Guts and BrassGuts and Brass
The night of December 15, 1939, was icy cold in Atlanta, but the thousands of people crowded on Peachtree Street scarcely noticed. They were dazzled by searchlights panning the sky and playing across the facade of the Loew’s Grand Theater, which, on this gala evening, was festooned with Confederate bunting and faced with a huge replica of a colonnaded Southern plantation. Loudspeakers announced the arrivals of Clark Gable, with his wife Carol Lombard, and Vivien Leigh, with beau Laurence Olivier. The day had been declared a holiday by the mayor, and three days of pomp and celebration had preceded this climactic event: the world premiere of Gone with the Wind. The hotly anticipated and very expensive film, a nostalgic and unapologetic celebration of southern glory presented in awe-inspiring Technicolor, was just what its Depression-weary audience wanted. When the Confederacy declared war, the audience of two thousand stood and cheered. Hattie McDaniel, who would become the first African American to win an Academy Award (for her role as Mammy), was not invited.
In the midst of the excitement was radio reporter Jack Harris, not yet thirty, his WSM microphone in hand. For six hours, he interviewed stars and fans alike, capturing the voices and the ambience of “one of the great events of Southern history.” As the long film came to its operatic, Dixie-affirming conclusion, Harris recorded the swelling theme music and the lusty applause. He transmitted a post-film speech by novelist Margaret Mitchell and interviewed audience members as they emerged from the screening. “Opinions all the way around say that it’s really a smash hit,” he announced with staccato urgency. “We haven’t had a dissenting vote yet that it is certainly one of the super-colossal productions of all time.”
As the 1930s came to a welcomed end, WSM was something of a super-colossal production itself. The station sent three shows each week over the NBC network, including the Grand Ole Opry, and the Nashville Times radio column noted that “WSM is fast becoming the leading NBC center in the South.” It sold far more of its airtime to national and regional sponsors than to local businesses, making a tidy profit for National Life, beyond its massive marketing presence for its insurance. The only hang-up in this steady march toward national prominence was Ed Kirby’s departure for Washington, because he had brought an imaginative drive to WSM programming that wasn’t general manager Harry Stone’s strength. Jack Harris, by then Stone’s trusted second-in-command, managed special events and sports like a dashing young champ, but he didn’t seem like the man to cast shows, oversee music repertoire, and hire musicians. For some time, Edwin Craig had wondered why WSM didn’t have a dedicated, full-time program director anyway. Now, he insisted, and the man who won the job brought a new level of production experience to the station. He also had the appealing attribute of being a Nashville native. His name was Jack Stapp.
He started working around radio while at a prep school in Georgia, and by the time he was nineteen years old and taking over as program director for CBS affiliate WGST in Atlanta, newspapers were calling Jack Stapp a radio “boy wonder.” That was 1932, by which time he’d decided to bypass college and become a radio professional. The Atlanta Constitution said he’d already proven his “ability to guide programs through a maze of technical details and retain the warm approval of temperamental artists.” He could have been on television, had there been such a thing, with his shoe-polish sleek hair, his dark eyes full of authority and warmth, and his full, almost feminine lips. But by 1934, Stapp was a seasoned radio announcer and personality and, according to one newspaper columnist, “a highly valued addition to the life of Atlanta and the South.” The writer predicted it wouldn’t be long before he was drafted into the big time.
Stapp’s best friend in Atlanta was Bert Parks, and he helped Parks land his first radio job. Bert Parks, an announcer with Miss America pageants in his future, paid back the favor a few years later by helping Stapp get his first network job at CBS in New York. For the latter half of the 1930s, Parks and Stapp roomed together, working as hotshots at CBS, and living the large life of New York’s Cab Calloway years. Stapp produced the Dick Tracy Show, School of the Air, and Mary Pickford’s Parties at Pickfair. He worked with Kate Smith and Edward R. Murrow, and once he worked a full week without leaving the studios, backing up radio news pioneer H. V. Kaltenborn during an early tipping point of World War II.
One day in the late 1930s, Stapp was producing an episode of Buck Rogers in the Twenty-First Century at CBS studios in New York, when Jack Harris came in, unannounced. “I’d never met him,” Stapp remembered. “The pageboy was bringing him through [with] one of the men from station relations, because CBS wanted to get WSM.” Stapp, still with family ties in Nashville, was a long-distance fan of WSM. He stopped the rehearsal and said, “Folks, I want you to meet a man here from the greatest radio station in America, WSM. They have the Grand Ole Opry.” He went on and on. Harris didn’t forget that, and when Edwin Craig and Harry Stone began thinking seriously in 1939 about hiring a full-time program director, Harris offered Stapp’s name for consideration. Stapp was streaking toward senior positions at CBS. He’s said he was considering an offer to be production manager for the network when WSM came inquiring. But he surprised himself. “I never knew I’d end up in Nashville again as long as I lived, except to see relatives,” he said some years later. “I made up my mind, I was coming South—back home.”
