The Balance of Power Has ShiftedThe Balance of Power Has Shifted
Americans lived with the idea of television, the bewitching vision of it, for decades before the TVs themselves arrived like an army of flying saucers in department stores across the nation. Even before WSM radio went on the air, popular-science magazines showed people gathered around color television sets, and in 1928 Charles Jenkins, an inventor in Wheaton, Maryland, was issued the first TV broadcast license in the United States. In 1930 Jenkins broadcast the first television commercial, and the BBC began regular TV transmissions, even though there were scarcely any television receivers to pick them up. Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworkin surpassed Jenkins’s mechanical model, developing the electronic television that became the global standard. In the mid-1930s the introduction of coaxial cable, which could carry phone and television signals, began to shape how TV would spread. AT&T began building a network to distribute programming across most of the nation, but not—at least for some crucial early years—in the South.
None of this was lost on Jack DeWitt, who very much wanted to expand into television. He saw to it that WSM was the first Nashville broadcaster to obtain a television license in the summer of 1948. Edwin Craig had taken Harry Stone and George Reynolds to a citywide meeting of broadcasters to talk about television as early as October of 1944, but as the war wound down, it was unclear how fast or even whether National Life would pursue TV. Craig was skeptical. He’d seen a milky, eight-inch picture in New York, and he wondered aloud to colleagues how that could amount to anything. He asked DeWitt and Stone to write up a study of the pros and cons of going into TV. “It was pretty bad,” remembered DeWitt. “It was an awful lot of money to take on.”
Television would require new studios, built from scratch, with sets, lights, backdrops, props, wardrobe, makeup, and other things one didn’t need for even the most elaborate radio shows. At minimum, they’d have to develop and write shows covering news and public affairs, kids’ interest, cooking, and fashion, and they’d have to figure out the infrastructure for taking cameras out on remote shoots. Moreover, WSM’s existing advertising base was national and regional. They scarcely even sold local spots, so how would they make money? Above all, Craig knew that unlike his radio signal, which blanketed more than half the United States, a TV station would scarcely reach the borders of Davidson County. That wasn’t going to sell any more insurance.
But RCA/NBC was pressing its many radio affiliates to get into television. Irving Waugh attended a lavish meeting at Princeton in about 1948 where “General” David Sarnoff offered a glimmering vision of the future, where television would lead and radios would take on new roles in people’s lives. (To prove it, he produced the first portable transistor radio Waugh had ever seen.) Edwin Craig would have heard firsthand from his old friend Niles Trammell, now president of NBC, about television’s bright future. The hometown press was working Craig over as well. In a June 8, 1948, editorial called “Time to Catch Up,” the Tennessean accused all of Nashville’s radio broadcasters with foot-dragging on TV, especially WSM. “The public has every right to expect television this year from WSM—both because of its history as a vigorous and enterprising pioneer in radio as well as because of the clear-channel privileges it has enjoyed so long and profitably.” Nashville, it concluded “wants television and wants it this year.”
National Life tentatively promised to have a television station up and running in 1949, but didn’t come close. That May, a Tennessean story noted that “Nashville, a conspicuous blind spot on the television map of the United States, must wait another year—perhaps longer—before this amazing new baby of science opens its eyes in Middle Tennessee.” The story charged local broadcasters, WSM excepted, with getting a late start in applying to the FCC. By then, Memphis had an independent station. So did 40 percent of the country, including Louisville, Oklahoma City, Richmond, and many others cities of comparable size. “We’re not stalling,” DeWitt told the newspapers.
Eddie Jones, the Nashville Banner’s first television columnist and longtime chamber of commerce executive director, said DeWitt and Irving Waugh were the prime movers behind TV at WSM. “You had two guys who were not Craigs who were from different directions saying, you know, we are a broadcast leader and this is the next life of broadcasting, and we ought to jump in there and get going with it. Jack desperately wanted to build a new station and buy the big tubes. And they had plenty of money, so why not?” Most compelling, the rapidly filling television broadcast spectrum led to a temporary FCC freeze on new stations after September 30, 1950. If WSM could make it on the air by then, they’d have a local monopoly for up to three years in the new medium. Even so, Craig resisted until the last minute. “I remember so well that he had his back to the windows of the boardroom,” said Waugh. “He turned around in his chair and looked out the window and he finally said, ‘We pioneered broadcasting in Nashville. I guess we owe it to the community. Go ahead and build the damn thing.’ ”
“The magnitude of the job . . . began to sink in,” wrote Aaron Shelton. The station bought two RCA TV cameras; based on the two they’d purchased, engineers started constructing two more from parts. After much wrangling with the city and the Civil Aeronautics Board, they selected a site for their 500-foot transmitter tower, almost exactly where the original WSM radio transmitter had been near Ward-Belmont. They rigged up a remote unit—a retired bread truck outfitted with monitors, switchers, power supplies, camera cables, tripods, lighting, and a microwave transmitter to send signals back to the studio. Working with a consulting firm, they ordered and installed a film chain, film projectors, slide projectors, monitors, lights, follow spots, and a massive audio/video patch board.
