Jack, We Got a Real ProblemJack, We Got a Real Problem
“Howdy you’nses! This is your bald-headed, hand-spanked, corn-fed, gravy-sopping, snaggle-toothed, cross-eyed old country boy, Eddie Hill, telling you he crochiates your cards and letters and is a hawg about you!”
In coat and tie, surrounded by records, he sat before an open microphone and a pair of industrial-weight turntables in a small studio on the fifth floor of the National Life building on a winter’s night in 1952. Wide-eyed and wired with enthusiasm, “Smilin’ ” Eddie Hill sounded like nothing that had ever been broadcast from the Air Castle of the South. He was a thirty-year-old hillbilly singer, instrumentalist, and humorist from Benton, Tennessee, “just several ax-handles, five wagon greasin’s and a few cucumber vines from Nashville,” as he put it. And although he came off as a nut, he was a powerful man, a disc jockey whose nightly show was a 50,000-watt bully pulpit for country music made in Music City.
“To me he was the most powerful DJ at that time in the business,” said Opry star Mac Wiseman. “Several times, [when] I’d record at Castle Studios, we’d run off an acetate dub, and I’d hotfoot it right up the hill with that acetate, and within two or three hours of singing into that microphone, Eddie had it on the air. It was a scoop for him. My advantage was that the other radio stations monitored Eddie all the time because they knew he got the scoops. I’d get it on Eddie’s show while it was still sizzling, because I knew how many other disc jockeys were waiting with baited breath for a new release.”
By the early 1950s there were indeed hundreds of country DJs around the nation, as live radio gave way to the more economical format of a personality spinning records. Conservative WSM, habitually resistant to anything but live or network radio, came slowly to the new era. Nashville’s WMAK and WKDA had prominent country DJ shows by the end of 1948. And WSM did give some of its stars like Francis Craig and Snooky Lanson short pop-record shows as early as 1947. But not until the early 1950s did WSM come to grips with the reality that DJs were displacing barn dances like the Grand Ole Opry as the key star-makers in what Billboard magazine was now calling “country and western” music. Many in management and most of the station’s employees moonlighting in music publishing and record production had a strong interest in making sure that WSM’s cadre of artists were well promoted to these far-flung taste-makers. Much of WSM’s tumultuous 1950s was shaped by the steps it took to court and leverage the influence of this new army of country music evangelists.
One exemplar, a rail-thin twentysomething named Tom Perryman, could be found barking over his microphone in Gladewater, Texas. He had been raised on a farm near the oil fields of East Texas, where his late father had been a field geologist. In 1943 he badly injured his back in a rough school yard game, and as part of a difficult recovery, he endured spinal fusion surgery, among the first ever done in Dallas. “After that surgery I was in plaster casts from my knees to my neck for about three or four months and laid up at the hospital and then later in a hospital bed out at the farmhouse,” he recalled. To endure the staggering boredom and discomfort (he once let his cat in his bed, and fleas got in his body cast), he listened to the radio, the Grand Ole Opry included, via NBC. He paid special attention to the announcers—to Louie Buck, David Cobb, and Jud Collins—and tried to imitate their commanding, resonant tones. He remembers it as learning to “illustrate with his voice.”
After a brief stint in the Navy, where he received basic radio training, Perryman worked as a operator/announcer/disc jockey at KEBE in Tyler, where his first country record show was billed as the “KEBE CO-ral.” Next came the Gladewater job, where he launched the “Hillbilly Hit Parade.” At the same time, he began arranging live shows in the area, signing up talent from the artist service bureau of the Louisiana Hayride, an influential radio barn dance located just a few miles away in Shreveport, Louisiana. Perryman’s first show as a promoter drew a big crowd in Jacksonville, Texas, to see Hank Williams, Johnnie & Jack, Kitty Wells, and Slim Whitman in 1948. He also touted, on the air and at live shows, local strivers like future superstar Jim Reeves. And in this he was not alone. A generation of DJs throughout the South and Midwest promoted artists and live shows as a natural extension of their roles as personalities and taste-makers in their local communities. “[We] were just star-struck egomaniacs,” he says, half joking. “Let’s face it, the disc jockey in these markets was as much of a star as the artist was. Because they were there every day.” This manifold life they led—as DJ, interviewer, talent developer, and show promoter—was a vital part of the growth of country music in the postwar years.
