It Helped Everybody in the Long RunIt Helped Everybody in the Long Run
Harry Stone felt betrayed. Over nearly twenty years he’d managed WSM from a part-time local station to a national powerhouse with a signature show. Just one year before he’d been named vice president and general manager of WSM. And then, without warning, old man Craig made Jack DeWitt his boss, at a much higher salary. It was but one reason that by 1947, Stone looked weary, with deep creases in his cheeks and forehead and gray streaks in his hair. He oversaw a ten-person staff of his own plus sixteen in production and a small army of sometimes unpredictable musicians. A micromanager, Stone tended to get involved to a fault with every foible of a complicated organization. “You had to clear everything with Harry,” Irving Waugh remembered. “You couldn’t get a ticket to the Opry for your Mother without getting it from Harry.”
Stone was taking the Opry in important and profitable directions, but he found himself in regular battles with Mr. Craig and Judge Hay. He favored amplification. They opposed it. He supported Pee Wee King’s flashy wardrobe and his hard-swinging country music. They didn’t. They seemed to want the show stuck in 1935, with old-time string bands and hillbilly clothes forever. By the end of the war, and especially after DeWitt’s appointment, Stone’s relationship with Craig lapsed into overt hostility. “Harry was belligerent,” Waugh said. “Harry treated Edwin Craig as almost an equal. They were closer to the same age. Harry thought nothing of sticking his face right in Edwin Craig’s and arguing with him.” For DeWitt, it was a fairly simple situation. “[Harry] didn’t like Edwin Craig, and of course I did,” he said. “He referred to Edwin Craig as ‘that son of a bitch.’ ”
DeWitt wasn’t perfectly qualified for the job, truth be told. He was an engineer by training and temperament, and while he’d been an officer in the disciplined Army Signal Corps, he had little rapport with the carnivalesque Opry cast and no experience with programming, promotion, or ad sales. Harry Stone was the more complete broadcaster, many thought, and certainly the more proven radio station boss. “That son of a bitch was tough as nails,” said W. D. Kilpatrick, a record sales representative and future Opry boss. “But he was the best combination radio station manager and Opry manager there ever was.”
As good as he was, Stone couldn’t keep a rein on Jim Denny, whose sideline concessions business had grown into something substantial. Stone resented watching Denny’s employees roaming the aisles of the Ryman Auditorium selling popcorn and souvenirs, the profits all bound for Denny’s pockets. Denny was, however, too close to the Opry artists and too smart with a dollar to be ignored or dismissed, so despite some misgivings, Stone had recommended in 1946 that Denny be the first full-time head of the Artist Service Bureau, in charge of Opry stars’ live appearances and tours.
For thirteen years, Denny had worked for National Life by day and the Opry the rest of the time. With his promotion, WSM raised his pay by a third and moved him to a fifth-floor office with an assistant, where he figured out the booking business. “Nobody knew as little about it as I did,” Denny wrote to his children many years later. “I had no idea what prices I should get for the acts, but it didn’t take long to find out.” One of his tutors was Mary Claire Jackson (later Rhodes), an assistant to some of the WSM announcers. Writer Albert Cunniff observed that “WSM had treated the Artist Service Bureau in a haphazard fashion in previous years, delegating responsibility for its operation to several people, each of whom had other jobs at the station as well.” Denny made the whole operation run better almost immediately. Opry artists found themselves playing arenas, fairs, and auditoriums, instead of schoolhouses.
Denny struck exclusive regional deals with show promoters, the men who put up the money and the posters, who rented the halls and put on the shows. Those on his good side found Denny to be businesslike, honest, and attentive to details like hotels, publicity, and travel. He made handshake deals and he lived up to them. At the WSM offices, meanwhile, he inspired a sort of awe. He wore a diamond horseshoe ring and dressed in impeccable pinstripe suits. His voice, on the selective occasions when he spoke, commanded attention. He started quietly copromoting some of the shows the Opry stars were playing, sharing in the overhead and taking a cut of the profits personally. He began driving Cadillacs—a new one each year—and sometimes he’d park them in Jack DeWitt’s space behind Seventh and Union to rile him. Perhaps the only chink in the armor of his appearance was his toupee, which sometimes appeared ready to scamper off his head.
Jim Denny’s new influence was built on his control of the Opry brand. Artists had to pay WSM’s Artist Service Bureau 15 percent of their earnings to play under the Opry banner, and it was worth it. Having “Grand Ole Opry” on a show poster in Manchester, Tennessee, or Auburn, Alabama, was such a potent draw that WSM started watching out for unauthorized use of the Opry name. One of DeWitt’s early acts as WSM president was to trademark the Grand Ole Opry name, which, to his surprise, had never been done. At a 1947 clear channel hearing, Stone called the show “a national institution” with a reach “far beyond our original plans.” That September a cast of Opry stars, including Ernest Tubb and Minnie Pearl, played two nearly full-house shows at Carnegie Hall in New York. Next came Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., as well as appearances in Germany and Austria. This once humble show, along with its sponsors, its parent company, and its artists, was climbing rapidly to the pinnacle of the country music business.
Most importantly, the Opry was proving to be bigger than any one performer. Roy Acuff left the show for a time in 1946 to pursue personal appearances out West. But Red Foley, a star of various Midwestern radio barn dances, stepped easily into the anchoring role on the Prince Albert Opry feed to NBC. He was more urbane than rustic and he quickly became one of the best-known singers of folk and hillbilly music in America. His full name was Clyde Julian Foley, and he learned music from his father and his friends who hung around dad’s general store in Blue Lick, Kentucky. He went on to take voice lessons and study music at college, making him one of the only Opry artists ever to do so. He didn’t finish school; Chicago’s WLS recruited him in 1931, and he grew popular on the National Barn Dance. Then he started his own radio show, The Renfro Valley Barn Dance, over WLW in Cincinnati, moving later to Louisville’s WHAS. He signed with Decca in 1941 and recorded hits like “Old Shep.” His rise to the top slot on the Opry’s best-known segment heralded popularity for a new type of singer, one who came from and understood country music but who could croon with the mainstream mellifluousness of a Bing Crosby or a Frank Sinatra. Foley is also spoken of as one of the most entertaining and engaging men ever to step on a Nashville stage.
