as the Metropolitan Opera and Jack Benny, and the Opry was the first non-network show to win the prize. Even more remarkable, perhaps, was the reaction in the morning Tennessean, which dedicated one of its usually weighty editorials to taking on the Opry’s local detractors. “There probably are thousands of radio listeners who do not care for the type of entertainment which this feature offers,” the paper said. “For them there are seven days and six nights of the week in which they can search for programs over WSM more to their liking. The Grand Ole Opry is for the other thousands . . . The steadfastness with which the officials of WSM have kept the Grand Ole Opry on its schedule in reply to the great interest shown in it and in spite of the criticism from highbrows, has been rewarded . . . It is a recognition to be proud of. For it is based not on the big name of a star or on high pretense, but on the pleasure it brings to those who listen to it. And that, after all, is the best criterion of an entertainment feature.”

Out back of the Fatherland Street Tabernacle, a sturdy, streetwise young man minded the stage door. He’d first come to the attention of the Opry artists and managers because he sorted their mail back at the National Life building. He had in fact been in the mail room for three grinding years, but Jim Denny had long before proven his patience in the face of hunger. Sent to the city by destitute parents to live with an aunt when he was eleven years old, Denny arrived by train with forty cents in a tobacco sack. The aunt never showed up. “I was alone and broke and scared,” Denny said years later. “Even the street cars scared me.” But he became one of the ubiquitous newsboys on Union and Church Streets, selling the Tennessean in the morning and the Banner at night, delivering Western Union telegrams in between. Denny biographer Albert Cunniff wrote that “at night he often slept curled up on a warm bundle of newspapers in the corner of the Tennessean’s press room.”

When he started working full time for Western Union for twelve dollars a week around 1924, Denny was thirteen years old, and soon he was living with his single mother and younger brother. Denny took night school accounting classes. He looked for better work out of town but found nothing. Then he began pestering one of the companies on his telegram route about a job. National Life signed on the eighteen-year-old as a mail sorter in May of 1929. Physically imposing, ambitious, hot-tempered, prompt, well-dressed, and blunt, Denny slowly climbed the ladder, to filing, then accounting, then—in 1933—the tabulating room in the actuarial department. Cunniff wrote that “it was a noisy beehive that centered around wire-driven IBM machines that operated on keypunched cards containing information on new policies, policies about to lapse, cash value checks to be written (and) payroll information.”

Denny’s Opry work was entirely freelance and self-motivated. Soon after the Opry moved to Fatherland Street, Denny’s volunteer efforts were rewarded with two dollars per night for guarding the back door and helping with sets and staging. He also became the show’s de facto bouncer. “If someone was acting up and disturbing people I would ask him very sweetly to leave,” he told the Tennessean in 1963. “If he gave me any backtalk at all, it was wham! Right then! A right to the head. Usually, by the time they got over their surprise, they were outside!” The job earned him the respect and affection of the Opry musicians and staff. Whether he was taking tickets, answering the phone, or looking after patrons, it became clear to the Opry’s power structure that this impoverished kid was rich in talent, willpower, and loyalty.

In early 1934, drama director Madge West assembled a cast of WSM players and prominent Nashvillians for one of the station’s most ambitious radio shows yet. The Trial of Vivienne Ware told the story of a society beauty accused of murder. The cast included a mysterious nightclub dancer, a tremulous butler, and a medical examiner. A real judge-elect for the first circuit played the judge in the radio case. A real incoming attorney general played the district attorney. WSM acting stalwart Casper Kuhn played three parts. A new WSM hire named Jack Harris played “A Reporter.”

Harris was a reporter in real life as well, a local-born overachiever who took on larger roles at the station as the 1930s progressed. A dashing young man with dark, deep-set eyes and a daytime-drama jaw, Harris started a newspaper at Hume-Fogg High School, then worked at various collegiate publications, and ultimately covered sports for the Tennessean. He was planning to continue in print journalism, but when he was offered jobs by both WSM and WLAC at $60 and $65 per week respectively, twice what the newspaper was offering, he went into broadcasting.