One of the few people in Nashville who knew what Tom Perryman and his small-town colleagues were up to was Murray Nash, employee of the now thriving Acuff-Rose publishing company. Formerly a talent scout for RCA and Mercury Records, Nash was, by 1952, promoting records featuring Acuff-Rose songs directly to DJs. Consequently, at a time before there were full-time country “format” radio stations, Nash compiled a nearly complete list of disc jockeys playing country music shows on general-purpose radio stations around the nation.
How that list became the genesis of WSM’s vibrant and vitally important “Disc Jockey Festival” is a subject of conflicting memory. Nash said that he approached Jim Denny with the DJ list and the idea of inviting the DJs to Nashville in November, ostensibly to celebrate the birthday of the Grand Ole Opry. Denny, Nash said, ruled the idea out as too expensive and complicated. Nash said he also got turned down by Jack Stapp and then public relations director Bill McDaniel. So Nash took on the invitations himself, asking only that WSM provide letterhead and postage. Wesley Rose confirmed that Acuff-Rose printed the invitations and stuffed the envelopes, while WSM ran them through its postal meter.
McDaniel took credit for the idea in a 1960s Billboard retrospective. “Although we were well aware of the importance of the disc jockeys in the promotion of the ‘Opry,’ we had never really gone out of our way to encourage their effect on the music,” he recalled. “We had recently learned that we could obtain a fairly reliable list of the nation’s disc jockeys so the idea was conceived to entertain them at the party in Nashville on the night of the anniversary performance of the Grand Ole Opry.”
Still others say it was Bill McDaniel’s new assistant Harrianne Moore. In her version, she overheard Murray Nash and McDaniel talking aimlessly about the list and volunteered the idea. “I said to Bill McDaniel, ‘Look, you’ve got a list of all the country music disc jockeys. So why not invite them to a celebration of the Grand Ole Opry’s birthday?’ ” she said in 2004. She couldn’t recall what Nash was doing at WSM with the DJ list, but she was quite confident in her story. Moreover, publisher Buddy Killen backs her up, and Irving Waugh publicly applauded her for her idea at a banquet in 1970.
In any event, 672 invitations went out with scarcely two weeks’ notice. Many jocks, like Perryman, sent word back that they’d have loved to come but there was no time to arrange travel and coverage of their shifts. Those who did arrive on November 22, 1952, were given entrée to the ballroom at the Andrew Jackson Hotel. Irving Waugh remembered a quiet gathering of fewer than one hundred people, including a few wives who’d come along. Waugh consulted with Jack Stapp, who ran back to Seventh and Union to round up a bunch of National Life secretaries to come over to mingle and liven things up. Waugh led the applause when the Solemn Old Judge cut the Opry birthday cake, and stars like Jimmy Dickens, Minnie Pearl, Red Foley, Ray Price, and Cowboy Copas glad-handed DJs from twenty states. By the time the day was over, the DJs had met dozens of Opry stars, walked the halls and studios of WSM, seen the mysterious city of Nashville for the first time, and met one another. A fraternity was in the making, one born of enthusiasm and a burgeoning marketplace. They went back to their stations and talked on the air about what a time they’d had in Music City.
WSM followed up with a newsletter that spotlighted record releases and live appearances by Opry artists, plus news items and talking points for DJs across the country. It emphasized the closeness of the Opry family with news of babies born or folks in the hospital. “What a disk jockey needs most is interesting information upon which to base his patter in introducing records,” the station said in publicity material prepared in all likelihood for Variety magazine. “We decided that furnishing such material was a good way to get more of the records made by our artists played on other stations.” WSM staff intervened on behalf of DJs who were having trouble getting new records from record companies, and they arranged drop-in visits by Opry stars at radio studios around the country. It built relationships with DJs in Europe and Japan. Which all means that by the mid-1950s, WSM and the Opry’s Artist Service Bureau were acting like the promotions arm of a large record company, engaging in multipronged assaults on the hearts and minds of DJs around the country and the world.