Before he left, Stapp called his friend Phil Carlin at NBC—his network’s chief rival—to promise him he’d be pitching shows from his new NBC base in Nashville. And upon arrival in his old hometown, he shook things up. He wasn’t entirely happy with WSM’s house ensembles, which were good enough for an orchestra pit, he thought, but not for regular network feeds. Recruiting new talent wasn’t made easy by AFM Local 257. “The union wouldn’t let me bring in musicians, because of competition naturally,” Stapp told the Country Music Foundation’s Doug Green. “But somebody at WSM came to me and said there are a lot of good musicians from Nashville who hold Nashville cards who would love to come back to Nashville if they had a regular job here. So we got on the phone and got hold of these guys and had an excellent orchestra.”
Stapp liked what he saw in vocalist Snooky Lanson, as well as a new-to-Nashville singer named Kitty Kallen. He also had good reason to be pleased with his announcing staff. Besides Harris, WSM had a cast of names and voices intimately known in the entire region. David Cobb, Ott Devine, Louie Buck, and Lionel Ricau were all sincere, engaging, and capable of introducing an opera singer or an Opry star with equal grace. Collectively, they defined the convivial, folksy personality of WSM even more than the music. They didn’t take nicknames or adopt characters like announcers from Hay’s generation. Instead they came across as very much themselves—polite but genuine. One afternoon each week in the late 1930s, all participated in a free-flowing, banter-filled quiz show called Stump the Announcer, in which host Richard Dunn read general knowledge questions sent by listeners. A bell rang when an announcer was flummoxed, which was relatively rare, and a dollar would go to the question’s sender.
Stapp’s relationship with Phil Carlin at NBC seems to have paid off quickly. The show Magnolia Blossoms was revived from a hiatus as an NBC feed, and Francis Craig’s long-running local program, Sunday Night Serenade, hopped to the network as well. Most auspicious, however, was the inauguration of a half hour of the Grand Ole Opry on NBC. Prince Albert Smoking Tobacco, a loose pipe and roll-your-own tobacco made by R. J. Reynolds, became the presenting sponsor of a half-hour segment of the Opry in January 1939, but only locally. On October 14, that segment went national. George Hay announced and Roy Acuff starred in the first NBC network broadcast of what would from then on be called the “Prince Albert Opry” from War Memorial Auditorium.
By 1940 NBC was a massive operation, headquartered at Rockefeller Center in New York, with a multiplex of state-of-the-art studios issuing shows to 172 stations as well as shortwave broadcasts in six languages across the world. In the age before television, NBC was rivaled only by CBS as the most influential entertainment and news organization in America, and WSM was one of NBC’s star affiliates. Already, the Air Castle of the South had graduated key talent to the network, including dramatist Casper Kuhn, who became nationally known as announcer Dick Dudley. Even more prominent were “Smilin’ ” Ed McConnell, who got his own show, and Dinah Shore, who was named the nation’s outstanding new radio star in a 1940 Scripps-Howard newspaper poll. This pipeline of artistry only bolstered what had long been a special relationship. The initial union between NBC and WSM had been a handshake deal, and Edwin Craig was a lifelong friend of NBC’s Niles Trammell, who became NBC president in 1940. When CBS courted WSM in 1936, NBC fought to keep WSM in its fold. Broadcasting magazine called the relationship “strategically important” and said that “by re-signing the station, NBC kept for itself one of the most important outlets on its networks.”
One measure of that importance was how often NBC turned to WSM for live, national entertainment. While local stations like WSM occasionally filled air time with records or transcription discs, NBC prohibited prerecorded programming until the middle of World War II. So sometimes, especially on weekend afternoons, the network would call its trusted affiliate looking for live filler, sometimes fifteen minutes, sometimes more. When such requests came in, Jack Stapp arranged a band to back up a staff vocalist or a group. An announcer typed out snappy intros to three songs on a typewriter. They’d slap a name on the show, rehearse it in Studio B to tweak the timing (if they were lucky), and then run it live when the cue came from the network.