The single greatest obstacle to getting a TV station up and running in Nashville had nothing to do with WSM’s will or FCC policy. The problem was access to network programs. AT&T’s growing national network of coaxial cable feeding programming from New York didn’t come any closer than Louisville. Other southern stations were going on the air using a primordial video recording format called kinescopes, which the networks mailed to Atlanta, Birmingham, or Houston for delayed broadcast. That wouldn’t do; Craig’s one edict was that WSM-TV go on air with live network programming. But 175 miles of hill country separated them from the trunk line of American television. Jack’s audacious solution harnessed microwaves—high frequency radio signals that beam like a spotlight from point to point. DeWitt wanted to tap the AT&T network line in Louisville and shoot it, by microwave, to WSM for rebroadcast over their TV tower. If they could have done it in one hop, nobody would have thought twice. But because of the curvature of the earth, the system would need five hilltop relay stations. Each would have a receiving dish listening to its counterpart up the chain and a sending dish aiming down toward Nashville.
DeWitt and a new Vanderbilt graduate named Lucien Rawls poured over topographical maps of the land between Nashville and Louisville. After a lot of study, they found their target sites. Somebody looked up every property owner and contacted them. Why did they lease their hilltops for huge iron towers, two radio dishes, a brick building, new power lines, and a whole list of uncertainties about lightning, fires, and electricity? Because John McDonald, host of Noontime Neighbors and friend to every rural soul, personally visited with each owner about it. WSM’s ambassador of agrarianism was, reportedly, five-for-five in his mission to secure use of the properties, stretching from Holsclaw Hill, south of Louisville, to Gallatin, Tennessee.
The launch point—the roof of the Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper building—also had its roots in the station’s legacy of good will. “The owners—the Binghams—still had a feeling of obligation to WSM for the services we had rendered them during the great flood,” Aaron Shelton observed about a debt that was by then more than twelve years old. Thus did WSM begin building the longest privately owned TV relay facility in the United States, a temporary jigger job with a price tag of a half-million dollars.
Despite Craig’s misgivings about the overexposure of country music, Stapp and Waugh had no reservations when sponsors, artists, and country music fans began to find common interest in WSM radio’s early morning time slots, manifested by a boomlet of fifteen-minute hillbilly shows. The Vagabonds and Pee Wee King had filled some of the first a.m. country segments in the 1930s. Later, Roy Acuff and the Delmore Brothers took the trouble to get to National Life’s fifth floor at or before sunrise to play mere fifteen-minute blocks of time. Ernest Tubb was a staple at dawn in the 1940s, sponsored by R.C. Cola. By 1950, the early morning hours had become a miniature Grand Ole Opry, with emerging stars like Little Jimmy Dickens and Cowboy Copas on the air between 5:30 and 7:30, waking up the farmers and hawking sponsors’ wares. Announcers like Grant Turner, David Cobb, and Louie Buck, despite their long hours and many duties, would come in early to turn the station on and project some of their famous personality between musical numbers. The shows attracted key advertisers, who paid hungry musicians and who stuck with country music for years to come.
“If you were in town, you were required to do the early morning shows,” said country and bluegrass veteran Mac Wiseman. At the time, Wiseman played with Bill Monroe’s band and boarded at the Tulane Hotel. He woke up and, at dawn, walked up the hill with his guitar in all kinds of weather to take the elevator to the fifth floor. “Quite often, I was the only Bluegrass Boy there,” he said. “(Fiddler) Chubby Wise and Bill and those guys were sleepy. So I’d go on the air for fifteen minutes with me and the guitar and get some mileage out of that.” He has called those spots his personal springboard to the Opry itself.
Sometimes, sponsors worked with artists like Wiseman on a “per inquiry” or P.I. basis, which paid a commission linked to the number of people who called in about the product in question. “You had to be able to pitch—baby chicks, ladies hose, and all that jazz—on a percentage basis,” he said, recalling the economics of morning country radio. “If you couldn’t sell, you didn’t eat!” Like scores of country singers of the late 1940s, he’d been working P.I.’s for years, selling songbooks over small Virginia radio stations. “Consequently, I was right at home doing it by myself on WSM,” he said. “And man, think about the coverage I was getting . . . I still contend that [the early morning is] the most saleable time with radio. Because those ladies are up getting their husbands off to work and the kids off to school. And they can do their chores and get breakfast and still not miss anything on the radio.”
Another star of the 1950s who remembered the mileage he got out of the early WSM slots was Carl Smith. Three days a week he played with a band at 6:15 a.m. “But the other three mornings a week are when I really got my education,” he said. “It was 5:15 in the morning on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. And on Sunday morning I did a fifteen minute hymn show. Just me and my guitar. No band. They wouldn’t let me have one picker. An announcer put me on and I don’t know where he went, but there was nobody else there. It was me in the studio with an open mic, and if I had to cough, I had to cough. But it was the greatest education, because I learned how to talk to people and how to think. Because in radio, you’ve got to visualize them people out there listening.”