When management approved a second convention for November 1953, the public relations department officially named the event the Disc Jockey Festival, while it remained informally known as the Opry birthday party. This time, Tom Perryman did come and found that more than four hundred others had done so too. He met dozens of DJs who were promoting country music on record, live in their studios, and in gymnasiums, auditoriums, Elks Lodges, and churches around the country. He found that a variety of industry players were fleshing out the November weekend into a sprawling, exhausting good time. Record companies and music publishers sponsored hospitality suites and receptions. Country Song Roundup magazine threw a party. Acuff-Rose hosted a banquet on Saturday before the Opry. Ebullient Opry artist Jumpin’ Bill Carlisle lived up to his nickname by jumping up on a table and performing spontaneously, giving birth to a tradition of showcases. The gathering merited coverage in Billboard magazine.
Also that year, the performing rights organization BMI gave its first-ever awards for Nashville songwriters. The idea came from another young woman working ostensibly in a support capacity, WSM receptionist Frances Williams. “I went to Bob Burton, who ran BMI, and I said, ‘I think that you should have an award for your songwriters,’ ” she related. “He liked the idea, but the only time not filled in by a lunch or dinner was Friday breakfast. He said, ‘Nobody will come out to hear songwriters or see songwriters at seven thirty.’ ” Williams replied, “The songwriters will come. You open the door, they will be there.” And sure enough, Nashville’s first great modern songwriters, including a number of prominent stars who wrote for Acuff-Rose or Hill and Range, came to assert their own place in a blossoming industry. A house band, with Owen Bradley, Harold Bradley, and Chet Atkins played the songs that had earned the most radio airplay over the past year. “I knew some songwriters, and I knew how sensitive they were, and how they were never rewarded,” Frances Williams Preston said in 2004. “And I saw all the stars get all the big awards, and this little guy sits here, and he wrote it, and gets no recognition.” Not many years later, Preston was asked to set up and run BMI’s southern regional office in Nashville, setting her on a path that she would take to the top of BMI and the music industry nationally. All because she naturally took to heart what would become a Nashville credo: “It all begins with a song.”
Yet another WSM tradition had been born by the second DJ convention—a Friday night show celebrating platter spinners from across the nation, Mr. DeeJay USA. Another Jack Stapp inspiration, Mr. DeeJay invited one DJ each week to travel to Nashville, stay at the Hermitage or Andrew Jackson, and go to dinner with star announcer Grant Turner. Then the DJ got to host his own show on WSM from 10:30 to midnight, after the Friday Night Frolics, spinning records and interviewing artists who stuck around after the Studio C show ended. Launched May 16, 1953, Mr. DeeJay featured jocks from stations large and small. Major-market hotshots were recognized, and small-town jocks got to feel like king for a day. Being invited to be Mr. DeeJay during the DJ convention was a particular honor, and that’s what happened to Tom Perryman in November 1954. He did his segment live from the lobby of the Andrew Jackson Hotel. “If you got to come up here and be the guest of WSM and the Opry and meet and hobnob with all of these people whose records you’d been playing, you were part of ’em,” Perryman remembered. “It was the greatest thing that could happen to a small town disc jockey.”
The times were marked, Perryman said, by fellowship and a spirit that welcomed newcomers and cherished established stars. Out in the country, artists could drop in radio stations, visit with the air personalities, and play a few songs, just by showing up. In Nashville, the camaraderie played out in more formal ways than merely the dice and card games in the halls and the impromptu performances in the smoke-filled hotel suites. The DJs got organized. The earliest attempts at corralling far-flung jocks into an association foundered, but on November 21, 1953, the Country Music Disc Jockeys Association (CMDJA) was born, with about one hundred charter members. Its published objective: “to further a greater and more widespread public acceptance of country music through the betterment of country music disc jockey programs.” Perryman was on the board. Nelson King of WCKY in Cincinnati was named president. None of the officers were from Nashville, though WSM disc jockeys Eddie Hill and Joe Allison signed on as members. A statement issued that fall made it clear that despite its origins at WSM’s convention, “WSM is in no way responsible for the formation of the organization.”
If WSM was late in coming with DJ shows, it had only to look locally for a model of how to do them right. WLAC had joined the 50,000-watt clear channel club in 1942, some years after being launched, then sold, by National Life’s hometown competitor, Life & Casualty. Despite a robust presence in Nashville life, WLAC never managed to become the promotional goldmine WSM had for National Life. Suffering from the Depression, Life & Casualty sold WLAC to its general manager, J. Truman Ward, soon after Ward became president of the National Association of Broadcasters in 1934. In the 1940s, the station carried the CBS lineup in Nashville, including stars like George Burns, Eddie Cantor, and Lum & Abner. It maintained a staff orchestra that regularly played the network, produced live drama, and hosted scores of hillbilly artists (including some WSM performers looking for extra work).