Sometimes such requests gave birth to long-running shows. One Friday in 1940, NBC’s Phil Carlin called Stapp and said, “Can you feed me a show Sunday afternoon?” It wasn’t much notice, but Stapp pulled together the premiere of the readily named Sunday Down South in a couple of days. The show aired sporadically on the network in the latter half of the year and then became a local show at (variously) noon, 3:30, or 4:30 p.m. It was a sustaining (commercial-free) show until October 1942, when it jumped to a regional network with Lion Oil of El Dorado, Arkansas as its sponsor. Sunday Down South eventually settled into a 5:00 p.m. slot where it ran for years following the NBC Symphony, over fifteen and later twenty-five stations. A live audience in Studio C helped the show crackle. Pop smoothies like Snooky Lanson and Dottie Dillard fronted Beasley Smith’s orchestra, while emcee Louie Buck promised “a breath of magnolia and a ray of sunshine” in his enthusiastic opening patter. Smith’s arrangements were dense with saxophones and trombones and heavy on post–Gone with the Wind romance. Although it never made the full NBC network again, Sunday Down South encapsulated as well as any regular program of the 1940s and 1950s the genteel Dixieana WSM cultivated for its audiences and sponsors alike.
The Grand Ole Opry became particularly symbolic of WSM’s stature within the network. Not only was having a Saturday night prime-time show on NBC an honor, WSM fought for and won the freedom to locally preempt the rest of NBC’s Saturday lineup to broadcast the Opry in its entirety. Craig asserted later that WSM was the only station in the NBC chain with such permission. “We almost lost our NBC affiliation” over the issue, he said, but “we felt we were acting in the public interest by bringing good entertainment to hundreds of people in our own community, so we took a firm stand.”
More and more, the Opry was at the core of WSM’s self-image as well. A brochure for potential advertisers proudly noted in about 1940 that the Opry “is unique in radio, a strange slice of America—the homespun voice of America speaking to the homespun heart of America.” Outsiders began to see it that way too. The New York Times covered the Opry on January 14, 1940, offering a respectful description of the crowds, the songs, and the artists. Just over a week later, Time magazine’s radio column described the show as “a weekly fiesta, Southern style, for hill folk from the Great Smokies, croppers, tourists.” In the middle of the year, Republic Pictures released a modestly budgeted film entitled Grand Ole Opry with performances by Uncle Dave Macon, Roy Acuff, and others. And even at home, the media praised the Opry and WSM’s role in building it as a cultural phenomenon. The Nashville Times editorialized: “Now we in Nashville realize that instead of being marked as a capital of hillbillydom, we have become instead a city that knew how to develop and present one significant phase of real American music which would have been untouched, had it not been for our activity in bringing it to the rest of the nation.”
Not everyone saw it that way in Nashville, where there was still a stark divide between the hillbilly musicians and the power players behind the radio station that happened to be helping them. Few people described the schism as well as Pee Wee King: “Most of the rich people, the movers and the shakers, and the university crowd didn’t pay us much attention,” he wrote. “They didn’t go to the Opry. They had their own little cliques and circles, their golf tournaments, symphony concerts, card games and dances. People who lived in the fashionable sections of Nashville, like Belle Meade and the West End, had little to do with the early Opry stars. Sometimes we’d get the cold shoulder from people who thought we weren’t worth fooling with. They seemed to be saying, ‘You’re not in my class. You’re not educated and cultured. Why should I spend my time with you?’ ” It was like living, he said, in two cities: “the city of the Opry and the rest of Nashville. The attitude that country music was lowbrow spilled over to the fans. I’ve seen them go into record shops and buy a Frank Sinatra or a Jo Stafford record and sneak an Eddy Arnold or a Pee Wee King record in the pile. For a long time it wasn’t fashionable to admit in public that you liked country music.”
“They were two separate worlds,” confirms Ridley Wills II, a third generation National Life executive. “It was never talked about in my family. My father [Jesse Wills] was a poet, about as uninterested in country music as you could get. You no more talked about country music than you did Jackie Fargo, the professional wrestler. It just didn’t come up.”
Jim Denny got along with hillbillies just fine. He respected the Opry musicians, and they trusted him in return. In 1941, Denny became the Opry’s unofficial stage manager. War Memorial could be a volatile place because so many rowdy soldiers came to the show. Charlie Sanders, a former policeman who helped Denny in those days, said that Denny was perfectly willing to manhandle drunks who would occasionally volunteer their way up on stage. If necessary, he would clock them on the head or haul them off by the collar.
At the same time, and more constructively, Denny’s entrepreneurial streak surfaced. He asked Runcie Clements for permission to sell concessions and souvenirs to the Opry audience. To Clements, this looked like pocket change, and besides, the Opry lacked souvenirs. So he said yes, and Denny got crafty. “He had a guy draw an outline of a hillbilly performer and made a rubber stamp out of it,” remembers Denny’s son Bill. “And at home we had a jigsaw, and we would stamp plywood sheets with that and it said, ‘Grand Ole Opry, Nashville, Tennessee,’ and we would take the jigsaw and cut ’em out, sand off the edges a little bit, and paint ’em with lacquer. And that became a souvenir that we sold at the Opry.” Father and son Denny also made key rings with a leather fob they would stamp, one by one, with a hammer and die. A similar whacking sound emerged from the family basement as they stamped gold foil Opry logos onto the wooden ashtray bottoms. Later, along came seat cushions, artist songbooks, and, to the great relief of stifling summertime patrons, hand fans.