In the loose and caffeine-addled atmosphere of WSM, with Opry announcers, pickers, and artists milling about trying to crack each other up, some of country music’s golden era stars made some of their most unaffected and upbeat music. One exceptional series starred Hank Williams, then at the height of his career, on a regular show sponsored by Mother’s Best Flour. These fifteen-minute tours-de-force married salesmanship and musicianship, and were delivered with the ease of a bunch of guys hanging around a clubhouse. Hank and Louie Buck swapped twangy talk, read scripted pitches without sounding like they were reading, and talked their way casually into songs. Williams sang his own familiar material, gospel standards, and covers he never recorded anywhere else. He sold Mother’s Best cornmeal nearly as earnestly and effectively as he sold a song. Typically, the show’s first ad was aimed at the farm wife and her need for perfect cornbread. The latter was all about the farmer, with talk of antibiotic feed supplement to help chicks grow “more bigger.” And somehow, there was time for one of Hank’s sidemen, like Don Helms on steel or Jerry Rivers on fiddle, to shine on a solo instrumental. The boys weren’t always rock solid on the chord changes, but it never threw them. Riding over bumps was just part of the road.
The September deadline pressed on everyone at the new WSM-TV, especially the engineers. The microwave link was touchy, working one day and failing the next. The audio had a tendency to arrive with spikes of static, and the only good solution became to lease a land wire from AT&T to bring down the sound in a separate feed from Louisville. Worst of all, the Nashville Bridge Company, contracted to build the five-hundred-foot tower that would hold the huge, eight-thousand-pound antenna, had been stymied by bad weather. They told DeWitt they couldn’t finish until October at the earliest. As a stopgap, they hastily built a one-hundred-foot guy-wired tower with a simpler antenna, in hopes of reaching what was approaching ten thousand local TV sets. Anticipation was keen. When WSM-TV started transmitting its test pattern, a fixed image of an Indian head, people excitedly called the station reporting reception. Some people just left the test pattern on.
The cameras worked; it was time to take the promotional operation on the road. The jiggers took the new remote unit truck and set up racks of heavy, hot-running gear in mid-July at Harvey’s Department Store. The prominent downtown merchant had already committed to sponsoring WSM-TV’s opening broadcast and was selling televisions as fast as it could. WSM entertainers stood on a stage above a display of handbags and played to two television cameras across a crowded aisle, while the image played on TVs on the showroom floor. On August 13 the setup moved to a 300-foot tent at the Tennessee State Fair, with Opry artists, Snooky Lanson, Beasley Smith, Dottie Dillard, and Jud Collins on site. The Carter Family, a reconstituted mother-and-daughters version of the most important early group in country music, performed with their new guitarist, Chet Atkins. The Tennessean ran a sixty-four-page supplement heralding the coming of television, and Sunday Down South was simulcast on radio and the closed-circuit television display. Fairgoers were able to stream past a camera positioned so they could see themselves on a TV screen for the first time, prompting giggles and gasps.
DeWitt wanted a month between the final installation of the microwave relay and the station’s on-air date. He got three days. He and everybody in the station knew they weren’t really ready, but the deadline was inflexible. “We gathered early that morning at our new TV studios and prepared to do our best,” wrote Shelton. Louisville was still flickering in and out. DeWitt—president of WSM—took off his jacket and went to work with pliers, wire cutter, and solder. The audio-patch amplifier was flaky; Shelton and company made a last-minute reroute to bypass it entirely. When 1:10 rolled around, the engineers were soaked with sweat and very unhappy. The entertainers took their places, trying to look as cool as possible under vicious lights. Owen Bradley was at the organ, his brother Harold, in a sportcoat and bow tie, ready with his arch-top guitar. Ott Devine was the first to speak, welcoming viewers to WSM-TV and plugging Harvey’s Department Store. Dottie Dillard sang a number. Two other women offered household hints and modeled clothes. As Dillard prepared to sing her closing number, the camera pulled in close, and a housefly landed on her nose. Shelton remembered it vividly. “Dottie, being the professional that she was and having a keen sense of humor, slowly crossed her eyes and looking down her nose, observed this intruder for at least two seconds and then calmly began her song.”
Viewers called in from across the city reporting that even with the temporary transmitter, they were receiving the station clearly. But the segue to the afternoon’s highlight show foretold of trouble to come. The Notre Dame versus North Carolina football game from South Bend was supposed to be coming down the relay, but all that came through were “streaks, tears, glitches and occasional vertical rolls” as Shelton put it. In at least one local tavern, groans of disappointment went up when a “Network Trouble” sign was placed on an easel in the WSM-TV studio. It didn’t look like the signal would be fixed for some time, so somebody called Opry singer Little Jimmy Dickens, who rushed to the station and found himself singing country music on television with fifteen minutes’ notice. About an hour later, the network fixed the problem (for it was not WSM’s fault in the final analysis) and the second half of the game came through fine. A few days later, just as WSM radio had done twenty-five years prior, WSM-TV broadcast game one of the World Series, a triumph. But when the downlink failed the following day, rubbing out a game-winning Joe DiMaggio homer, DeWitt had to go on the air and apologize.