After World War II, WLAC took an unexpected turn. By adopting record shows and by setting a remarkable group of disc jockeys free to explore music without prejudice, WLAC became the voice of the Other Music City—the rhythm & blues ferment happening in clubs along Jefferson Street—the black yin to WSM’s white yang over Nashville’s clear channel, nation-reaching airwaves.
Although black music was heard over WLAC as early as 1939, it wasn’t associated with specific air personalities until Gene Nobles discovered a new audience in 1946. At the suggestion of some students from one of Nashville’s black universities, Nobles experimented with boogie-woogie, blues, and jazz on his nighttime record show, to great public response. He played Louis Armstrong, Pearl Bailey, Billie Holiday, and Fats Waller, said his studio engineer Bill Rainey in 2001. “We began to get notes and letters from people requesting that kind of music. He realized he had a pretty good thing going there.” Historian Martin Hawkins wrote that by the time Bill “Hoss” Allen joined the air staff in 1949, “most of the evening hours were given over to black music. Station owner Ward found that he had carved out a niche for himself. ‘We realized there was no other station covering the South playing R & B late at night like that,’ he said in 1975.” A third jock, John Richbourg, known on air as John R., had been on staff since 1942, but when he got in the swing of WLAC’s new R & B sound in his late-night shift, he was able to offer vital early exposure to artists like Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, and Little Richard. He knew and supported many of the musicians; Ella Fitzgerald sang at his funeral.
Speaking in chilled-out, soulful voices that many listeners mistook as black, Allen, Richbourg, and Nobles tapped a world of music that had been right under southern culture’s collectively upturned noses for decades. Music from “race” and “sepia” lines of the major labels, along with vital artists on independents like Chess, Atlantic, and Savoy, exploded to a $25-million business by 1955, thanks to stations like WLAC spinning the sounds that were coalescing into rock and roll. Locally, WLAC’s DJs drew from and promoted a thriving new Nashville record economy, with labels like Bullet, Republic, Tennessee, Excello, and Dot. Hawkins observed that “while the majors [labels] saw Nashville solely in terms of country music, the independent labels bridged the two solitudes of black and white music. In other words, they reflected the Nashville music scene as it really was.”
WLAC’s white DJs saw with musical, commercial, and perhaps even moral clarity something that eluded WSM’s patrician owners and many of its country-loving partisans. WLAC’s audience, which included Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and many other white rockers with country roots, grasped it too. Rhythm and blues was country music’s sibling. Both were forged from folk and gospel influences, some overlapping, some distinct to racial experience. Country’s “ancient tones” (to borrow a Bill Monroe expression) traced an Anglo-Saxon thread to England, Scotland, and Ireland; R & B was animated by the joy, discipline, and abandon of the African drum circle, albeit tempered by generations of enslavement and discrimination. Yet both spoke to and for common people and their most profound, most universal concerns. Both offered a bridge to the other, for anyone wise enough to follow their ears across.
Unfortunately, even as the historic and dichotomous contrasts of Nashville’s two 50,000 watters inspired some great American musicians to integrate white country and black R & B, WSM replied with little but cultural and economic myopia. Rock and roll was, for WSM, a genre non grata when it barreled out of Memphis in 1954. Ralph Emery, the legendary WSM DJ of the 1960s, explained the station’s conservatism as more than prudishness, but a kind of loyalty to its original audiences. “There was more profit in rock than country in the waning 1950s. The WSM listenership was down and could have been improved by playing rock & roll,” he said in his autobiography. “But [management] was more concerned about keeping its initial, pre-Depression families of listeners.” Thus when urban renewal efforts and the Capitol Hill Redevelopment Project bulldozed the slums behind the National Life building, including several important black nightspots, and when National Life at last installed air conditioning in 1953 (one year after the hottest summer on record) and employees had to be reminded to keep their windows closed at all times, it marked an unwitting metaphor for the insularity of WSM in the coming decade.