Harris, who made these recollections in 1993 as a retired radio and television mogul, says that even in 1934, he recognized WSM as “one of the really great stations in the country.” He chose it over WLAC and its five extra dollars per week, he said, “because of the prestige.” Once hired, Harris quickly became protégé to Ed Kirby. “My job, when I first came there, was to work in the mornings with the insurance company on sales promotion, and then I would go three stories up to the radio station and I would work from one o’clock until after the ten o’clock news at the radio station,” he said. Initially, he was a sports reporter, but he expanded into reading news, and by May 1938, Harris had introduced his 10:00 p.m. news show The World in Review.

For newspaper publishers nationwide, radio upstarts like Jack Harris were a threat and a challenge to their news monopoly. At the Banner, the man who worried about this the most was Jimmy Stahlman, second generation publisher and, as it happened, president of the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association. When Harris lined up the first contract for a useful news wire to WSM, Stahlman fought back.

“He was probably the most violent antiradio news man in the country,” Harris recalled. “He threatened the United Press that he would go to every publisher in the south and have them or urge them to take out United Press from their newspaper if they sold this service to our station. Stahlman was a very powerful man, and United Press buckled under and came and asked us if we would give the contract back.” This wasn’t an unusual battle in radio. George Hay’s first radio job came when he was drafted to announce on his newspaper’s radio station, but the Commercial Appeal couldn’t put news on their WMC station because in the 1920s, the wire services themselves would have cut off the newspaper. And National Life wasn’t looking for any trouble with a paper with which they’d long had good relations, so company officials (Harris doesn’t say who exactly) got United Press to nullify the contract.

Some time later, another wire called International News Service (INS) approached WSM, and this time, WSM signed on. Although INS was heavier on lengthy overseas stories than he wanted, Harris built his 10:00 p.m. news around it, rewriting all the copy and delivering it live. “It was a one-man operation,” he said. “You didn’t have tape . . . it had to be well written and well delivered.”

Then in the middle of 1935, the Banner’s Stahlman did something Harris thought unconscionable. He bought a fifteen-minute block of time at 12:30 p.m. called the Banner News Hawk.

“He hired a former preacher to deliver fifteen minutes of news at noon,” Harris recounted. “The newscast consisted of saying, ‘There was a murder in Nashville today. For the rest of the story, read the Nashville Banner this afternoon.’ It was a fifteen-minute commercial. As a budding journalist, it appalled me, but I was just a rookie.”

Appalled though he may have been at Stahlman’s brazen act of promotion, Harris also wore a publicist’s hat. He wrote stories about the station and then tried to place them in all manner of publications, local and national, sometimes under his own byline, sometimes under an assumed name and sometimes anonymously. His news release about the new Banner News Hawk, which included the fact that Stahlman was president of the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association, piqued the interest of the leading entertainment and media trade paper Variety. Stahlman, the crusader against radio news backing a radio news show? It ran a story, and Harris remembered a headline that trumpeted Stahlman as having flip-flopped.

“I could feel the walls tremble when that reached Nashville,” said Harris. “I waited for a summons, and I got one from Mr. C. R. Clements, who was executive vice president of National Life—this was after three or four days of rumors and whatnot. I took the press release. I thought my career at WSM was going to be short-lived, because Mr. Stahlman was a man of great power, and I had heard he was demanding whoever wrote that story had to be fired.”

Clements showed him Variety.

“Young man, did you write this story?”

“No sir, this is the story I wrote,” Harris said, and handed him his original press release.

Clements looked at it for a while, then smiled. “That’s a very clever news release,” he told Harris. “Well, I just wanted to tell you something. The day Jimmy Stahlman can tell this company who to hire and fire will be the last day that I’m the head of it. Go ahead and do your job and don’t worry about it anymore.”

In the midst of the Great Depression, National Life floated like an ark on a turbulent ocean. Even with the down year of 1932, the company’s so-called insurance in force grew 30 percent between 1929 and 1934, while life insurance companies nationally lost business. Officials credited WSM. Ridley Wills, who became president of National Life in early 1931 when C. A. Craig became chairman, praised Ed Kirby’s “resourcefulness” in making the Shield brand more relevant and potent to the nation and endorsing further use of the radio station in promoting National Life business. Broadcasting magazine wrote that while in general “life insurance institutions have been slow to use radio,” National Life “led every American and Canadian life insurance” company in new business during 1933, and that “radio was the only new ingredient added to the sales kit in the past two years.” A year later, Edwin Craig himself called the radio/insurance marketing synergy a “once in a lifetime” arrangement.