More than a celebrity factory, the Opry had also become one of the most exciting musical laboratories in postwar America. Bluegrass was largely invented over WSM microphones, recorded by WSM personnel, and promoted through WSM branding. It would grow into one of America’s most important forms of roots music, a self-sustaining and evolving subculture and a significant business niche. Today bluegrass enjoys concert hall stages, festivals, and fine arts coverage, in large part because WSM backed it for sixty years.
Bill Monroe was a strapping and coldly serious mandolinist from Rosine, Kentucky, who’d already achieved near stardom as part of a long-running duo with his brother Charlie. But starting in the 1940s, he achieved something much greater. Working with a complex amalgam of rich musical influences, including blues, swing, jazz, gospel and old-time fiddle music, Monroe fused a new alloy of country music so distinct it earned its own name and legacy.
The name came from Monroe’s band, which in turn was named after his home state. Monroe led many iterations of his Blue Grass Boys beginning in 1938, and once he became an Opry member in the fall of 1939, he grew to near Acuffian stature. And at the end of 1945, he found the personnel that truly completed his vision: banjo player Earl Scruggs, singer/guitarist Lester Flatt, fiddler Chubby Wise, and bass player Cedric Rainwater. This legendary quintet would play together for scarcely more than two years before Flatt and Scruggs peeled away to form their own world-renowned band. But over the coming decades, Monroe continued to graduate expert musicians from his band, populating the bluegrass landscape. His tastes strongly influenced what was and wasn’t bluegrass, including its acoustic instrumentation, its bone-chilling harmonies, its instrumental flair, and its bluesy heart. He would earn the title “Father of Bluegrass,” and his sound and songwriting had so much drive, passion, and bite that he would become the earliest WSM/Opry musician to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. To Harry Stone, Jack DeWitt, and Edwin Craig, of course, he was but one of many talented performers on a show that was making their radio station known across the nation and the world.
With the war behind them and a huge new market for country music opening up, WSM officials began to pitch the Grand Ole Opry to new constituencies. Some of its postwar promotional efforts were more organized than the Opry’s staging. Perhaps the most ambitious, planned by Harry Stone and Jack Harris in tandem with the Esty advertising agency, brought a group of national newspaper and magazine writers to Nashville for a June weekend junket in 1946. Harris, who was only recently back from the war in his new assistant manager role, arranged elaborate hospitality, anchored at a suite of rooms at the Hermitage Hotel.
“You are to have a bar in operation in the main suite, which we will use as headquarters for the group,” Harris wrote to hotel manager Bill Caldwell. Guests were to be told if they wanted anything, to pick up a hotel phone and ask for “George.” “Your phone operators will be completely filled in, so that all such calls for George from our party rooms will immediately be plugged in at a special desk where one of the Georges will be in attendance.” The Georges weren’t to accept tips. The rooms were waiting with fruit, flowers, a carton of Camels, and a can of Prince Albert cigarette tobacco.
The station prepared talking points about each of the visiting writers and editors. Every WSM staffer who would have contact with the delegation was to know some basics about them as individuals. Jack Cluett, radio editor for Woman’s Day, was a wealthy former gag writer who “likes to drink a lot.” Jim Felton, radio editor for Time, came from California, swam, played tennis, and had just bought a new house. Ruth Champenois of The Woman, Florence Somers of Redbook, and Betty Parsons of McCall’s were all close friends. Clyde Carley, associate editor of True, was related to Acuff and came as a ready-made fan of the Grand Ole Opry. And Carley Wheelright, associate editor of Parade, was “unmarried” and “handsome.”
Harris marshaled his forces with the same precision and perhaps more humor than he had on the deck of the USS Missouri. “While the wine will flow like a Grand Ole Opry ballad, the staff of WSM will have to be on its toes every minute to assure success of one of the most important promotional ventures we have ever undertaken,” he wrote in a memo to the staff. “Our mission is to show them the Grand Ole Opry, particularly the Prince Albert broadcast from the [riverboat] Idlewild. It is further to give them the type of Southern hospitality they have probably heard about, but never really seen and felt before.”
On Friday at about 6:00 p.m., a plane chartered by the Esty agency landed at the airport, where Harris and Stone met the media. Two busses and a station wagon, escorted by motorcycles, carried the reporters to the Hermitage Hotel, where they were greeted warmly by Stapp, Louie Buck, and another announcer named Winston Dustin. After settling in, they were delivered to the Noel Estate, a venerable Nashville property, where they were met in the backyard by most of the senior WSM staff, including George Hay. Former Vagabond singer turned ad-man Dean Upson presided over the bar. Open-pit Tennessee barbecue was served alfresco. Noontime Neighbors host John McDonald had been put in charge of spraying the yard for chiggers.
The rest of the weekend unfolded with a similar attention to detail and alcohol. A bar was open at 8:00 a.m. at the hotel the next morning. Lunch was served with mint juleps at the Belle Meade Country Club. The guests were offered their choice of afternoon fun: golf, swimming, tennis, horseback riding, a visit to a Tennessee Walking Horse farm, or a tour of the Hermitage (Andrew Jackson’s home, from which the hotel had taken its name) and the Parthenon. That night, the entire group watched the opening of the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman and got tours of its cramped backstage. WSM staffers were under instructions that “the Opry story is good enough as it is—Do not try to embellish!” Then everyone was driven to a dock where they boarded the Idlewild, a steam pleasure boat that visited Nashville for a few weeks each year for moonlight dance cruises. On board, the Opry’s Prince Albert portion ran smoothly from 9:30 to 10:00, with Red Foley, Minnie Pearl, the Oak Ride Quartet, and comedy from the Duke of Paducah. The show was beamed by shortwave to a receiver on a bank of the Cumberland River and then relayed to WSM, where it was simultaneously broadcast and piped to the NBC network. Listeners on over 130 stations nationwide heard the show, enhanced by the sounds of the paddle wheel, the boat’s bell, and a calliope.