In 1922, Owen Bradley’s father got fed up with farming a hillside in West-moreland and moved fifty miles to the north edge of Nashville. Owen was ten when WSM went on the air, and Francis Craig and Beasley Smith were among the first musicians he ever heard on his crystal radio. His first music lessons were in Hawaiian guitar, which he practiced in earnest after being laid up with an eye injury. Later his mother bought him a piano, and Owen began to imitate and emulate the big band sounds he heard emanating from Chicago, New York, and Nashville. “I liked Hawaiian music, hillbilly music, anything,” he once recalled. Owen’s brother Harold, about ten years younger, recalls Owen organizing a group that met in a large converted chicken house on the Bradley property. “A bus would pull up out front, and a band would get off, and they’d go out back and have jam sessions. The neighbors would be hanging over the fence.”
Owen’s first regular jobs were on trombone with a bandleader named Red McEwen. The boss was patient as Bradley learned to read charts and play his role in a working dance band. Bradley could recall shows at the elaborate but rustic Wilson County Fair and playing underage at the gambling houses out in Cheatham County. “Beyond the county line, first came the Pines. A little further out were the Belvedere and the Ridgeway Inn. We were kids playing out there,” Owen told music writer Robert K. Oermann. It was, he said, “like a little Reno, Nevada” out on Highway 70, full of booze and burlesque and sometimes amateurs doing their best. “One night we had this dancer performing in front of the band. We couldn’t read music properly, so we kept repeating the melody, over and over. This poor gal was dancing herself to death. She bent over and looked between her legs backwards and said to the band, ‘Shut up! You S.O.B.’s are killing me!’ ”
Soon Bradley began assembling his own bands, which began to make real money playing walkathons at the Hippodrome (“the South’s Largest, Finest Roller Rink”), charity events that tested the bands’ endurance nearly as much as the couples who aimed to be the last one standing. Meanwhile, Bradley had become a familiar face at WSM, playing trombone with show bands and sometimes piano behind young Frances Rose Shore. At the same time, he played piano and guitar in a little band called the Blue Diamond Melody Boys at WLAC for $1 per program. In about 1940, Bradley moved his base from roadhouses in Cheatham County to upscale clubs in Brentwood. There, he worked with numerous musicians whom he would know for years thereafter. Kitty Kallen, Snooky Lanson, and a dimpled Dottie Dillard all fronted the band at one time or another. Saxophonist Charlie Grant proved himself in the reed section. Drummer Farris Coursey kept civilized time.
New WSM program director Jack Stapp noticed Bradley’s talents as soon as he moved to Nashville. Initially, he had to hire Bradley under the pseudonym Roland Brown to keep WLAC in the dark. And Bradley could tell Stapp had a vision. “When he came, he started acting as though WSM was a network,” Bradley said in 1988. “He started filling up different spots with local programs. This was a very important time. WSM agreed to have a band. It started off small and gradually grew. By 1940, I was asked to join as a utility player.”
Bradley’s boss was a fascinating character named Pietro Brescia, a former violinist from Francis Craig’s orchestra who became WSM’s music director in the late 1930s. Born in Chile to Italian parents, Brescia had fought for the United States in World War I, played in the San Francisco Symphony, and developed a scientific interest in snakes. Now, he was conducting the NBC network feed Riverboat Revels—a variety show set on a virtual river steamer. Listeners heard a sound effects man ringing a boat bell and splashing in a pool to evoke a churning paddlewheel. Ott Devine, the original host, addressed a live studio audience that was keyed up to burst into applause at the right moments. A “captain” with a gratingly sweet, old-fat-man voice presided over everything, sometimes ordering a band to play, quoting poetry, shouting orders to his Negro deck boy, and contriving dramatic excuses for his guests to burst into song. Brescia led the “River Boat Roustabouts,” a ragtime orchestra that kept frantic tempos with a woodblock and a banjo. Other pieces were elaborately orchestrated suites, with difficult interplay between the tiny violin section, trombones, and piano. The group was frequently joined by original WSM cast member Joseph MacPherson, who sang songs like “Old Man River” or “River, Stay away from My Door” in a stiff, operatic baritone. When the group played a southern hoedown or fiddle tunes like “Arkansas Traveler” in orchestral style, the beats were as rigid as a drumstick and really quite painful to anyone attuned to the relaxed flow of old-time fiddling.