The company continued to pour resources into the station. By early 1935, Harry Stone was in charge of an office and artist staff of two hundred full- and part-timers. The volume of mail the station received in the wake of going to 50,000 watts was staggering. A certified report for the month of January 1934 shows 174,574 cards and letters from the United States, including 1,000 from North Dakota and 106 from Washington state. Those audiences drove lucrative sponsorships, and by 1936, even WSM itself was in the black.

Almost anything attached to radio thrived during the Depression. Maxwell House Coffee, a company started in Nashville but no longer based there, exploded when it sponsored the Maxwell House Coffee Showboat in 1933. Pepsodent tooth powder turned itself around with the popularity of Amos ’n’ Andy. Once controversial, radio was now an invaluable advertising tool, especially for everyday consumer goods. Transcription discs, the oversized records used to record, reproduce, and distribute radio shows, made it possible for stations to syndicate their sponsored programs to ad hoc networks of interested stations. Ed McConnell seems to have been the first WSM entertainer to enjoy this new avenue of exposure, hosting a show for Aladdin Lamps of Nashville that was sent to and played over about twenty stations sometime before 1932.

Productions in Studio C grew out of a fast-paced, collaborative, and often combative process that called on the talents of dozens of people. A late 1934 issue of Our Shield offered a walk-through of the National Life building for a fictional Shield Man, including a virtual tour of the radio station. A contrived but insightful scene described Oliver Riehl and Ed Kirby talking over a production.

Rough dress rehearsal has just finished in Studio C. The corridors outside the studio are alive with musicians, vocalists, dramatists, and technicians. Some of them are smoking and chatting about various and sundry parts of the dress rehearsal which is about to take place after this brief intermission.

Up the winding stairway brings us to the control room, where the engineer and two other men are making some corrections in the music, the script, and the dialogue. Let’s listen in on part of the conversation:

“Now listen, Eddie; we can speed up the show on page six if we just cut that blurb in half. Then let us put in that new squawker for a two-minute go just ahead of the heavy bromide. And why not?”

“Say, Ollie, must I go through the same gripe with you again this week? To do that means losing our objective entirely; the copy slant will be shot to pieces. And, again, those sound platters are full of bugs, and your trained seals are good all right, but they are badly miscast.”

“O.K. fellow; I’ll change those parts around, and I believe the crooning thugs should be told again about chewing the text.”

“When George [Reynolds] gets back, I’ll caution him again about smoking in the control room. This is part of the studio, you know.”

At this point Mr. E. W. [Edwin Craig] walks in, checking on each program as he does, and explains that the above is typical of a daily conversation wherein Company shows are produced. It really sounds pretty much to the listener as though it might be the start of a young war, but Mr. E. W. adds that that’s the way Kirby and Riehl get along in producing all the Company shows, and that therein lies the success and constant improvement characteristic of all the WSM broadcasts.

Kirby wasn’t as inclined toward radio production jargon as the passage suggests, his widow says. But many of the terms did float around the station for years. “Trained seals” were the part-time dramatists paid on a per-show basis. “Chewing the text” was mumbling. “Sound platters” with “bugs” were sound effects records marred by pops and scratches. In addition, the engineers called themselves “jiggers,” which could be a noun or a verb (“Are you still jiggering at WSM?”), and they called Studio C’s control room the “poop deck” for its elevated overlook.

The studios thrummed daily with script meetings, typewriters, mimeograph machines, visits to Vito Pellettieri in the cozy warren of the music library, and the setting and striking of music stands and microphones. The product: sweet, dreamy, and escapist fare that took cues from prime-time NBC feeds like Paul Whiteman’s smooth jazz concerts or the “Chez Paree” Orchestra. WSM’s in-house extravaganzas included The WSM Hollywood Show with a cast of seventy, including a twenty-voice mixed chorus, three arrangers, and a full orchestra. The show premiered songs from upcoming MGM pictures, like Reckless with Jean Harlow and Shadow of Doubt with Constance Collier. WSM also sent its new show Magnolia Blossoms over the NBC Red Network starting November 25, 1935, promoted as “a thirty-minute program of music with a Southern flavor.” It featured the Fisk Jubilee Singers, opera singers John Lewis and Christine Johnson, a “girl trio from Georgia” called the Dixianas, and many others.