Sunday featured a fish fry at Marrowbone Lake. Fishing gear and boats were provided, and Louie Buck offered a prize for the largest fish caught. A jukebox played Grand Ole Opry artists. And after a long afternoon, and another stop at the hotel, the writers were delivered back to their plane. They took home souvenir boxes with fresh farm butter and slices of Tennessee ham in dry ice, plus a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey.
The weekend was a smash. The Banner called it “the largest group of magazine and newspaper syndicate writers and editors ever attracted to this city for a single event.” Grant Turner remembered reams of good press in its wake. But only a few weeks later, Jack Harris decided that Nashville had become too parochial for him. “I realized I’d made a mistake,” he said in 1993. The war, he said, had been “a broadening experience, but most of the people had not left and they were very satisfied to do what they had been doing for a long time.” Nashville, he said, was an “old Southern town” where the prevailing attitude was: “If it was good enough for my granddaddy, it’s good enough for me . . . I found out that you can’t go home. I had changed too much, and home hadn’t changed that much, and I just wasn’t happy.”
Harris found his new life through powerful friends he’d made in England. Oveta Culp Hobby had organized the Women’s Army Corps and steered it to a vital place in the war effort. Her husband, William P. Hobby, was a former governor of Texas who owned the Houston Post. The couple also owned radio station KPRC in Houston; in early 1947, Harris accepted their invitation to run it.
In the WSM master control room, where the on-duty staff usually gathered when they were not working or playing table tennis, the announcers and engineers frequently talked about the music industry, and there was plenty to discuss as the war came to a conclusion. Big bands were getting smaller. Small record labels were getting bigger. Modern jazz and R & B were dethroning swing as the nation’s hippest music. Independent labels sold fifty million records in 1946 alone, partly through aggressive promotion to a growing number of small radio stations, which couldn’t afford transcribed, syndicated programming. Country music was thriving nationwide, especially in California, where so many southern refugees had migrated during the Dust Bowl. But if Nashville had a chance of competing for some of the burgeoning country music business, it would have to develop into a place with more for an aspiring hillbilly singer to do than simply audition for the Opry.
One of the station’s newer announcers, Jim Bulleit could see that Nashville wasn’t ready for the music business in 1945. A WSM wartime recruit from small town Indiana, Bulleit had been a miner, a cowboy, and a sideshow performer before he went into radio. In Montgomery, Alabama; Twin Falls, Idaho; and Griffin, Georgia, he multitasked his way through announcing, sales, and program production. Historian Martin Hawkins, who has documented Nashville’s embryonic music business, says when Bulleit auditioned at WLAC, he was told he was overqualified and was referred to WSM. (At the same time, a young aspiring DJ named Sam Phillips was shunted in the opposite direction and found gainful employment at WLAC before moving to Memphis, founding Sun Records, and changing the world.) In any event, Bulleit clearly recalls the date he started at WSM, the second anniversary of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1943. Before long, he was announcing on the Opry, hosting a Francis Craig segment, and running the Artist Service Bureau. He was acutely aware that he was the only talent booker in Nashville, and that the city still lacked recording studios and music publishers, save for Acuff-Rose. “[Bulleit] expounded at great length about the pent-up demand for records that would become evident when the war was over,” recalled Aaron Shelton. “His ambition was to start a record company.”
Two years later, he did just that, leaving WSM to launch the Bullet Recording and Transcription Company. Its first trade ad in Billboard at the end of April 1946 announced: “Hillbilly records from the home of the Grand Ole Opry.” And its first release spoke volumes about where Nashville was headed. “Wave to Me, My Lady” by Brad Brady and his Tennesseans had “Zeb’s Mountain Boogie” on the flip side. Brad Brady was none other than Owen Bradley, deftly seasoning his swinging big band style with just a touch of hillbilly ruckus, and to everyone’s surprise, the “throwaway” B-side became a jukebox hit. Though it was only distributed in Nashville and Birmingham, “Zeb’s Mountain Boogie” sold out several pressings. It marked a small victory for the scarcely born Nashville record business, largely because the songs had been recorded in town, at an off-hours studio at WSM. At the time, that was the only option, but that was about to change too.
Bulleit’s foray into record making and selling offered an irresistible invitation to WSM’s technical staff to offer recording services. Engineers Aaron Shelton, George Reynolds, and Carl Jenkins had been watching for years as Opry stars made records in New York, Chicago, or Hollywood. It was, wrote Shelton, “always expensive and not too satisfactory from an artistic standpoint . . . Many . . . were unable to relax and perform to the best of their ability when surrounded by an almost foreign environment and personnel, most of whom were unsympathetic and unappreciative of their talent.” Shelton imagined he and his colleagues could do a better job on their home turf.
WSM had certainly been a recording studio before. Pee Wee King, Owen Bradley, and Eddy Arnold had used Studio B to cut syndicated shows during the war, and in December 1944, Arnold cut his signature hit “Cattle Call” for Victor at WSM, a session many peg as the first in Nashville for a major label release. Thus a full-service recording studio, especially one owned and operated by the men who engineered the Opry stars’ sound over the airwaves each week, seemed a smart bet. Reynolds was, in Shelton’s appraisal, a “superb audio engineer” who also had a grasp of business basics. Jenkins had solid background in studio installation, wiring, and fabrication. And Shelton himself was long familiar with the disc-cutting machines, for he’d been recording commercials and syndicated shows for WSM since 1939. He knew audio circuits, but he also felt equipped to relate to the talent. He liked country music and the people who made it, and he knew about the balance of sounds that made an effective record.