A few days later, NBC president Niles Trammell came down from New York to help his old friend Edwin Craig celebrate the anniversary of WSM and the inauguration of WSM-TV. Though the station had the luxury of picking its programming from any of the three networks on normal nights, station programmers carefully hewed to only NBC and local shows during Trammel’s visit, save for the World Series. On October 8, WSM and WSM-TV simulcast an hour-long dedication program that included veterans George Hay, Francis Craig, Beasley Smith, and Joseph MacPherson, with narration by Jud Collins and Ernie Keller. Edwin Craig praised the “staff of fine young men, who have worked tirelessly through many sleepless nights to iron out the difficulties inherent in this new operation, and whose encouragement has been your sympathy and understanding.”
The Nashville Banner had the same competitive misgivings about television that it had a quarter century before about radio. Eddie Jones, a feature writer for the newspaper before WSM-TV went on the air, remembered that once again Jimmy Stahlman and his deputies debated just ignoring the TV story and eschewing TV program listings, so as not to feed their advertising competition. But one day Jones’s boss, Charlie Moss, the executive editor, called Jones, admitting the paper had better take some notice of TV. He asked Jones to start a column.
“I wrote two or three a week,” Jones said. “But I didn’t have a TV set! I’d go down to Harvey’s into the TV department and watch the shows. I’d been doing this about a month. And Charlie called me one day and said, ‘Eddie, that column’s looking pretty good. How do you like TV?’ I said, ‘Well Mr. Moss what I see is pretty good.’ He said, ‘What do you mean, what you see?’ I said well, ‘I don’t have a set.’ He said, ‘Goddamn! How are you writing all this shit?’ ” Jones replied: “Well, they send out news releases, and I go down to Harvey’s and watch the shows. Do you think the paper might help me get a set ?”
He thought a minute and said, “I’ll go half with you.”
DeWitt heard complaints for months from viewers and the newspapers about the inconstant network downlink, but gradually it began to work more reliably. He had a team of engineers tending to the five towers round the clock as the winter of 1950 came on. At the end of January, DeWitt decided a field trip would be a good idea—an inspection tour to fine-tune each site. He took Aaron Shelton and link supervisor Andy Sutton in the company’s Plymouth station wagon, driving to Kentucky on a cold but otherwise ordinary day. As they reached the hilltop nearest Louisville, a dusting turned to heavy snow. The link looked good, and they headed south, while the roads grew ever slushier.
When they arrived at Elizabethtown just before 7:00 p.m., two inches of snow lay on the dirt road to the tower and on the radio dishes themselves. The radomes, the plastic hoods covering the sensitive receiver at the focal point of each dish, were covered with ice. The team swept out the dishes, cracked off the ice, filled out some logbooks, and drove on. Bonnieville, Kentucky, proved harder to reach. The dirt road up the hill dropped down in a hollow, and the car rammed up against snowbanks that piled up and stopped them cold. It was dark but for their headlights, and they were in abjectly lonely country, where moonshiners could be watching for, or shooting at, suspected revenuers. DeWitt personally knew of a still on one of these mountains. But breaking free was the only option. “We would back up about twenty or thirty feet and bang into the piled up snow with as much momentum as possible and bulldoze our way forward another ten to twenty feet,” Shelton said. Jack abandoned the wheel and got out to walk, telling Aaron and Andy to stay put. They kept bulldozing and eventually arrived at the top of the hill ten minutes behind DeWitt. The station’s engineer had gone home, but the signal looked good. It was 2:00 a.m. when Andy went outside to sweep out the dishes, and when he returned, he had to confess that he’d cracked one of the radomes while deicing it. It was fixed with a thermos bottle coffee cup, which served duty for two weeks before its retirement.
The station wagon had calcified into a dented hulk, frozen in second gear. DeWitt had to swing around without using reverse and rumble back down the hill. By the time they approached Bowling Green at daybreak, one tire chain was missing and the rest beat like loose tank treads on the icy road. At a service station just north of the city, a mechanic gouged them on a new set of snow chains. Then in town, an auto dealer fixed the transmission while the three ate breakfast. Two stops later, the team arrived at Rock Bridge near Gallatin, one microwave hop from WSM-TV’s antenna in Nashville. DeWitt checked in for the first time with the station, and an engineer told him they’d been without primary power for fourteen hours and were not expecting any for another day. Nashville had been assaulted by the most devastating blizzard in a century, a storm that stretched from Texas to Maine and claimed hundreds of lives. In Nashville, trees ripped apart under the weight of thick coatings of ice, and by the morning of February 1, the Tennessean reported that the city looked “as if the area had been under artillery fire.” Roofs collapsed into homes and businesses. Stray power lines spat fire in the snow, making huge clouds of steam. A water main burst at Second and Broadway, turning the hub of downtown into an ice pond. Most of the city was without power for days, but using back-up generators, WSM-TV only lost four hours of air time.
Gradually, television became more routine for the WSM crew. Shelton remembers the station’s first live remote broadcast the following spring—a two-camera pickup of a stock car race from an East Nashville race track. The light was poor, and it rained, but the cameras worked anyway. Harvey’s continued to be WSM-TV’s leading sponsor, and the station would cut to a camera in the store several times a day. A large crew produced a lunchtime variety show for women, with Dave Overton at a downtown hotel, featuring a small orchestra, singers, audience interviews, and Overton’s ad-libbing prowess.