Far more timeless and delightful was the harmony singing of Betty and the Dixie Dons, an all-purpose group led by Alcyone Bate Beasley. Daughter of the late Humphrey Bate, she was herself a veteran WSM entertainer. As “Betty,” she led a crisp and note-perfect vocal trio, backed by a tactful and swinging mix of accordion, violin and guitar. Left-handed Jack Shook, the most important Nashville guitarist of the pre–Chet Atkins era, stroked his acoustic arch-top with brio and sophistication. The band as a whole could bounce energetically or flutter romantically.
Minnie Pearl joined the riverboat cast, in what was likely her earliest non-Opry WSM appearances. David Cobb played her straight man. Her routines generally centered around the fictitious town of Grinders Switch, a mythical place like Lake Wobegon or Yoknapatawpha County, where country life played out according to Minnie’s imagination. One of her frequent subjects was Brother, modeled after poor Kyle from the mountain. “Every time I bring him out, something happens,” she fretted in one routine. “The first time I brung him to town he like to scared every feller to death!” Cobb asked what was the matter. Pearl replied that, “They all said he had smallpox, but he didn’t. It was just where we had been learnin’ him to eat with a fork.”
That, in high WSM style, gave way to Kay Carlisle, a pop vocalist billed as the “sweetheart of the blue grass region,” who sang “Bragging.”
The World in Review with Jack Harris grew more ominous as the world spiraled out of control. Some listeners told him he slanted toward supporting U.S. intervention in his summaries of Hitler’s growing threat, and in retrospect Harris couldn’t disagree. On Sunday night, September 1, 1940, WSM broadcast The First Year, an in-house production that summarized the gathering storm. “Today . . . marks the first anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War,” intoned an announcer, “a titanic struggle between two diverse political philosophies: democracy and totalitarianism.” Recordings of Adolf Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, and King George VI were spliced into live scripted synopses of key developments, bolstered with sound effects of exploding bombs and marching soldiers. When the Germans sank the cruise ship Athenia, the radio audience heard explosions and screams. The show concluded and cut to Jack Harris with the latest war news.
When men began to leave WSM for the service, Harris was one of the first to go, hired away by his old mentor, Ed Kirby. Kirby’s colleagues at the National Association of Broadcasters were afraid the War Department would box radio reporters out of the biggest story of the twentieth century. The nation hadn’t fought a war in the broadcasting era, and it was all too plausible that the government could simply commandeer radio itself. NAB’s preemptive plan had Kirby at its center. They offered his services to the War Department for one dollar per year as a liaison between the military and the broadcasters, a publicity agent willing to work with and negotiate censorship policy. A graduate of Virginia Military Institute, Kirby got back in uniform and accepted the rank of lieutenant colonel. Harris answered an invitation to join him in Washington.
“On the last broadcast that I made before I went to the War Department in 1941, I called it The World in Preview and tried to predict what was going to happen in the world,” Harris said. He wasn’t right about everything, but years later he would give himself a passing grade. Over the next four calamitous years, he and Kirby produced radio programming for troops, crafted and implemented War Department policy about journalist access, and helped stitch together a web of wired and wireless broadcasting—the Armed Forces Radio Service—such as the world had never known.
The War Department worked out how to coordinate media coverage of the war even as it practiced for the war itself. When the Second Army held maneuvers in nearby Manchester in 1941, the war games became a perfect opportunity to pursue Jack Stapp’s ethic of covering big stories out in the field. WSM engineers and reporters followed the exercises for two weeks via portable shortwave transmitter. As a base of operations, WSM rented a private dining railroad car, where at one point, station brass shared a white tablecloth dinner with three American generals, including the soon-to-be-famous George Patton. “I remember standing out on the railroad tracks on a hot summer evening, drinking Scotch whiskey with General Patton, and conversing with him about the upcoming war,” said Jack DeWitt. He could recall the general’s ivory-handled revolvers and the high pitch of his voice.
Later that summer, the War Department staged some of the biggest maneuvers ever held in the United States. The station sent new announcer Jud Collins with Aaron Shelton and George Reynolds to engineer coverage of a momentous event that was set to sprawl across much of the state of Louisiana. They loaded a backpack relay transmitter, acetate disc recorder, AC generators, spare tubes, batteries, extra-long microphone cables, headphones, microphones, and power cables in a trailer behind a used DeSoto purchased for the trip and a company Chrysler station wagon with “WSM—650 k.c.—Nashville, Tenn.” emblazoned on the side. They headed for Winnfield, Louisiana, headquarters of the “Red Army,” where they found rows of tents, hordes of mosquitoes, a big mess hall, and a massive contingent of national media, including CBS’s Eric Sevareid and NBC’s top special-events announcers Bob Stanton and Dave Garroway.