In late 1945 or early 1946, the trio pooled its resources and got an extra $1,000 loan from Third National Bank. They didn’t leave their WSM jobs; this would be an off-hours moonlighting operation. DeWitt said he didn’t care as long as it didn’t interfere with their WSM work. Without a contract or a ceremony, they formed Castle Recording Company, a name pulled straight from WSM’s slogan, with a castle-in-the-clouds logo. The team’s first investment was a belt-driven master cutting lathe that etched a mono track into a spinning acetate disc (tape-recording was years away). There wasn’t room for it at WSM, so they installed the bulky machine in the station’s old broadcast house on Fifteenth Avenue, producing a less-than-ideal situation in which the mixed signal traveled through phone lines to the transmitter building before being recorded. Engineers had to place a call to find out if they’d gotten a good take. “Through our close association with WSM, we were allowed to rent at a nominal fee the use of one of their studios at hours when the station had no need,” recalled Shelton. This “was recognized by all concerned as only a temporary stop-gap arrangement while we scouted around.” Even in temporary quarters, Castle Recording made an impact, especially on December 11, 1946, a day that heralded Nashville’s postwar music revolution.
Hank Williams, much to Fred Rose’s relief, was sober when he arrived at National Life that winter’s morning. Rose had arranged for a band from the Opry to back his new discovery—a volatile, brilliant, and raw-boned country singer from Alabama whom he’d agreed to produce for the small Sterling Records label in New York. One of those side musicians, Vic Willis, remembered Williams as pathetically skinny and overworn for twenty-three years old. They rehearsed that morning and had lunch at the Clarkston Hotel coffee shop, where Hank turned down a waitress’s offer of a beer. Then they cut four songs, including Williams’s first commercial single, a bouncy gospel number that asked, “Can’t you hear the blessed savior calling you?” Its B-side was the secular heartbreak song “Never Again.” The record did well enough to justify a follow-up session in February, when they cut Hank’s “Pan American,” the song inspired by the WSM railroad broadcast. They convened again in April, and August, and November, recording four sides per day, including country landmarks “I Saw the Light,” “Honky Tonk Blues,” “Honky Tonkin’,” and “I Can’t Get You off of My Mind.” All, not by accident, were published by Acuff-Rose.
Even if Hank wasn’t prepossessing, Castle’s engineers knew they were hearing somebody remarkable as they coaxed his voice and guitar onto disc. Shelton recalled that the whole crew thought this singer was “almost hypnotic in his effect on an audience, even the limited few in the control room.” They joined Rose in lobbying to get Hank on the Grand Ole Opry. The campaign ultimately took two years and the personal intervention of Jim Denny, because Stone and DeWitt knew full well of Williams’s binge drinking, which could unpredictably wreak havoc among his associates, family, and fellow musicians. But at least the boys at Castle knew they had made their first important records.
A record made by no means guaranteed a record sold, especially in country music, where the sector of the music business we now call “retail”—record merchants—lacked shape in the 1940s. One who stepped into the breach was Opry star Ernest Tubb. The Texan used to say that the secret to his blockbuster success wasn’t that his voice was very good but that its sheer ordinariness made guys all across America think they could surely sing as well. He was an ordinary-looking man too, with large ears, a crooked grin, and an Adam’s apple almost as large as his capacious nose. But he had an inimitable style, fountains of charisma, and a relaxed swinging baritone that gave songs like “Thanks a Lot” and “Waltz across Texas” an irresistible friendliness. By 1947 Tubb was not only one of the most successful Opry stars, he was about to become the next one to use his relationship with WSM to launch an outside business that would help country music as much as it helped him.
Ernest Tubb Records, a mail-order record store and shop front downtown on Commerce Street, filled a void. Postwar record dealers, if they carried hillbilly records at all, kept them segregated from the pop and classical titles. Like other country singers of the day, Tubb got sore when he was approached by fans in cities and towns around the nation telling him they loved him on radio but couldn’t find his records anywhere. When Tubb first came to Nashville in 1943, only Hermitage Music Company, a jukebox operator, dealt in country records—selling off its used platters at cut rates. By 1946 a handful of stores sold records, emphasizing pop music.
Tubb had already enjoyed a strong war-years run on WSM’s early morning shows. By 1947 he starred in a pre-Opry show from the WSM studios sponsored by Carter’s Chicks, a company that mail-ordered live baby chickens by the millions. Once finished, he’d go to the Ryman to play his 11:00 to 11:15 p.m. Opry segment, which he sponsored to sell his songbooks. Then, beginning in early 1947, he’d head back to the WSM studios for his Midnite Jamboree, where his own Texas Troubadours would share the mic with guest Opry artists like Red Foley, Johnny and Jack, and Bill Monroe. Tubb biographer Ronnie Pugh wrote that Tubb’s midnight broadcast “became the centerpoint of three shows that visiting acts like Johnny Bond, Jimmy Wakely, Margaret Whiting, or Floyd Tillman worked—the Prince Albert Grand Ole Opry at 9:30 [NBC’s portion], the ‘Midnite Jamboree,’ and the next day’s ‘Sunday Down South’ broadcast.” If Tubb couldn’t be in town, David Cobb spun records from the Ryman Auditorium for a holdover Opry audience.
When Tubb’s store held its grand opening in May 1947, WSM was there, with microphones and its now ubiquitous remote truck. Cobb, who hosted all of Tubb’s radio shows, was there, as were Harry Stone and Dollie Dearman, who had been dating since the war. Dollie, though she didn’t care for country music, was close friends with Minnie Pearl and was hired on as one of the first clerks at Tubb’s shop. The gala went out live on a Saturday afternoon before the Opry, and before long the shop was the home of the Midnite Jamboree as well. Post-Opry crowds migrated a block to the small store and crowded in between the record bins. Some milled outside where it was cooler and listened to the music and talk over loudspeakers. Millions more heard it for decades over WSM.
The store’s record business took off more slowly, not for lack of demand but because of the sheer fragility of 78-rpm records. The Tubb family remembered that as many as six in ten of the records mailed out in flat cardboard boxes arrived broken. Tubb and his partners agreed to absorb those losses and simply send out another copy. Since mail orders accounted for 70 percent of Tubb’s business, breakage was a key reason the store lost $10,000 per year for its first five years. Relief came in the very late 1940s, when Columbia introduced its 33-rpm “microgroove” LP and RCA produced the small, 45-rpm single. For a year, these new formats battled for dominance, before the industry called a truce and began building phonographs that could accommodate all three speeds. Happily for Tubb, the new records were harder to break.