But no televised event stirred as much excitement as the finals of the Southeastern Conference basketball tournament on March 3, 1951. When Vanderbilt upset Kentucky, the top-ranked team in the country, coached by the legendary Adolph Rupp, it was the most surprising and glorious moment in the city’s athletic history. “Students pounded on tables in Nashville restaurants, toured the city with automobile horns blaring, danced jigs in dormitory hallways and some tumbled out of their rooms into the rain,” reported the Tennessean. Thousands had seen the victory live on WSM-TV, by feed from Louisville. DeWitt remembered it as the galvanizing event that made Nashville a TV town and WSM-TV profitable. Despite the costs and despite the technical troubles, being a monopoly in the hottest new medium in the world put the station in the black in six months.
The Artist Service Bureau under Jim Denny handled the touring schedules of about one hundred Opry artists by 1950, but it was much more than a booking agency, said Frances Williams Preston, then the station’s vivacious receptionist. “It was the Artist Service Bureau,” she explained. “They would get involved in everything to do with the artists. When an artist signed on to the Grand Ole Opry, they just took his career over, and they were a part of his family. I mean, they got him out of jail, they put him in hospitals, they put him in rehabilitation places. They helped pay for the new baby coming along. You know, everything they could do to keep that artist’s life, trying to make it a normal life, they would try to do.” Denny also helped connect cash-loaded Opry artists with good local bankers, and he began booking them beyond concert venues, at personal appearances and on commercial spots. He scouted jingle work for non-Opry artists like Owen Bradley, hooking him up with United Biscuit Company and Happy Family Baking Powder for a percentage of the fee.
Harry Stone had tried and failed to swing side deals with Opry acts, where Denny was succeeding, further annoying Stone. Stone tried to collaborate with Denny on a popcorn concession, but that ended in bitter feelings, and on March 14, 1950, Stone wrote to Denny to say that the time had come for WSM to supervise the concessions at the Ryman Auditorium. “For this supervision, I believe you agree that WSM is entitled to a commission,” he asserted. By this time, Ryman concessions were grossing $20,000 annually and personally netting Denny $6,000, which was roughly equal to his WSM salary.
By summer the strain of working at odds with DeWitt and competing with Denny for influence over the Opry proved too much for Stone. He announced his retirement in July, citing poor health. Country star Eddy Arnold came to the aid of his friend, paying Stone’s moving expenses when he shipped out to manage a television station in Phoenix, Arizona. He’d been with WSM for twenty-two years and at the core of its decision making for twenty-one. He was inextricably linked to the Opry’s achievements, because for all his crabbiness and guile, he was widely remembered as somebody who genuinely loved country music and wanted to see it play the best forums. He could have put the Grand Ole Opry in a gymnasium, but he talked his way into two of the finest concert halls in the South. His barn dance, because it was as much his as it ever was George Hay’s, had earned its way to Carnegie Hall and the capitals of Europe, despite the ambivalence of its own hometown. He left Nashville feeling abused and underappreciated, and he probably thought he’d never come back.
With Stone on his way out, Denny moved to consolidate his power. In a long letter to station executives, he made his case that in addition to running the touring operation, he should be Opry manager. “I would like to have an Artist Service Bureau that would have complete charge of all of the bookings and managers of acts as well as the acts themselves,” Denny wrote. He urged that the new position answer directly to the president and that the audition process not be “brushed off as it is at the present time.” Mostly he emphasized that the show was “haphazardly handled” and a success “in spite of all of us connected with it and not because of any of us.” His sober conclusion: “Without a doubt, we have the hillbilly program of the nation but we are coasting on our laurels instead of trying to improve the program.”
Denny’s letter worked. He was promoted a new general manager position at the Opry in January 1951, reporting to DeWitt. Programming and personnel at the Opry remained Stapp’s purview, but Denny was in charge of everything else related to Opry talent including booking and management. Almost immediately, however, DeWitt and Denny crossed swords. In March the president asserted control over Opry concessions, buying the equipment and stock of what was now a fairly elaborate and lucrative business. Albert Cunniff wrote that “Denny was not happy with the settlement.” He felt “railroaded by the station, which ignored” his prior permissions. Denny “pointed out to DeWitt that other halls around the country leased concession rights to concessionaires, not the incoming shows. Nevertheless, WSM moved in.” It would not be the last of their battles.
In the wake of Acuff-Rose’s successes with “Tennessee Waltz” and “Shoe Shine Boy,” it became abundantly clear that controlling the copyrights of hit songs was the likeliest path to wealth in the music industry. Jack Stapp, as head of WSM’s musical productions, had watched for years as song publishers came from New York, making the rounds of the office and the Opry stars, trying to get their companies’ songs recorded and broadcast. Once on record or in a repertoire, a song could earn royalties indefinitely. Publishing was largely a relationship business, and there were few people better at that than Stapp, so when he and his old war-era buddy Lou Cowan of CBS in New York started talking over the idea of starting a music-publishing company, it seemed like an obviously good idea. Cowan, a power player responsible for TV game shows like The $64,000 Question, offered an initial investment. BMI president Bob Burton, another good friend of Jack’s, advanced the company an additional $2,000. Cowan and Stapp forged the deal at a 1951 dinner in New York, while Cowan’s wife Polly absentmindedly drew a picture of a tree on her menu. It gave a name to Stapp’s new side job, song scouting and song plugging in Nashville for Tree Publishing Company.