Jack Harris was there, in his new job as liaison between the radio correspondents and the virtual combatants—the “Red Army” and the “Blue Army.” The Blue Army’s chief of staff was a lieutenant colonel named Dwight Eisenhower. WSM listeners heard a pontoon bridge being built in the middle of the night, the metallic rumbling of tanks, and the thud of artillery fire. Collins, Shelton, and Reynolds kept on the move as the Blue Army seemed to push the Red Army all over the northern part of Louisiana. After a final exercise involving precision bombing runs at Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport, Harry Stone hosted some of the generals back at his hotel room for before-dinner drinks. Young reporter Jud Collins was tasked with buying the liquor, though nobody told him to excise any references to alcohol on his National Life expense report. When the document reached the third-floor treasury department, Shelton related, “The whole building fairly shook and Jud had to endure a lecture on expense reporting. After redoing his expense account and listing two fictitious meals instead of two real bottles of booze, Jud’s ‘swindle sheet’ sailed through without question.”
Radio had already changed life in the United States, but the coming war made the medium indescribably important. Beyond reporting the news and offering home-front diversion, radio companies took a direct and aggressive role in supporting the war effort. As its first official morale booster, WSM teamed with its loyal sponsor R. J. Reynolds to develop the Camel Caravan, a touring revue of Opry stars aimed at supporting the troops, widening exposure of WSM and country music, and selling cigarettes. Its formation paralleled the development of the United Service Organization (USO), making the Caravan one of the earliest free traveling shows ever organized for American soldiers.
“We had held auditions on a flatbed truck in [Nashville’s] Shelby Park and put the show together in late summer of 1941,” remembered Pee Wee King. “Then we brought it up to Fort Knox to try it out to see how it would go over with the servicemen and with the Camel cigarette people.” Four long red touring cars were painted with a Camel Caravan logo. One pulled a house trailer used as a dressing room, and the lead car had electric bullhorns on top that blurted out: “The Camels are coming. Da DA, Da DA.” The instruments followed in a truck whose fold-down sides converted into a stage. The first cast featured twenty-one different entertainers. The Golden West Cowboys anchored the show. King’s band member Eddy Arnold was stepping forward as a solo act. He crooned a seductive early hybrid of traditional country and silky pop. Lithe redhead Dollie Dearman danced, and Kay Carlisle brought confectionary pop singing to the mix. A versatile entertainer and businessman named Ford Rush became the Camel Caravan emcee. He’d known George Hay since their days on the WLS Barn Dance and had been running the Artist Service Bureau since David Stone left for a radio station in St. Paul, Minnesota.
The Caravan, working almost every day to captive audiences of scared new recruits, forced Sarah Colley to further develop Minnie Pearl. “You had to be quick and punchy to get through to them, and that gave me the guts and brass to let Minnie kick up her heels and have fun,” she wrote. Besides getting $50 per week for the shows, Minnie got $50 more from the advertising agency for chaperoning the Camelettes, a small team of girls who danced in majorette outfits and strolled through the crowd handing out free cigarettes. That fall, the Caravan traveled in loops around Nashville, hitting four or five bases each week. “As we passed, people would wave and blow their horns at us,” remembered Pee Wee King. “People came up to thank us in hotels and restaurants. We tried to do two complete shows a day, a matinee in a sports field outdoors, and an evening performance in a base theater or auditorium.”
On the morning of December 7, 1941, the Camel Caravan pulled into San Antonio, set for a day off. Minnie was with Dollie Dearman when news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor reached them. “We thought the Camel Caravan would end instantly,” she related. “We didn’t realize there would be more need for it than ever.” The next day President Roosevelt declared war on Japan, but the Caravan had shows to play at air fields Randolph and Kelly. They mustered all the spirit they could and headed for the first base. Whereas their vehicles had zoomed straight into their bases, this day they were stopped, searched, and ID checked. Minnie made jokes about seeing her initials on the arms of all the MPs. They visited hospitals, where morale was low. Eddy Arnold dropped his standard opening number “I’ll Be Back in a Year, Little Darlin’ ” out of respect for soldiers who now didn’t know when or whether they’d be going home.
When word of the attacks reached WSM’s studios, some of the newsmen and announcers had to look up Pearl Harbor on a map. Among them were two new hires. Jud Collins had been discovered when he broadcast a track meet over WSM from his first broadcasting home, WSGN in Birmingham. Harry Stone had heard him and coaxed him up to Nashville with a job offer doubling his salary to $35 per week. Collins remembered that Stone painted a picture of National Life as a good employer; people who come to work for us stay with us, he’d said.