The station nurtured its new pop singers like Buddy Hall, Dottie Dillard, and Dolores Watson, cultivating a sweet and genteel sound that could, depending on the song and the mood, be serene and moving or insufferably cloying. Hall was the station’s replacement for Snooky Lanson after he left for Your Hit Parade. A former Arthur Godfrey “Talent Scout” singer and a Perry Como fan, Hall was one of thirty-eight singers who auditioned for Jack Stapp and Owen Bradley on a recruiting trip to New York. Dillard, a member of the Anita Kerr singers, excelled at playful lyrics and perfect diction. She could be heard on many of the station’s routine variety shows, such as Sing for Your Supper, sponsored by “carefully cup tested” American Ace Coffee. There, backed by Owen Bradley’s orchestra, her take on songbook standards was supple and charming.
Dolores Watson’s voice evoked more of a satiny, candle-lit ambience. She arrived in the late 1940s after winning a talent contest in her hometown of Rome, Georgia. Initially, Bradley hired her to sing with his dance band at the Plantation Club on Murfreesboro Road. But soon, she had her own shows on WSM. One early delight was Dreamtime, where her singing, backed only by Chet Atkins’s gentlemanly guitar, proved airy and transcendent. For that matter, Atkins, then blossoming into Nashville’s premiere guitarist and producer, was a regular presence on WSM in the 1950s. None of his shows was remembered more fondly by music aficionados than Two Guitars, an unrehearsed exploration of the crossroads of country, pop, and jazz with the legendary steel guitarist Jerry Byrd.
WSM missed its most obvious chance to bless and benefit from the unarranged marriage of country and R & B when Elvis Presley played the Grand Ole Opry on October 2, 1954, just three months after recording “That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky” at Sun Records in Memphis. That most famous of all early rock and roll recording sessions spoke to the fusion Elvis was creating. The latter song came from the pen of Bill Monroe, a certified Opry star and father of bluegrass music. The former was an R & B song by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. And perhaps the melding of those styles with pop crooning and hillbilly music would have played better with the Opry audience and staff had Elvis merely looked more like the new breed of emerging country smoothies, say Jim Reeves or Sonny James. Presley couldn’t have been more polite or deferential on that night at the Ryman, and he was well received over at Ernest Tubb’s Midnite Jamboree, but his pink shoes and his gyrating hips left the Opry crowd cold, whereas they’d gone crazy for Hank Williams, who shook his knees but did not swivel his pelvis.
When Elvis came to Nashville for the following year’s DJ convention, both Cashbox and Billboard had picked him as the most promising new country and western artist on the horizon. Frances Williams signed him in at the registration desk. “I’ll never forget that, because he had on mascara, and he had on blue rhinestone cufflinks. And no man ever wore blue rhinestone cufflinks or mascara,” she said. Jack Stapp told folks they’d better take notice of Elvis, because he was going to be huge. Nevertheless, WSM let him get away. Elvis would spend much of the next two years building his career down in Shreveport on the stage of the Opry’s chief competitor, the Louisiana Hayride. Tom Perryman booked him enthusiastically in East Texas starting in 1954. But WSM officials and Nashville’s new country entrepreneurs spent much of the mid-1950s upset that Elvis and his ilk were destroying the market for country music by drawing off young people. Perhaps the truth is that WSM’s roots in the segregated South blinded its leaders to an opportunity disguised as a musical rapprochement of black and white. Elvis, who would wind up being enshrined in the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1998, had deep roots in country and a preternatural love of black music. But the Opry establishment, for all its virtues, couldn’t see that far in 1954.
The drama in Nashville began to attract the attention of the music trade press. With recording, publishing, radio, and touring, Nashville now had the pieces in place to begin shaping the music business. Billboard and Cashbox began to cover the city with regular stringers. The most famous of those early reporters was a tiny man from Knoxville with a Popeye face, a cigar typically wagging from his teeth, and a tour de force talent for “doubletalk” that could seduce, beguile, embarrass, and delight even the least gullible sorts. Charlie Lamb’s story reads like a John Irving novel: his mother was a trapeze artist, his father a circus entrepreneur, animal trainer, ventriloquist, and magician. Despite a peripatetic childhood, he got as far in school as some prelaw undergraduate work at the University of Tennessee, and during World War II he became an undercover cop for the Army Air Corps, though he weighed in at about 105 pounds. He got married in Mississippi while stationed there, then moved to Knoxville, where he became a copy boy and then a reporter for the Knoxville Journal. Like a hummingbird hopping from flower to flower, it was on to radio and concert booking. WROL had an artist service bureau for the pickers and singers it employed. Among them were two future Nashville star acts, the bluegrass duo Flatt & Scruggs and the tough and handsome Carl Smith. Lamb promoted shows for both, riding around Knoxville in a car with his pal Buddy Killen, barking about the night’s bill over electric megaphones on the car roof.