Back home, Stapp looked for help, somebody in the music community who could listen out for new songs and songwriters. He turned to the pool of pickers who congregated in WSM’s lounge and at the Clarkston Hotel coffee shop next door. First he tapped steel guitar genius Jerry Byrd, but it soon became clear that Byrd’s mind was entirely on his session work. Then in 1953, Stapp’s eye fell on Buddy Killen, a young bass player who often spent the night at National Life so he’d be earliest in the pool, trying to pick up seven-dollar sideman slots on the country morning shows. Killen had come to town playing with the Jamup & Honey minstrel act and spent some miserable months on the road with some hillbilly bands. He very much did not want to get back in a bone-jarring touring car. About that time, however, Killen became aware that several WSM announcers aspired to be songwriters. They asked Killen, a respectable singer, to make demo tapes for them that they could give to Tree. Stapp, they told him, was prepared to pay ten dollars per night for the sessions.
The studio time came from a new source. Owen Bradley and his brother Harold, the guitar player, had recording fever. They’d already opened two facilities in Nashville when they set about modifying a house in the Belmont neighborhood into a studio for both sound and film. “It was called ‘Bradley’s Film and Recording Studio,’ ” remembers Owen’s son Jerry Bradley, himself a major music executive. “They had a lot of film equipment. They would make country music films, commercials, industrial movies, and they did some things with Minnie Pearl.” Owen hired a WSM engineer named Mort Thomasson to help wire the place, and while he worked out bugs in the system, sometimes in all-night marathons, Buddy Killen stood with his guitar before a microphone, singing songs that WSM announcers hoped might make them rich.
Stapp dropped by during one of these lonely sessions. He was friendly and asked Killen about himself. Killen, young and earnest and very much aware of Stapp’s influence at the Grand Ole Opry, was on his best behavior. They seemed to have a rapport. One day Stapp called Killen and asked him to go meet with and record a new singer working the Andrew Jackson Hotel. “She’s written some songs,” Stapp said. “Would you mind getting with her?
“I don’t know anything about that,” Killen shyly protested.
“Ah, you’ll do fine,” Stapp replied, with what Killen would learn was uncharacteristic nonchalance.
“So I went down and got with her and listened to her songs and took her out to the studio and put them down. They were gospel songs. So I called him and told him what I’d done. And he thanked me. And a couple hours later, he called me at home and he said, could you come down to my office? I said, sure. I didn’t know what the deal was. And I go down and we talked about the weather and everything. And he says, ‘How would you like to go and work for Tree?’
“I said, ‘Mr. Stapp I don’t know anything about publishing.’
“He said, ‘I don’t either. We’ll learn together.’ ”
People loved Jack Stapp, even if he was a bit high-strung. The engineers enjoyed needling him. Once, during a ventriloquist act on Sunday Down South, one of them feigned alarm and told Jack he’d just realized that the dummy didn’t have a microphone in front of him. Stapp, choosing worrying over thinking, fretted aloud that they needed to get a mic in there! And yet for all of his perfectionist ways in the movement of talent and the timing of shows, his colleagues said he never cracked whips. His style resembled Owen Bradley’s—relaxed but focused, candid but respectful. Frances Williams Preston, the one-time WSM receptionist, called him flamboyant and said he was fond of Cadillacs. His influence lay in his connections. “Well he knew everybody,” said longtime Nashville radio station owner Bill Barry. “Not just here in town. He knew everybody in Hollywood, New York, Chicago. He’d pick up the phone and talk to ’em.”
Killen quickly found out that Stapp lacked the organizational prowess that is sometimes found wanting in creative types. The modest archive of Tree Publishing—some lead sheets and some audio tapes—was stuffed inelegantly in the drawer of a WSM desk belonging to Stapp’s secretary. It looked to Killen like somebody else’s taxes, and he more or less ignored the mess as well. Instead, he got Stapp to spring for a $50 reel-to-reel tape recorder so that he could trot around town, meeting with prospective writers and harvesting their songs. He had no office but his car and the WSM house phones.
When Jim Denny followed Stapp’s lead and got into the publishing business himself in 1953, he was, as in all things, more disciplined about it. He formed Cedarwood Publishing in partnership with Opry star Webb Pierce; each staked $200. He took an office next door to National Life with a full-time “girl Friday” and a staff writer. The latter, Danny Dill, was an Opry act who would later write the famous country lament “Long Black Veil.” The administrative assistant was Dollie Dearman, Camel Caravan dancer, Ernest Tubb’s record shop clerk, Ryman concessionaire, and now, as if in final rebuke to Harry Stone, Denny’s girlfriend. The whole operation was an audacious move that added to his leverage over the careers of Opry artists and that further antagonized DeWitt.
Cedarwood struck gold first, when Webb Pierce massaged “Slowly,” a yearning honky-tonk lament, into a huge hit. Not only a landmark for sonic innovation—the first pedal steel guitar solos of a steel-saturated era—it earned Cash Box’s title of “Best Country Record of the Year” in 1954. Tree would have to wait for its first smash until 1956, when Elvis Presley recorded “Heartbreak Hotel” by Thomas Durden and Mae Boren Axton of Nashville. That same year, Cowan sold his interest in Tree to Stapp, who cut Killen in for 30 percent and his secretary Joyce Bush in for 10 percent. The gesture was thanks for years of perseverance and low pay—sweat-equity investments in the future of Music City.