Tubb’s only other obstacle was a certain mistrust among other artists. Some initially thought he was serving only himself, though history records that he was exposing and marketing country music as a whole. “I spent a lot of money advertising records and I think that within six months they all saw that I was creating a bigger demand for records by advertising over the Grand Ole Opry,” Tubb said. “It helped everybody in the long run.”
Though he was not yet fifty years old, veteran orchestra leader Francis Craig settled into semiretirement around the end of the war, playing his last NBC broadcast in early May 1947. Later that summer he took on the dual role of music librarian and disc jockey, something by then widespread in radio but new at the conservative WSM. One of Craig’s duties was to screen new records that came into the station, to see if they were suitable for airplay on the Air Castle of the South. In most cases, he placed little white labels on either side of the 78s and wrote “F.C. O.K.” Suggestive lyrics earned “Do Not Play,” and sometimes he took a yellow crayon or even a pen knife and made an X across the disc. Meanwhile, Craig’s weekday, late-morning DJ show Featuring Francis Craig tried to cultivate the same ambience that better-known big band leaders like Paul Whiteman and Tommy Dorsey offered in their new record shows on the networks. He spun records by WSM alums like James Melton and Dinah Shore, and a WSM press release from that summer said that Craig “will do live interviews with music stars betwixt recordings.”
Francis Craig also continued to write music, and one day in 1946 he called his daughter and her friend to the living room to hear a tune he’d written the night before. It was a lilting, lightweight number with a little slip-note, half-step rise as a musical hook. It had no lyrics, but those soon followed when Craig met Kermit Goell, a boisterous New Yorker who’d come to town to pitch songs, at the Hermitage Grill Room. Craig played his new tune and urged Goell to write some lyrics, which he did on a menu. Its title: “Near You.”
In January of 1947, Craig, who had never had an especially successful recording career, was looking for a swan song. He collaborated with Jim Bulleit on a session in WSM’s Studio C. Bulleit’s chief purpose was to record Craig’s longtime theme song “Red Rose.” Shelton engineered the session, mixing the orchestra through three overhead microphones to a single track. Owen Bradley, who is sometimes remembered as the producer of the session, was there early in the evening, but had to leave for a 9:30 live engagement at the Andrew Jackson. The band also cut “Sometimes I Wonder” and “Hot Biscuits” and concluded by trying to think of a song that would make a good B-side for “Red Rose.” After playing through several, Craig and Bulleit agreed on “Near You.” They rehearsed a few times and recorded it in one take.
“Red Rose” was released in March and hyped with all the resourcefulness a tiny label like Bullet could muster. Over downtown, airplanes dropped roses that could be exchanged for a free record. But local jukebox play didn’t translate into brisk sales, and Craig rationalized that all he’d really been shooting for all along was a disc for posterity and for his girls. It’s not as if a twenty-year-old song was going to storm the charts anyway.
But then one of those quirky music business things happened, the kind that can only be explained by chaos theory, where little actions produce large consequences. Cal Young, the DJ who dropped the WSM microphone down the National Life stairs, was now twenty-five and spinning records for WKEU, a tiny station based at a hotel in Griffin, Georgia. He remembered: “I came home one weekend and ‘Red Rose’ had just come out, so I went down and bought it and didn’t pay any attention to the other side of it.” It was unusual for a DJ to wander into Ernie’s Record Mart to purchase records he could easily get free, but Young had grown up in the Francis Craig era and was curious. He took it back to Georgia. “And down there we’d play anything,” he said. “So it got flipped over right away.” After just a few spins of “Near You,” a local record shop called asking where they could get some copies. I got it in Nashville, Young said. It’s on Bullet. Call your distributor. And apparently they did. “They sold the hell out of ’em,” Young said. “It really did catch on there.”
Bulleit and his wife were driving to South Carolina in the early summer for a vacation and they were surprised how often they were hearing “Near You” on the radio. Author Robert Ikard recounted that “as soon as they reached the beach, Bulleit received a frantic phone call from his staff to get back home and take care of a business problem he had never encountered, an overwhelming demand for one of his products.” In June, they sold 80,000 copies, then 200,000 in July, then 400,000 in August. By October, he was 600,000 units behind, and some in his network of far-flung record pressing plants were giving him fits by shipping more copies than they reported and keeping the profits. But even in a cutthroat industry, Bullet rode “Near You” to remarkable heights.
“What I was really proud of was that we were the first little record company, or independent as we were called, to ever not let the majors catch us on a sale,” said Bulleit, in reference to the major labels’ practice of rushing out “cover” versions of regional hits. Versions of “Near You” came from the Andrews Sisters, Alvino Ray, Frankie Laine, and Victor Lombardo, “but we outsold them,” Bulleit said. “Near You” hit #1 on Billboard’s “Honor Roll of Hits” on September 27 and didn’t let go for seventeen weeks, an all-time record. Frank Sinatra hammed up the song on radio’s Your Hit Parade. Billboard called the record’s success a “freak happening.” And Nashville celebrated its latest native son to enjoy big-time (pop music) success. “Everywhere you go, ‘Near You’ is either sung, played, or fried in deep fat,’ said an announcer at a gala Ryman Auditorium concert for Francis Craig, where WSM musicians presented Hawaiian, country, and operatic versions of the song.
Castle Recording, which now had Hank Williams and a #1 pop record to its credit, couldn’t remain in WSM’s studios, so Aaron Shelton and company set out looking for a room large enough to hold a hillbilly band and “possibly smaller pop orchestras.” They looked nearby, so WSM engineers could slip over for lunch-hour sessions. They settled on a former dining room on the second floor of the Tulane Hotel, a gone-to-seed brick block popular with musicians and traveling salesmen. The would-be studio had dusty oak panel walls, high ceilings, and supporting columns that roughly divided the room into two sections. The accoutrements—the ceiling fans and chandeliers—were long gone, and half the room was piled with disused furniture. The hotel needed the storage, so the engineers built a partition wall and then subdivided the remaining space into a studio, a control room with an eight-foot-long window at chair height, and a small room for the master lathes.