Somehow, when Cashbox magazine decided it needed a Nashville “rep” around 1951, Charlie was the right man at the right time. “Rep” implied both reporter and representative, capable of simultaneously gathering news and selling ads to the very people he was soliciting for stories. (What we would now call a conflict of interest was in that day regarded as getting by in new industry on a shoestring.) With three children to support and pittance pay, Lamb commuted for a time before he moved, eschewing hotels and sometimes writing his column by the side of the road on a manual typewriter. “Often I would shave in a cold creek at Crossville, before coming to Nashville,” he told Nashville writer Walt Trott. “Finally, I had to have some place where people could contact me, so I paid a parking attendant next to the Ryman twenty-five cents a day to answer the phone there and say ‘Charlie Lamb Agency.’ I gave it out as my telephone number.”
One of the first things Charlie Lamb did in Nashville was visit Jim Denny, boss of the Opry. Frances Williams directed him toward Denny’s office. Next he knew, Lamb was talking to a man more than twice his size, confidently stating his business: “To tell him I was in town and that I was writing columns and so forth and I was covering the Grand Ole Opry and I would like to have some kind of freedom of entrée with him and with the different people here.” The Opry was getting sporadic coverage from various newspapers, but Lamb told Denny he was ready to take on the Opry entertainment matrix as a full-time beat.
After that, Lamb virtually lived at WSM. “In gathering my news, I would go to the fifth floor at lunch time for the dinner bell show [Noontime Neighbors]. And all the artists were there that weren’t on the road. They picked their mail up there,” he said. He went back for the Friday Night Frolics and never missed an Opry. “I was just living and working and breathing Grand Ole Opry. I made tight friendships with all the officers and executives of the station, because I saw to it that every one of them ended up one way or the other in my column.” That column gave Lamb the springboard he needed to launch his own Country Music Reporter in 1956, the first music business periodical published in Nashville.
Charlie Lamb, if he didn’t sense it immediately, found out that Frances Williams was no mere receptionist. She was a bright, observant, and poised young woman with a college degree and a kernel of certainty that the one option she was being offered by her situation in life—teaching school—wasn’t sufficient. Pressed by her father to get a summer job, she reluctantly agreed to be a “messenger girl,” delivering mail at National Life. “In the radio station there was always activity and there was always music, and there were stars. So they got their mail pretty often,” she recalled. “And the Death Claims Division is probably still looking for their mail, because I just wasn’t too interested in those other areas of an insurance company.” One day, she noticed that the WSM receptionist was pregnant; at National Life, Shield Babies may have been celebrated in the newsletter, but they marked the end of a Shield Girl’s career. Williams knew this. She approached Jim Denny about the job. “So he called, and the human resources manager said, ‘You can have her. She’s not worth a damn.’ So anyway, I got my job as receptionist at WSM.”
Today, Frances Williams Preston remembers WSM being green. “Green vinyl floors, a round green and gray desk. Very institutional looking,” she said. And as busy as a bus station. One observer from the day likened WSM’s lobby to Times Square on election night, another to New York’s Radio City. Song pluggers came in from New York to meet with Stapp or the orchestra leaders. Colonel Tom Parker and other manager/promoters squatted in the lobby doing business—sometimes in competition with Denny’s artist bureau—over WSM’s free phones. Scores of musicians passed by with their cases, coats, and hats. Opry stars came in to check their mail. And there were disc jockeys and announcers, engineers, delivery men, and dozens of public figures large and small, who came to do brief talks about anything from the doings of the Ladies Hermitage Association to running for Senate. “We had politicians coming in, because we were a clear channel station, and they had free time,” Preston said. “So that meant that a politician doing an interview or a program on WSM could be heard all over the United States.”
With Denny down the hall running the Artist Service Bureau, a good bit of the traffic through her lobby consisted of trusted band members, family members, and managers hauling road receipts. “I can remember Bill Monroe’s girl Bessie, Big Bessie, they called her,” said Preston. “She’d bring—it looked like a valise, a large bag, a purse like thing—full of cash. And they would sit there in that office on the fifth floor and count out thousands and thousands of dollars, when they were paying their fees to the Artist Bureau.”