On the dramatic side, Ed Kirby’s brainchild America’s Flag Abroad earned critical praise. Announced by young newsman Jack Harris, it dramatized stories of American diplomacy overseas at a time when, thanks to ominous rumblings from Adolf Hitler, international relations and statesmanship were on everybody’s minds. Radio Guide called it “a striking broadcast, much too brilliant to be confined to a local outlet. It should be given network airing as soon as possible.” Kirby followed that act in January 1936 with The Story of the Shield, billed as “a study of man’s first and most important form of protection in all ages from the dawn of time to the present time.” Researched for more than a year by a Vanderbilt professor, the show dramatized stories of heroes who carried literal or metaphorical shields, like Charlemagne, Robin Hood, Sir Galahad, Roland, Lancelot, King Arthur, and the Knights of the Round Table. It also featured a new announcer, a veteran of Alabama radio named Ottis “Ott” Devine. He was tapped because, according to National Life press, he was “one of the few radio personalities who can talk effectively to both children and grownups.” And that’s how The Story of the Shield was pitched—to adults and kids alike. “Parents may feel sure no blood and thunder ‘gangsterism’ will creep into these heroic stories, which form fascinating, exciting, wholesome and profitable radio listening,” said the station. It ran three times each week at 5:30 p.m.

The ever-more-elaborate productions required new levels of skill and attention to the fine points of radio drama, including sound effects. In 1935 WSM hired “Count” Gaetano Cutelli, a native of Sicily and a Hollywood authority on radio sound staging. He didn’t stay long, but he trained Shelton and young announcer Casper Kuhn how to make mouth sounds imitating animals and how to best use specially built sound effects equipment. Shelton wrote: “There were rectangular boxes filled with sand, gravel and rocks and with two half coconut shells to clomp up and down in these boxes, a good imitation of a horse galloping along almost any kind of road was obtained. The rubber bladder of a basketball with the proper amount of BB pellets in it could be made to sound like a steam locomotive chugging up a hill or coming to a stop at the railroad station. A large open drum head with BB pellets could sound like waves crashing against a seawall or gentle waves coming up on a sandy beach.”

In late 1934 WSM offered up its most ambitious early morning program to date, a 6:30 a.m. variety show called Rise and Shine, hosted by Hay and packed with most of the WSM staff entertainers, including Oliver Riehl directing a fifteen-piece orchestra, a devotional by Rev. Priestly Miller, and Banner columnist Freddie Russell with sports news. The program of “salon music, gang songs, instrumental numbers, vocalists, humor, news and a little touch of the hillbilly” included versatile guitarist Jack Shook, the Opry’s Delmore Brothers, John Lewis, Marjorie Cooney, and a new singer named Snooky Landman (soon to be known as Snooky Lanson).

Snooky, whose real name was Roy, came from Memphis and had been scuffling with determination since he began singing for tips at age twelve. Some said he approached Francis Craig on a date in Memphis; the singer said he’d been called by Craig to audition. But clearly, by 1934, Lanson was singing regularly in front of Craig’s orchestra on radio and at the Hermitage Hotel, where Craig had returned as a fixture after his dalliance with the Andrew Jackson. Craig had been through a number of singers, both male and female, since James Melton’s departure, and Lanson seemed to have something special—a mellifluous voice mixed with boyish charisma. It was never as easy behind the scenes, for Snooky drank hard and clashed with Craig frequently over money, workload, and personal decorum. As biographer Ikard wrote, “they needed each other but never came close to getting along.”