“The windows in the control room and cutting room facing Eighth Avenue presented quite a problem,” Shelton related. “The noise from the heavy duty trucks pulling up the hill from Church Street to Union Street was particularly annoying, and the late afternoon sun beaming through these windows caused a heat problem in both these technical areas.” Those were closed with insulation and sheetrock. In spare hours, they cleaned the paneling and painted the walls. They placed sound baffles around the room, installed a U-shaped vocal booth, and assembled their own monitors for studio playback, designed after the large Altec-Lansing horn speakers used in movie houses. WSM, then upgrading equipment, sold the team a Steinway studio grand piano, a Hammond organ with a revolving speaker cabinet, and a small celesta. The Castle crew poured nearly all of their first-year earnings back into the studio, upgrading to an eight-channel mixing console designed by George Reynolds, which allowed setting up multiple mics for almost any size group. After a year, they had both a Scully master cutting lathe (state of the art for the time) and a new prize, a model 200 Ampex tape recorder.
Castle’s shakedown session tracked a short commercial jingle for a jewelry store owned by Harold Shyer, with Snooky Lanson on vocals. “Snooky apparently was not too keen to be doing a strictly local commercial jingle, but he was too professional to indicate this to Mr. Shyer,” wrote Shelton. “Snooky decided to quote a price that seemed very high ($500, I believe) for such a small amount of work. Harold Shyer accepted Snooky’s price without hesitation. And so, with Owen Bradley as his accompanist, Snooky gave the highly reverberant new Castle studios this inconspicuous inception.” The tag line of the commercial stuck in their brains for years: “If Harold says it’s so, it’s so.”
Irving Waugh shifted from the microphone to the business side of WSM almost as soon as he returned from the Pacific. He sold commercial time for about a year, and in early 1948 he was made commercial manager. On the surface, the job couldn’t have been easier. WSM was backlogged with quality national and regional sponsors. They needed caretaking, but Waugh scarcely had to go drum up new business. When local concerns inquired about advertising, Waugh would usually refer them on to WLAC or another local station. Most sponsorships were for half-hour or quarter-hour blocks, and even the rare thirty-second spots were sold to national accounts, like Bulova Watches. Commercials of that sort ran occasionally at the top or bottom of the hour, never more than one in a row.
Moreover, time sales wasn’t the numbers-driven science it would become. Although rudimentary radio ratings research had been available since the early 1930s, WSM didn’t acquire any until 1948, when Waugh looked at studies by the Broadcast Measurement Bureau. What he saw surprised him—an audience of about ten million people, broken down by age and by county, most of whom identified country music as the main reason they tuned in at least weekly. But in general, “we sold on coverage, power, prestige,” said Waugh. “We had very little demographic information, and didn’t bother to seek it. We had success stories, like [long-time bluegrass sponsor] Martha White Flour in Nashville.”
The environment allowed Waugh to be more than just the sales manager, because, as he said, “DeWitt didn’t manage the station. He knew, of course, engineering, but I ran sales and programming, and in effect, I kept peace between Denny and Stapp, who didn’t care for each other particularly, because Denny thought of himself gradually taking over—which he was.” Still, the developing synergies between Denny’s Artist Service Bureau, the Opry itself, and the nascent Nashville music business gave Waugh, with his ties to national advertising accounts, influence over the ways WSM could advance the country music agenda. His first triumph in this regard followed negotiations that produced a Friday-night edition of the Grand Ole Opry.
The story begins with “Colonel” Tom Parker, who would become familiar to many as manager of Elvis Presley. The imposing Parker had come from Florida, where he’d been a dogcatcher and show promoter, but now he was in Nashville, haunting the WSM studios and carving out his place in the music business. After a long courtship, he landed Eddy Arnold as a management client. Arnold was a newly minted star, and Parker thought it was time for Arnold to get off the Opry with its meager fees and into his own starring role, preferably on WSM itself. Parker got Ralston Purina, the feed and meal maker, to sponsor a half-hour syndicated show starring Arnold, and then he tried to sell it to WSM for the half hour before the Opry. This required a negotiation between the Gardner Agency, representing Ralston Purina, and Waugh, responsible for all ad revenue on WSM. And Waugh had several demands.
First, WSM wouldn’t air a prerecorded show on Saturday night after years of taking pride in live local programming. The Gardner Agency indicated that it could take the show to WLAC, which had already offered a slot on Friday night. Waugh didn’t want to see that happen, so he told the Gardner representative that WSM would take drastic steps to protect its identity as the country music station in Nashville. “I told him that if he went on the other station on Friday night, we would put a live country music show against him, and in front of him, and behind him . . . I said, ‘I hate to say this, because it sounds as though I’m threatening you, but this means that much to our company.’ ” The Gardner man countered: Eddy Arnold would host a live show on Friday night on WSM, but WSM would have to follow through on Waugh’s “threat.” To keep Arnold from sounding like a hillbilly in a sea of pop music, WSM would add new live country music shows before and after the Arnold show. Waugh took that deal, but quickly found out he had displeased Edwin Craig.
“Mr. Edwin kept me upstairs for three and a half hours one day about it,” Waugh told Opry historian Jack Hurst. “He said that this was too much exposure, that having (a country show on Friday night) would damage the Opry. He wanted me to take the Friday night show off, but he wouldn’t order me to take it off. I told him that this was in keeping with what he had always told us to do: to try to make friends for the parent company, deliver the biggest audience we could deliver and if possible to make a dollar. I said, ‘This will do all of those things.’ ” Craig pressed his case but wouldn’t order the change. Waugh said, “We stayed up there until it was time for him to go to dinner—he had a party or something at home—and he never asked about it again.”