Besides greeting visitors, Williams’s chief duty was to answer fan mail—requests for pictures, bizarre testimonials of idol worship, and dead earnest suggestions of how characters on the soap operas should handle their problems. But she was restless and looked for other things to do. Marjorie Cooney, who was still doing her Ann Ford news broadcast, took a liking to the much younger Frances and encouraged her natural self-starter qualities. “Nudge, nudge, nudge,” she’d say when a good idea came up, and Williams was usually more than game to bring it to fruition. She drove large parts of the DJ convention logistics. She developed, scripted, and hosted a fashion show for WSM-TV. When she was elected “Miss Fire Prevention” for the annual safety parade cosponsored by WSM and WLAC, she pushed the predictable role into new territory by jumping off a tall fire engine ladder into a rescue net. And she did color commentary for WSM-TV’s coverage of the Iroquois Steeplechase, a cross-country horse race and high-society social held in a large park south of the city. WSM had covered them all on radio and took on the ambitious job of putting the event on television. Williams cruised the upper-crust crowd in their Old South regalia and tried her best to coax answers out of Belle Meade matrons, who largely froze in the presence of the WSM-TV cameras.
Williams didn’t know she was preparing herself to be one of Nashville’s first female business executives and eventually the corporate CEO of BMI worldwide. “There were so few things for women to do,” she said from behind a desk at Nashville’s BMI office in 2004. “I knew I didn’t want to type. I knew I didn’t want to be a secretary. And it probably was the best thing I ever did, because if I’d learned to type, I might still be sitting somewhere behind a desk with a computer now.” The vast desktop was, indeed, computer free.
It was just a matter of time before Jim Denny’s aggressive mix of booking, management, and publishing got him in trouble with WSM artists and management. When Jack DeWitt began to suspect that the Artist Service Bureau chief was booking shows on the side, he audited Denny’s books in the summer of 1953 but found nothing amiss. But Ernest Tubb fell out with Denny. And so did Roy Acuff, who asked for a meeting with DeWitt in early 1955 to complain that Denny was giving the best shows to his cronies and leaving others the crumbs. Denny replied that Acuff himself wanted special treatment. Acuff, wrote Albert Cunniff, called “secret meetings with the Opry talent to air his complaints about Denny and to try to have Denny taken down a notch—or dismissed.” Others have said that Acuff and Denny were in a struggle to be the top power player at the Opry.
When Opry stars began to generate hit after hit from songs published by Denny’s company, Cedarwood, it really raised eyebrows. Buddy Killen, looking back in 2004, said Jim Denny was “the epitome of abuse . . . Cedarwood had become pretty hot [by 1955]. Jim was getting songs recorded by all the stars. And it became pretty apparent that he was utilizing his position to get that done. He was getting a lot of complaints from the artists, because everybody was looking to [WSM] to book all the Grand Ole Opry acts. And he was playing favorites.” W. D. Kilpatrick, D to his friends, one of the earliest Nashville country record sales reps and talent scouts, said Denny simply held the best hand in Nashville in those days and he played it aggressively. “Good dates were that hard to come by,” he said. “If you controlled the booking, then you controlled who recorded what.”
At the time, Denny’s defenders outnumbered his detractors. His camp included enormous stars of the day, like Carl Smith, Jimmy Dickens, and the irreproachable Minnie Pearl. When DeWitt asked every Opry member to put his or her candid thoughts about Jim Denny in writing, he “apparently received little or no bad reports,” according to Cunniff’s account. And in the wider world of country music, Denny just got more and more popular. In May of 1955, Billboard named him second runner up in its “Country and Western Man of the Year” poll, after Fred Rose, who had just died the previous December, and Steve Sholes, the producer making RCA into a major label powerhouse.