Hank Williams, the most famous and famously troubled country singer in the world, more than once called up Edwin Craig at home during dinner hour—from the Madison, Tennessee, sanitarium. “His wife had had him locked up,” said Craig’s daughter Elizabeth Proctor. “He’d been drunk for some days. And he’d get permission and call Daddy from the jail. And the houseman, serving those dinners to the whole family at the long table, would come in and say, ‘Mr. Craig, it’s that man.’ ” And Daddy would get up and go to the phone, and he’d say, ‘Now you just calm down, now. Miss Audrey is going to let you out. But just calm down and be quiet. And as soon as you get over this drinking, Miss Audrey is going to let you out.’ Then he’d come back to the table. And he said, ‘You know what? He’s going to write a million-dollar record while he’s in jail. This is when he writes best.’ ”
WSM had finally made Williams an Opry member in 1949, but his drinking became one of the touchiest problems for WSM management. They couldn’t easily jettison their most dynamic and well-loved act, a man who was revolutionizing country music before their eyes. And his problems beyond his drinking, including devastating back pain and a wife who could be a first-class harpy, had a way, some said, of earning him even more sympathy than scorn. Yet his unpolished side was an abrasion in the mostly civilized world of National Life’s signature show. His no-shows and his mean streaks were particularly offensive to Jack DeWitt, who was ready to be done with Mr. Williams.
The second week of August 1952, Denny and Carl Smith visited Hank at his apartment, where he was living without his ex-wife, his child, or his new fiancée. His longtime friend and virtual manager Denny offered the ultimatum. Management already wants you fired, he said. If you don’t make your next Opry appearance on August 9, you’re gone. And sure enough, Hank no-showed. Denny had to deliver the final blow by phone. Hank responded by going on a bender.
Ernest Tubb ran into Edwin Craig in the National Life parking lot just after the episode.
“What do you think Ernest?” Craig said.
“Well, I hate it, but I saw the tears in Jim’s eyes, and I know it was the hardest thing he ever had to do,” Tubb replied. “He told me he was going to try and get Hank to straighten up.”
Craig replied: “I’m sure Jim means well, but it may work the other way. It may kill him.”
The Opry firing didn’t kill Hank; he killed himself over the next six months. He expired in a touring car some time on New Year’s Eve as 1952 gave way to 1953; Denny was a pallbearer at the most grievous funeral in country music history.
In the very late 1940s, Aaron Shelton joined an entourage traveling with Eddy Arnold as he cut some sides at RCA’s busy studio in Chicago. Shelton was able to look over the facilities of what amounted to Castle’s chief competitor, since the proliferation of Nashville studios was still a few years away. “After spending the entire day at RCA studios, I was convinced that we were doing a better job in some respects,” he said. He had reason to be proud. Castle’s sound was coming to dominate the country charts. According to Shelton’s records, Castle made half of 1952’s thirty top-sellers on Billboard’s country and western chart, including landmarks like Hank Williams’s “Jambalaya,” Kitty Wells’s groundbreaking “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” and Webb Pierce’s “Back Street Affair.” Hank made Castle his base for nearly all of his recording career, rolling out “Your Cheating Heart,” “Kaw-Liga,” and many other timeless works.
All this work kept WSM engineers over at the Tulane Hotel for more hours than they should have been. (Edwin Craig began to notice and talked it over with DeWitt, who said it hadn’t caused him any problems so far.) Castle cut for Cincinnati’s King Records, including Cowboy Copas and Moon Mullican. Dot Records magnate Randy Wood asked Shelton to produce some sessions in the 1950s, including Mac Wiseman, pianist Johnny Maddox, and Cajun country artist Jimmy C. Newman. Castle hosted a session with pop star Rosemary Clooney, who monopolized the control room phone for phone calls to her new beau Jose Ferrer in London. The Andrews Sisters of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” fame cut a duet with Red Foley. Georgia Gibbs brought New York attitude and salty language to her sessions. The Castle engineers felt their way into the new era of multitrack recording and overdubbing, the art of layering new parts over prerecorded tracks. They fooled around with novel effects like echo or reverb, primitive though they were.
Fooling around was really what the jiggers did best. Keeping the machinery running at WSM was by now way past routine, and their attempts to relieve boredom ran the gamut from trying to crack up on-air announcers through the control room glass to outright pranks. Buddy Killen remembered a time when the engineers helped announcers David Cobb and Ernie Keller try to undo the buttoned-up announcer Tom Hanserd. “[Tom] was so intense. He just really wanted to do a good job, and every little thing bothered him. So one time they put someone else in another studio doing the news, and Tom thought he was doing the news. So they put him ‘on the air’ and he starts reading. And the microphone says, ‘Tom stop spittin’ on me!’ [They had secreted a tiny speaker under the grill of the microphone and were talking from the control room.] Well, he just kept reading. And it said again, ‘I said, dammit stop spittin’ on me!’ He just went into spastic disorder.” About the same time, when DeWitt was about to marry the woman with whom he’d spend the rest of his life, the engineers, in keeping with their penchant for diagramming complex solutions, posted a chart on the wall depicting how the couple might spend their wedding night.