The other was a severe-looking fellow with swept-back hair, a Roman nose, and an unnerving, imperious gaze. Irving Waugh of Norfolk, Virginia, had been a small-time newscaster, a seaman on a tramp steamer, and a poor college student who sailed on the Chesapeake when he should have been studying. From his job at a CBS affiliate in Roanoke, he sent a résumé and an acetate try-out disc to Jack Stapp at WSM. Stapp referred him to WLAC, likely to get him nearby so he could study this intriguing young man. After a few months at WLAC, Waugh was hired away by an NBC station in Cleveland. “I stayed there about four or five months,” he said. “I had a row with the music director. He took out his penis and tried to lead the orchestra. We had a woman vocalist and I was highly indignant at my age. I didn’t think that was proper conduct and I slammed him into the wall. He was close to the manager, so I thought I better get another job.” After some calls to Stapp, Waugh was hired as a part-timer a week before Pearl Harbor. Stapp and Waugh began to see qualities in each other they admired. They discovered they had been born on the same day. Early in 1942, Waugh became the newest full-time member of the announcing staff and took over for Jud Collins on the 6:00 a.m. sign-on.
Collins, acutely aware of what a break he’d been given, was on his best behavior. “This was a unique radio station,” he remembered thinking. “Not many stations throughout the United States had a studio orchestra or studios where they could welcome a crowd of people.” A bachelor, he moved into the YMCA just across the street from the studios, where he could be easily reached. Jud was ready to do whatever was asked of him, even giving up his Saturday nights to announce the chaotic and exhausting Grand Ole Opry, though he didn’t much care for the show.
Waugh, by contrast, pushed his luck. He got in a couple of fights, including one with country star Zeke Clements that he remembers losing. And he started “taking liberties” with the editorial side of his news announcing. “I finally got into trouble—deep trouble,” he said. “Tennessee was contemplating a sales tax. I grew up in Virginia where there were state controlled liquor stores. I took the trouble of calling Richmond and found out what their (revenue) was from their liquor stores. It just happened to be very close to the figure Tennessee was hoping to derive from a sales tax. So I then started pushing for state controlled liquor stores in Tennessee and not a sales tax. And my life was threatened.”
But for the most part, Waugh offered color commentary at Vanderbilt football games and announced news. He also hosted some of WSM’s wartime pop shows. In a 1944 episode of a Beasley Smith vehicle called Mr. Smith Goes to Town, Waugh’s crisp diction, seasoned with the long Rs of a Tidewater Virginia accent, introduced the NBC feed with a dense, literary flair. He set up his subject, singer Danny Ryan, by observing that the crooner was usually an up-and-at-’em kind of guy: “As a rule, to temporize just isn’t in the boy’s vocabulary,” Waugh said. “But for some unbeknowing reason, here he is, waggishly wagging his way through a song of ‘Waiting.’ ” Waugh made puns and slathered on alliteration. He used words no average person should know. He made words up. It was all a bit rococo even for WSM. He almost sounded restless, like a man in need of an adventure. He’d soon have one.
A day or two after the Pearl Harbor attack, C. A. Craig sent an open letter to his employees urging them to take part in the war effort in whatever way they could. “As one man and one woman, may we who wear the Shield pledge ourselves to do gladly and freely whatever may be our part in the great tragedy faced by the land we love!” he exhorted. National Life guaranteed that employees who joined the service would have their jobs back when they returned, and many took the offer. Jud Collins volunteered for the Air Force and flew navigators out of Hondo, Texas. Owen Bradley managed to turn his Merchant Marine stint in a musical direction, leading an orchestra at officers’ clubs, while his brother, WSM guitarist Harold Bradley, became a radio man intercepting Japanese code from a base in Hawaii. Aaron Shelton applied to be a communications officer but couldn’t pass the physical, because he couldn’t get his weight up over 124 pounds.
Jack DeWitt was called to duty immediately after Pearl Harbor, invited back to his old employer Bell Labs to work on a secret war technology that he would come to know as RADAR. A year later, he went to work at the newly completed Pentagon and then, upon being commissioned a major with orders signed by President Roosevelt, he was stationed at Belmar, New Jersey. There he spent most of the war, in charge of Evans Signal Laboratory, overseeing seventy-three officers and fourteen hundred civilians in a well-guarded research and development campus.
Jack Stapp finagled his way into an enviable job in the military’s division of propaganda and psychological warfare. He trained in New York and then was stationed in downtown London, where he was put in charge of the Special Events Section of the American Broadcasting Station in Europe. ABSIE, as it was know, went on the air just before D-Day and spent the next two years beaming news and speeches by exiled European leaders to the occupied people of the Continent. Stapp, with his beguiling mix of substance and charm, helped the likes of the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg and King Peter of Yugoslavia deliver messages to their citizens. When the Germans tried to jam it, ABSIE changed channels. When the Germans labeled it the American “Agitation Station,” it bolstered the confidence of resistance fighters. It played “Yankee Doodle” every fifteen minutes.