About the same time, a Vanderbilt sophomore approached Harry Stone about part-time singing work. She had dark hair, dark eyes, and the winning disposition of a confident southern songbird. Frances Rose Shore came to town when her family moved from Winchester, Tennessee, when she was about six years old. She’d survived polio as a baby, the long-term limp that resulted, the awkwardness of being in the only Jewish family in a small Tennessee town, and the taunts of school children about her nickname: Fanny. Nevertheless, she had thrived at Hume-Fogg High School in academics and sports. She also studied voice under WSM tenor John Lewis, and she was happy to battle with him over his ultimatum to quit wrecking her voice with cheerleading. When she was fourteen, she snuck out of the house to try her hand as a torch singer. Wearing her sister’s dress and makeup, she talked her way in front of a band at a nightclub called The Pines to sing “Under a Blanket of Blue.” It was going well—until she saw her mother and father sitting at a corner table with their mouths agape. They weren’t terribly upset, but they did insist that she continue her education. Now she was studying sociology and looking for ways to keep singing. Shore’s stage name—Dinah—was still a good many years in the future.

Shore’s own version of her surprise WSM audition appeared in her 1979 biography. Lewis, it said, invited Shore to WSM merely to try singing with a microphone. He’d told her it would be a help to her voice, which, though sweet, was not especially powerful. Lewis set her up in a quiet studio and put Beasley Smith in the control room, out of her sight. Smith liked what he heard and invited Shore to come twice a week to sing on a slot they called Rhythm and Romance. To purge herself of the shame of the school yard taunts she’d endured over the name Fanny, Shore added an e on the end, perhaps thinking that sounded more dignified. In any event, Fannye Rose Shore found herself on more and more programs, including a 1936 broadcast called The Wednesday Midnighter where she and Lewis would sing with Francis Craig’s orchestra. She worked to overcome her basically thin voice with phrasing and microphone control (“You’ll never hold a note the way Gracie Fields does,” her father told her in a discouraging comparison to his favorite singer). She listened intently to playbacks of her shows and made adjustments; her charm came naturally.

The soft and gauzy pop music at WSM was counterbalanced with some programming that was musically rarified and spiritually sanctified. In the 1920s and 1930s, the radio station had a strong relationship with Fisk University, offering music director John Work many chances to showcase the school’s singing groups. In 1936, WSM’s regular weekly broadcasts of the Fisk Jubilee Singers reached an apotheosis when it broadcast Easter Sunday services from Fisk Chapel. The live half hour was not only carried on NBC, it was relayed to the BBC for worldwide, shortwave distribution. Aaron Shelton engineered, monitoring the stage inputs and the relay back to the station. The copy was written by Tom Stewart, who probably announced as well. At the stroke of 12:15, local time, he said: “The National Broadcasting Company, in cooperation with the British Broadcasting Corporation, presents a special international Easter program, originating through the facilities of WSM, Nashville, Tennessee. We are speaking to you now in the chapel of the Negro university of Fisk in Nashville. We are to hear a program of spirituals sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and the Fisk University Choir, and a reading by the greatest of all living Negro poets and writers, James Weldon Johnson.”

Aptly introduced, Johnson began with a history of the singers. It was already one of the most venerated vocal groups in the nation, having made its fame in the nineteenth century. Fisk University was established in Civil War hospital barracks as the Fisk Free Colored School, one of many missionary institutions launched during Reconstruction by northern abolitionists. A white gentleman, a former Union army band director named George L. White, organized an ensemble and began touring in a somewhat desperate attempt to save the school from bankruptcy. And in a sense, Nashville broke its first international hit act. Henry Ward Beecher, the nation’s foremost preacher, championed the Fisk singers, winning them fame nationwide and in Europe, where they performed for Queen Victoria and other notables. Fisk’s Board of Trustees once bragged on them: “Wherever they have gone they have proclaimed to the hearts of men . . . the brotherhood of the race.”

Starting in 1935, a decade after putting its singers on its opening night show, WSM began to support Fisk directly, totaling some $33,000 over six years. The goal, Harry Stone testified, was to “hire teachers and promote the study of Negro spiritual music.” By the spring of 1936, the group consisted of seven men under the direction of Mrs. James A. Myers, legendary Fisk music teacher and mentor. That Easter, again reaching the world without leaving their leafy campus, the singers offered “Steal Away to Jesus” and “Study War No More.” After a 12:30 station identification break, Johnson read the poem “Creation” from God’s Trombone. The Fisk choir closed the program with “I Want to Die Easy When I Die” and “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” and, at 12:44 and 40 seconds, as scheduled, came the NBC network ID, with its familiar, three-toned chime.