Historians have dated the resulting show, the Friday Night Frolic, to 1948 or 1949, but radio schedules in the Tennessean don’t show a full slate of hillbilly talent on WSM’s Friday nights until 1952. Eddy Arnold’s “new” show (without country music before or after it) was hailed in an advertisement in early October 1950. By November, country standout George Morgan has a half hour after Arnold. It seems likely that because of Craig’s reluctance, the Friday Night Frolics coalesced gradually in the early 1950s, rather than the common perception that a full-fledged Studio C show was designed in the late 1940s.
Neil Craig agrees that his father was needlessly pessimistic about the public’s appetite for country. On family vacations Edwin would spin through the radio, hearing country come out of every Podunk town in the South, and it bothered him. That had to be bad for the Opry, he’d say. But the Opry seemed impregnable. It generated $600,000 per year in ad revenue, and that much again through the Artist Service Bureau. WSM was sitting on a “gold mine,” according to a late 1949 article in Variety magazine. It employed 230 people, 200 of them talent. And after a decade of silence on the promotional front, company newspaper Our Shield at last touted the value of the Grand Ole Opry to the National Life sales force. With the Opry about to celebrate its twenty-fourth birthday, the company newsletter noted the show’s “potential value to Shield Men is greater today than ever before.” One article suggested a sales pitch: “Good Morning, Mrs. Thrifty, my name is Will Shield. I just dropped by to ask you if you folks ever listen to the Grand Ole Opry.”
The Opry’s successes did not incline Jack Stapp to back off of his drive for good, live, broad-based radio programs during the rest of the week. He urged remotes whenever possible, feeding NBC from multiple Nashville locations on New Year’s Eve, for example, or broadcasting locally from country clubs, fairs, and political events. Chiefly, though, Stapp’s WSM was defined by its excellent music. A show fed to NBC featured Owen Bradley’s orchestra fronted by a striking new female singer from Rome, Georgia, named Dolores Watson. She’d impressed Ott Devine and Owen Bradley and would go on to win one of Arthur Godfrey’s prestigious talent competitions.
About the same time, Stapp also singled out Anita Kerr, a versatile keyboard player and singer working at another local station, to assemble a vocal chorus that could work all sorts of shows, from pop to hillbilly. She was barely twenty, but WSM musician Jack Gregory had recommended her as an exceptional talent who could read, write, and arrange. The long-running vocal group the Dixie Dons reportedly felt nudged aside by the new Anita Kerr Singers, but perhaps like the orchestra when he first arrived, Stapp wanted his own ensemble. Kerr was born into an Italian family that owned a grocery store in Memphis, and she began performing on WREC there. After marrying, she moved to Nashville. Stapp told her he needed much more than just another singer. “I said you’ve got to rehearse and make arrangements, the whole damn thing,” Stapp recounted later. It seemed to take her very little trouble to do just that, however. She and her fellow singers started working regularly on Sunday Down South, by then a signature show sponsored by the Lion Oil Company.
One of the Anita Kerr singers, Dottie Dillard, who had been with WSM since about 1947, got to step forward herself on Appointment with Music, another NBC feed that debuted as a summer replacement for the Jimmy Durante Show in mid-1948. She and Snooky Lanson shared duties, with Owen Bradley conducting. Early 1949 saw WSM’s local children’s show Wormwood Forest, written by Tom Tichenor and directed by Marjorie Cooney, become a network feed as well, after two years of being heard only over WSM’s signal. Most triumphantly, Snooky Lanson landed his own Saturday-afternoon network show about the same time, bolstering his profile. Not two years later, he announced he’d landed a five-year contract to be a featured male vocalist on Your Hit Parade, the first big pop music countdown show, which was moving from radio to TV over NBC. It was a coveted slot, one previously held by a young Frank Sinatra. Lanson and his wife and two children moved to Connecticut so abruptly that he had to cancel a Friday appearance at the Sulphur Dell ball park prior to the Junior League All-Star Game. His small-time gigs were over.
Bullet Records’ success extended far beyond Francis Craig and became part of something much bigger in Nashville. Indeed, for a label that really put its faith in R & B, hillbilly, and gospel music, “Near You” was atypically oriented to pop audiences. Bullet released the first-ever sides by B. B. King of Memphis in 1949 and records by the Big Three Trio out of Chicago, featuring a young Willie Dixon. Though Jim Bulleit sold his interest in the label to a business partner in 1949, the label enjoyed success with boogie-woogie piano player Cecil Gant, gospel group the Fairfield Four, and country records by Zeb Turner, Leon Payne, Autry Inman, and a young guitar hotshot named Chester (“Chet”) Atkins. A Bullet employee helped launch Tennessee Records, which had its own recording studio and introduced blues and gospel singer Christine Kittrell, while boosting the career of noted songwriter and producer Ted Jarrett.
Other independent labels followed, lending depth and breadth to the city’s record business. In 1947 and 1948, Owen Bradley made a brief go of two labels, a country/gospel imprint called World and a pop enterprise called Select. His partners were Dottie Dillard, the singer, and Hank Fort, a female song and jingle writer married to one of the National Life Forts. Newcomer label Republic would soon issue Snooky Lanson, pop/country pianist and Opry figure Del Wood, and the sugary Pat Boone, a local lad on the make. Randy Wood, owner of a hugely successful mail-order record shop in Gallatin, entered the record business in 1950, forming Dot, the only Nashville-born independent to grow into a national powerhouse.
All the while, Nashville’s night clubs thrummed with creamy swing, elaborate floor shows, and fervent jazz and R & B. During this little-known golden age of Nashville, a huge array of stars, regional comers, and local strivers played live at places like the Skyway on Murfreesboro Road, the Del Morocco and the Revillot in the black mercantile district of Jefferson Street, and at the Carousel and the Gaslight in a downtown row called Printer’s Alley. The scene encompassed black and white (though rarely did the twain meet), and as far as the nightclub scene went, there was scarcely any country music at all. Richard Frank Jr., who grew up dancing to Francis Craig and Owen Bradley and later became a powerful country music attorney, said, “In the forties and early or mid fifties, jazz, blues, and race music were as important in Nashville as country music. And it was their lack of cohesion and organization and focus that caused them to stay where they were while country music expanded and became a major force internationally.” But that consolidation, that star-making conformation, had yet to take place.