But in the studio, the fun mingled with a studied professionalism. Castle proved a worthy base for the first wave of major-label record men who came to Nashville trying to expand and develop the hillbilly record business. Outsiders all, they shaped the studio system for generations to come. “Uncle Art” Satherley, an Englishman with precise diction and perfectly pleated suits, represented the majestic Columbia Records. He made records by Bill Monroe, Red Foley, and George Morgan. Paul Cohen of Decca Records exuded contagious enthusiasm on his regular two-to-three-week stays in Nashville, and, of course, the Castle men were all comfortable around his part-time assistant, WSM’s moonlighting Owen Bradley. Among their sessions: Ernest Tubb, Kitty Wells, and Webb Pierce. From Capitol, Ken Nelson and Lee Gillette steered sessions. Nelson oversaw the work of Hank Thompson, Faron Young, Sonny James, and the Louvin Brothers, while Gillette engaged Castle to cut pop records, like Ray Anthony’s “Marshmallow World” and “Stardust.” Aaron Shelton also fondly remembered Don Law, another Englishman who followed behind his mentor Satherley at Columbia. Law, who worked with Jimmy Dickens, Carl Smith, and Lefty Frizzell, among others, was “a rather conservative person with a subdued, dry sense of humor, a large amount of musical knowledge, and a well-controlled taste for good Canadian whiskey,” Shelton wrote. “Don had an iron-clad rule—well at least a tin-foil-clad rule—that he would not take a drink until after the recording of the third tune of a session. But he once told me, after looking around to be sure that no one else heard, that he might occasionally record the third tune first.”
Castle also fostered the first cadre of top Nashville session musicians who would come to be known as the A Team. Many, like piano player Marvin Hughes and guitarist Jack Shook, were WSM veterans. Farris Coursey, a drummer from Sunday Down South and many other WSM shows, kept time with sticks, or in the case of “Chattanoogie Shoe-Shine Boy” with a snapping rag. Owen Bradley’s production duties for Decca opened the door for another piano player, Floyd Cramer, to add his signature slip-note style to records. Grady Martin, a guitarist from Little Jimmy Dickens’s Country Boys band, brought a virtuosic versatility to the studio. A new crop of daring, fleet-fingered fiddlers was epitomized by Tommy Jackson, best remembered for his fire-breathing take on the “Orange Blossom Special.” As sliding steel guitar became a hallmark of honky-tonk music, Ohio-born Jerry Byrd became nearly as much a fixture at Castle as the piano and piano bench. Here’s where the camaraderie and informal collaboration of the Nashville studio was born. These were mostly southern men who talked to one another the way southern men talk, with wit and a gift for narrative, irreverent but respectful, and always serious about the music.
Conventional wisdom held that television would be the death of radio, and although the obituary was premature, the adjustments were hard. The radio networks hemorrhaged sponsorships and had to cut rates and talent budgets. Hundreds of stations parted ways with the networks and turned to local businesses, which boosted their radio advertising 400 percent between 1946 and 1958. Transistors made radios smaller and more portable. They became standard in automobiles, and the formula of gathering around the radio for scheduled shows gave way to the personal, on-the-go, all-the-time-companion model we know today.
These changes threatened country radio barn dances everywhere, not to mention WSM’s very approach to programming. Craig and DeWitt ended their ten-year experiment with FM broadcasting in March of 1951, ostensibly due to a shortage of electronic gear stemming from the Korean War effort. But on the AM side, the company recommitted WSM to the live-radio ethic, with the Grand Ole Opry as a cultural and commercial showpiece. Waugh took out full-page ads in Variety, Time, and Fortune magazines, brazenly asserting WSM radio’s strength and vitality, urging that sponsors not “bury them alive.” Two years later, WSM applied to Variety for its showmanship award with a highly produced audio pitch—a set of four fifteen-minute transcription discs—targeted by name to the magazine’s editor, George Rosen. Over a swelling orchestral theme reminiscent of the score of Gone With the Wind, an announcer asked rhetorically, “Mr. Rosen, did we do what we said?” Did we not, he queried, live up to our promise of the 1951 Variety advertisement to expand, rather than cut, live programming? The presentation sampled Dolores Watson’s sparkling vocals from a show called Tin Pan Valley as “the kind of thing people said we wouldn’t be doing in 1953.” Further, the station bragged that “music is a big business in Nashville, and WSM has made it so.” It cited articles from magazines like Nation’s Business, Collier’s Weekly and the New York Times magazine noting that “the balance of power has shifted” from New York and Hollywood in the entertainment business. In a bit of aural theater, the announcer asked Mr. Rosen to walk over to “Joe” at his adding machine, who tallied up 904 live network feeds in 1953 alone. And they could claim that not only did the Opry play to “the biggest studio audience in the world” for a radio show, but that it boasted an incredible sixty-six performers who had released at least one hit record in the prior year. The pitch paid off. Variety named WSM the best all-around radio station in the United States.