WSM’s swirl of talent, production, and ever-higher aspirations inspired one of Ed Kirby’s signature flashes of promotional virtuosity. In 1935, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, he tagged WSM the “Air Castle of the South.” Perhaps he was reaching for another way to expand the Shield brand, and perhaps he was, as his widow Marjorie maintains, a genuine romantic, captivated by tales of knights and derring-do. Either way, Air Castle of the South became the moniker the station would use for decades, as well as an advertising icon. An early house ad in Our Shield featured a fanciful pen-and-ink illustration of a castle in the clouds, hovering just behind the elegant diamond of the WSM tower. WSM postcards featured the castle and clouds well into the 1960s. Ridley Wills II, one of the last National Life executives and grandson of a company founder, said the slogan certainly made an impression on his ten-year-old mind. “I would be lying out in my front yard playing with lead soldiers and I’d have a radio out there,” he said. “And I thought that the ‘Air Castle of the South’ was the greatest nickname I’d ever heard. I’d look up in the sky, and just think about WSM, the Air Castle of the South. Eight hundred seventy-eight feet high. I’d memorized that—how tall WSM’s tower was.”

In the mid-1930s, Sarah Colley, having graduated from Ward-Belmont, was on her own. She taught drama and dance briefly in Centerville but soon landed a place in the Wayne P. Sewell Production Company in Atlanta, which toured the South staging plays and variety theater. Sewell was a blend of P. T. Barnum and a small-time Dale Carnegie, whose new book How To Win Friends and Influence People was a favorite. Sewell’s organization had about ten advance men, or promoters, who sold shows town by town, and up to 150 “coaches” who staged them. That was Sarah’s job, for $10 per week. In small southern towns, she encountered the weirdness and wonder of show-business people, many of them more slovenly and raw than she’d been used to. And she had to unlearn the demure, stare-at-your-book posture of Ward-Belmont. “I learned to make eye contact and smile in every encounter,” she recalled. She learned to fend off male advances with wit, to travel light, to deal with every kind of personal melodrama. And she heard all kinds of southerners talk and tell their stories. Though she spent six years with Sewell, she was never offered the roles of her dreams. So she dreamed up a role for herself.

In the deep winter of 1936, Colley was dispatched to Cullman, in northern Alabama. She had to beg for a place to stay (the company expected its directors to find their own lodgings), and a schoolmaster more or less foisted her on a poor farming couple in their seventies, who lived in a cabin in the midst of nowhere. The old lady (“I’ve had sixteen young’uns and never failed to make a crop”) was taken by surprise but took Colley in, fed her well, and put her up in her son’s room for about a dollar a day, while he moved to a lean-to outside the house. The family called the son “Brother” because he didn’t like his given name, Kyle. “I’d heap druther they’d a-named me Jim,” he told Colley in their first candid conversation. “Then why don’t you change your name to Jim?” she asked. “Oh, I got a brother named Jim,” he replied. Over about ten days, she grew fond of the family. The old lady sent her off with what Colley considered a high compliment, almost a right of passage into another society. “Lord a’mercy child, I hate to see you go. You’re just like one of us,” she said. The mother’s name is lost to history, but her personality lived on as the character/alter ego that Sarah Colley would soon develop, a simple country maid named Minnie Pearl.

Country music reflected, soothed, and informed Depression-era America with its blues-based cathartic qualities and its identification with the common folk who were taking it on the chin. Record sales, following the double-barreled blast of radio (free music) and the economic downturn, struggled out of a hole, especially after the American division of the U.K.’s Decca Records slashed records to thirty-five cents and signed new stars like Jimmie Davis (“You Are My Sunshine”), the Delmore Brothers, Bradley Kincaid, and others.