This was the highly charged atmosphere in which David Cobb, by then one of WSM’s signature announcers, coined a phrase that helped define Nashville’s new identity. Cobb, a left-of-center man in a right-of-center environment, stood out on the fifth floor of Seventh and Union. Colleagues remembered him as a beatnik, a bohemian. Some said he’d came back from WWII with an earring. His publicity photo from the late 1940s showed him posed, stern and sensual, with a cigarette cocked near his chin, his pencil-thin moustache and glossy wave of hair suggesting a Hollywood leading man.
In early 1950 Cobb was billboarding The Red Foley Show—a sustaining half hour fed to NBC in the mornings with Owen Bradley, the Jordanaires, and guitar wonder Grady Martin. Cobb’s role was to set up the show at the top of the half hour before handing over emcee duties to Foley. “One morning,” Cobb told the CMF’s John Rumble, “for no good reason, I changed my introduction a bit. I don’t know where it came from: ‘From Music City USA, Nashville, Tennessee, the National Broadcasting Company brings you the Red Foley Show!’” After the show, Cobb was called to Jack Stapp’s office. He thought he might be in trouble. “I thought, what did I do wrong today?” An excited Stapp barked, “Where did you ever get that idea? That’s the greatest thing I ever heard!” And he encouraged Cobb to keep using “Music City” on the air.
It didn’t take long for the tagline to reach common parlance. That summer, the tiny Dixie Jamboree label issued a 78 by Dick Stratton and the Nite Owls declaring that “They used to call it Nashville, but I’m here to say / That now they call it Music City USA.” That fall, Dinah Shore, in a twenty-fifth anniversary message of congratulations to the station, toasted her hometown with the phrase. “A lot of us now in New York and Hollywood know that WSM [she seems to have meant to say Nashville] has really become known as Music City, U.S.A.” By 1951 there was a WSM-TV show called Music City USA. And over the next decade, the M section of the phone book gradually filled up with Music City “This” and Music City “That,” from Music City Tavern to Music City Mobile Homes. If there was a downside for Cobb, it was that henceforth, Stapp thought of him as the guy who could name anything, and he’d excitedly call when he had a new show in the works. Cobb said, “He thought I could just pull them out of the air.”
Two more hit records of 1950—both country/pop hybrids about Tennessee that bore the stamp of Fred Rose and WSM—fulfilled the promise of “Near You” and Cobb’s Music City moniker. One was Red Foley’s smash “Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy.” The other was Patti Page’s thirteen-week #1 hit, “Tennessee Waltz,” written by Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart.
Jack Stapp and Harry Stone were credited with “Shoe Shine Boy,” but Stapp was always clear that he hadn’t written it, just shared in the moment that led to the idea. “I was with Harry in the office one Saturday morning after the Opry rehearsal. I was sitting in his office. Everybody had started writing songs around here. Clifford [the ubiquitous WSM porter] was giving me a shoe shine. And the network was on. The band was playing a jazzy type tune, and Clifford was keeping rhythm to it. One of us said that’s an idea for a song. Let’s have Fred Rose write a song about a shoeshine boy.” Rose set some new lyrics to an old tune called “The Dogtown Strut” and called it “Boogie Woogie Shoeshine Boy.” Red Foley said he’d cut it as a B-side but that since he’d had luck with songs with Tennessee titles, he’d record it as “Chattanooga [“Chattanoogie” in some versions] Shoe Shine Boy.” Recorded at Castle and published by Acuff-Rose, the song exploded.
“Tennessee Waltz” was written in a car one night in 1946. King and Stewart were driving back to Nashville from Texarkana, listening to WSM. When they heard Bill Monroe’s “Kentucky Waltz” on the air, Stewart got a notion to write, if not an answer song, then an analogous song with Tennessee in the hook. King took over the driving so Stewart could write on a kitchen matchbox cover, setting lyrics to a King instrumental called “No Name Waltz.” The next day they showed it to Fred Rose, their publisher, who liked it but who made the kind of subtle change he was famous for—Instead of a bridge beginning “O, the Tennessee Waltz; O, the Tennessee Waltz,” he wrote, “I remember the night and the Tennessee Waltz.” The song was recorded by many artists, black and white, country and pop. The most explosive version, Patti Page’s, and sold six million copies. Cover versions appeared from Guy Lombardo, Sammy Kaye, Les Paul and Mary Ford, Jo Stafford, Anita O’Day, and Spike Jones. The song even became a hit in Japan with Japanese lyrics. Tennessee governor Gordon Browning sang it to great acclaim on the Opry stage.
Country music was freer than ever to cross borders of geography and style, and WSM had the talent and the resources to take the music anywhere. In the late 1940s, for example, the station put together a transcribed program about the history of country music, not for local broadcast, but for distribution to the BBC. Announcer Ernie Keller narrated and engaged in dialogue with Judge Hay, plus Opry stars Dave Macon, Roy Acuff, Bradley Kincaid, and others, about the journey of British Isles folk songs across the Atlantic to the American South. This remarkable audio not only offered a firsthand account of country music’s origins by some of its most important pioneers, it demonstrated WSM’s commitment to the genre and its diverse legacy. It’s easy to love country music on its face, they seemed to be saying, but one always loves it more when one knows its story. WSM’s leaders, especially Hay and Stone, were bold enough to claim country music as an American birthright, a potent indigenous voice of the people, as well as a viable commercial market. Likewise, much of the nation, in its extraordinary journey from depression and world war to peace and prosperity, had embraced country music as a new vessel of expression and chronicle of experience. A business that could influence new markets and new audiences had finally begun to organize in Nashville, almost exclusively through the people and facilities of WSM. With television on the way, this increasingly savvy Southern broadcaster had access to an entirely new medium that would spread and shape the music for the next half century.