Those who remained at WSM dreamed up new ways to contribute to the war effort. During 1942 the Camel Caravan entertained troops in Panama for several weeks and continued to tour the nation, now by bus. By the time it wrapped that December, the troupe had traveled more than 75,000 miles, covered thirty-two states, and done 175 shows in sixty-eight camps, hospitals, air fields, and bases. Though some twenty-two WSM staffers gave time to the Caravan, its shows were never broadcast over WSM. At the same time, Grand Ole Opry tent shows (there were two traveling units) played free for servicemen at regional bases. Francis Craig’s group also played regional military bases, for a time with perhaps his most remarkable vocal duo: Snooky Lanson and Kitty Kallen, just before she went to New York and became a network star.
WSM fed segments directly to the Army Hour, a sort of Stars and Stripes of the air developed by Ed Kirby. The show could be heard in the States over NBC on Sunday afternoons and globally over the Army’s shortwave facilities, tying the many theaters of war together and boosting morale through the most immediate medium available. WSM’s features for the show included an interview with an old country couple who had seven sons in the armed forces, exercises involving the building and demolition of a pontoon bridge, and broadcasts from an airborne B-24 bomber.
Numerous shows were aimed at bolstering recruiting efforts, including live broadcasts of young men swearing induction oaths from the steps of the War Memorial Auditorium, one block from National Life. When Nashville’s Vultee aircraft company converted to making A-35 Vengeance dive bombers and P-38 Lightning attack planes, WSM interviewed its women working for the first time in pants and coveralls on assembly lines. Downtown, the Nashville Bridge Company converted to building mine sweepers and sub attack boats, whose launches were signaled on WSM with the crack of champagne bottles on steel. Oil and gas barges didn’t merit a formal christening, but listeners heard them rumble down their iron chutes and splash mightily into the river. At night, the station rebroadcast BBC and other world news broadcasts, received by shortwave.
Nowhere in Nashville could one feel the impact of the war more poignantly than at Union Station, where huge deployments turned the platforms into scenes of mass departures, kisses, hugs, and tears. The WSM staff orchestra set up at Union Station about four times a week to play for departing troops. Harry Stone observed that “before the band began, these partings were more like boys being led to an execution chamber.” But “a morgue was changed into a festive occasion as it should be by WSM.”
WSM also sent engineers, writers, producers, and announcers for an NBC Blue Network show called This Is War. It helped recruiting effort for the all-female corps the WAVES, sold at least $150,000 worth of “Grand Ole Opry Bonds,” and contributed to the rubber salvage drive. Stone personally steered his boat on the Cumberland to Carthage and salvaged two tons of usable scrap. And Dinah Shore, now a top-tier singing star to civilians at home and troops overseas, returned to Nashville to stage a major war-bond rally at the Ryman. WSM furnished a thirty-three-piece orchestra, four singers, writers, promotions, publicity, and production for the two-hour show. Seats ranged from $100 to $500, and the gala raised $650,000 altogether, though it was not broadcast.
Sometimes, WSM’s service to the service took the form of day-to-day generosity and resourcefulness. One afternoon in the fall of 1943, the Smyrna Army Air Base Band spilled out of the fifth-floor elevator, frantic and late. They’d driven as fast as they safely could down the pike from Murfreesboro to make a 3:45 live broadcast. An alarmed receptionist guided them into the nearest empty studio, where they unloaded their instruments and began collecting themselves and warming up. It was about 3:40. Dean Upson, former member of the Vagabonds and now the station’s commercial manager, heard this down the hall and investigated. The apoplectic conductor told them they were on in three minutes and no one had told them what to do. Upson, perplexed, told him they didn’t have a band scheduled for 3:45. The band leader took stock and realized they were at the wrong radio station. They were supposed to be at WSIX, four blocks away. Upson placed a quick call to Jack Wolever, program director at WSIX, who was himself in a fit, wondering how he would fill the next fifteen minutes of dead air. We’ll wire you the performance, Upson said. Stand by. With two minutes to spare, WSM engineers set up the feed and WSIX listeners heard the Smyrna Army Air Base Band as scheduled.
WSM’s war effort was judged above and beyond the call of duty by industry watcher Variety magazine, which cited the station in 1942 for “contributions to military and civilian understanding” and in 1943 for “noteworthy network originations.” The publication noted that WSM’s service was part of an overall commitment to live entertainment that was raising the profile of its home city. “WSM made its large house band available for USO canteens (and) saw its pride, the Grand Ole Opry, grow to coast-to-coast proportions,” the trade paper announced. “WSM produces and presents more commercial and sustaining NBC shows than any other operation in the United States outside of New York, Chicago and Hollywood. Nashville was never known as a show town before WSM. Radio did that for Nashville, via WSM.”