Country music saw even greater growth through other outlets. Artists proved especially effective at selling products of all kinds over the air, from laxatives and patent medicines to work clothes, farm equipment, and live baby chicks. The Carter Family, the mountain trio from the Bristol sessions, found steady work singing of hard times and redemption over the famous Mexican border blasters, radio stations which, out of the reach of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), reached most of the United States with a half-million watts or more. From the Southeast to California, hillbilly artists toured around their radio bases, building regional fan followings. Cowboy movies spread the music of Gene Autry and other Western artists. Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys began to build their name as western swingers at KVOO in Tulsa, starting in 1934. And while polite society wouldn’t admit to enjoying hillbilly records, country songs crossed over to the mainstream as hits for pop giants like Bing Crosby, who cut “I’m an Old Cowhand” and “Empty Saddles.”

The record business—emerging as the center of the music industry—had no footprint in Nashville during the 1930s. Atlanta down the road remained a hotbed of recording, along with Dallas, San Antonio, New Orleans, and even Charlotte. Jukeboxes were dominated by Western singers, not the Gully Jumpers and DeFord Bailey. Song publishing remained firmly ensconced in New York, Chicago, and Hollywood, and the lone entity that managed the flow of royalties for those songs—the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, or ASCAP—barred musicians without formal training and Tin Pan Alley pedigree from membership, and thus from the income derived from public and radio performances. And although the Opry was growing rapidly in popularity, WSM was far from the only city with a country music variety show. The National Barn Dance on WLS in Chicago, sponsored over NBC by Alka-Seltzer, drew a million letters a year. Wheeling, West Virgina’s WWVA launched its Wheeling Jamboree in 1933. WBT in Charlotte had the Crazy Barn Dance after 1934. The Renfro Valley Barn Dance originated with Louisville’s WHAS, beginning in October of 1937. And there were others at KVOO in Tulsa, WRVA in Richmond, KWKH in Shreveport, and WHN in New York.

Nashville needed somebody to decide that it would and could have a music business future, and arguably the first such dreamer was one Joe Frank, a child of Giles County, Tennessee. A steel mill worker and coal miner as a young man, he cast off dangerous labor and moved to Chicago to get into the business end of show business. He booked or managed Fibber McGee & Molly, Gene Autry, and pioneering country fiddler Clayton McMichen. But by the mid-1930s, his chief act was his son-in-law, Pee Wee King. “By 1937, when I came to Nashville, it was already the capital of country music. Not many people knew that but Mr. Joe Frank did,” King noted in his autobiography. One of Frank’s first contributions, according to that memoir, was his suggestion to Opry management that they charge for admission. Standing on stage at the Fatherland Tabernacle, looking out over the people swarming for seats, announcer David Stone had asked why, given the national exposure the Opry was getting and the goodwill it generated. Mr. Frank said, “When you give something away, people don’t value it as much as they should; but if you charge even a small amount, they know it’s something special.” That’s not to say that Frank was greedy. He is remembered as overwhelmingly generous with money, time, and counsel for musicians struggling their way up. When Frank moved from his temporary base in Louisville to Nashville after getting Pee Wee King established on the Opry, the city had more than a barn dance; it had a champion.

King himself contributed much more than music to the Grand Ole Opry over his stellar ten-year run. Born to a working-class Polish/German family from Milwaukee, his given name was Julius Frank Anthony Kuczynski, and he grew up playing polka music on the accordion. He changed his name in high school, as soon as he formed his first bands, and over the next ten years he assembled groups that blended country, polka, pop, and jazz. He formed the Golden West Cowboys in Knoxville, married Joe Frank’s stepdaughter, and moved to Nashville to audition for the Opry one year later. The Cowboys, like the Delmores and the Vagabonds, made their living exclusively through music. They were polished, rehearsed, and—highly unusual for a hillbilly act—readers of music. Their adventuresome ways with country music, including the deft use of accordion, horns, and drums, would become the subject of stylistic debates with George Hay and Edwin Craig, but an even more lasting influence came when it was learned that the Golden West Cowboys were union musicians, tied to the Louisville chapter of the American Federation of Musicians. The Nashville union, Local 257, well established but focused on the city’s classical performers, didn’t welcome them. “They said country musicians weren’t professionals and many of them couldn’t read music,” King said. “But I convinced them that we were professionals and could read music. They would have had to accept us anyway because we were already members of another local . . . After that, other Opry members joined the Nashville local, and within a few years the Opry was unionized.”

Because National Life’s leaders had always resisted labor unions with a fervor, this was no small feat. For musical Nashville, it marked an understated turning point.