This meant little to DeWitt, who resented Denny’s persona and his obviously large income. Though Denny was in the midst of a year in which his staff would arrange more than 2,500 personal appearances by Opry artists, historians agree he was booking shows on the side, making private money off the Opry brand. This was foremost in DeWitt’s mind when he sent a memo to the entire WSM staff on August 2, 1955:
“Over a period of many years various members of the WSM staff have engaged in outside business activities, some of which have not conflicted in any way with their principal job at WSM. There have been and are other businesses which conflict directly and others which may be considered to conflict by people on the outside with whom we do business. The Board of Directors of WSM, Incorporated has considered this problem very carefully and has come to the firm conclusion that it will be necessary to review all of these businesses, and in some cases require that they be terminated in the interest of harmony within our organization, and the company’s present and future business relations with clients, talent, and others.
DeWitt insisted that staffers disclose, by that Friday, any outside business activities. “Failure to list businesses in full, even though the interest may be minor, or failure to receive permission to engage in new businesses in the future, will be considered a very serious matter.”
The most immediate consequence of the memo was the end of the Castle studio. For years, DeWitt’s attitude had been one of indulgence toward his fellow engineers, even while Edwin Craig made his displeasure over the arrangement clear. But the Castle group was somewhat ready to pack it in anyway. George Reynolds (a close friend of DeWitt who was appalled by Jim Denny) was by now vice president and technical director of WSM, Inc. Carl Jenkins was studio supervisor of WSM radio, and Shelton was chief engineer of WSM-TV, a huge job, especially on the eve of color television. Each man had more than twenty years with the company and retirement benefits beginning to build up. They ranged in age from forty-four to forty-eight, and Reynolds had already had a heart attack. Moreover, the Tulane Hotel, Castle’s headquarters, was slated for demolition in a year. So, Shelton said, “we opted for the security and permanence that WSM Inc. seemed to offer.”
Denny replied to DeWitt on August 4 with a memo listing Cedarwood and his newer Driftwood publishing companies. Denny disclosed that he owned principal stock in both but asserted that they were run “completely independent of my services.” He followed up with a twelve-point letter, which he read in person to the WSM board. He noted that he’d been stripped of the concession business he had built, that he’d endured a clean audit of his books, and that he’d been besieged by accusations from Roy Acuff. He said he’d asked for the meeting because he’d heard from a reliable non-WSM source that people in the industry were being approached inquiring whether they might want Denny’s job. Some on the board must have squirmed, because the rumor had merit. DeWitt had already inquired after Murray Nash, musicians-union chief George Cooper, and record man D Kilpatrick.
The coup didn’t happen overnight, however. (“Everything up there took forever,” said Killen.) While the behind-the-scenes power struggle played out, the Opry rocketed along. In October WSM announced the first ever network television exposure of the Opry, a thirteen-episode, monthly series over 130 ABC stations, sponsored by Ralston Purina. That November’s DJ convention was the largest and weirdest yet, a thirtieth birthday for the Opry that featured a visit from Elvis and a famous Hank Snow publicity stunt. A live elephant paraded in front of the Andrew Jackson Hotel, wearing a banner that said “Hank Snow Never Forgets—Thanks DeeJays.” Meanwhile, Denny just forged ahead at his usual breakneck pace. In March of 1956, Billboard named him “Country and Western Man of the Year.”
But the long knives were out. Some time in early 1956, DeWitt consulted with the National Life board, which agreed that Denny needed to operate artist booking for WSM, Inc., and not for himself. “He’ll have to come to toe with the establishment,” is how DeWitt summed up its position. DeWitt told historian John Rumble: “We knew what was going on and we winked at it for a long time and finally (Denny) became so obstreperous that something had to be done about it. I had a real zoo going on there.” DeWitt’s remarks to a third interviewer suggest how DeWitt saw Denny’s ultimate aims: “His main objective was to take over the Grand Ole Opry. That’s what he wanted to do. It finally got to the point where he thought he had enough strength to take it over. I don’t think he thought he could force me out, but he would liked to have done it.”
So on September 24, 1956, DeWitt called Denny to his office and told him the board wanted him to stay and that they’d virtually double his salary if he did, but in exchange, he’d have to divest his publishing sideline and devote all of his time and efforts to WSM. Denny said if that’s the case, you’ll have to fire me. It seems DeWitt did so.
Journalist Charlie Lamb says that he had warned Denny that his many conflicting interests could get him in trouble. He also says he was there in Denny’s office the day of the denouement. Denny got called away to the eleventh floor, and when he came back, his eyes were glistening. He looked out the window at War Memorial Building. “They gave me the ax,” Denny said.
The banner headline of the third issue of Charlie Lamb’s Country Music Reporter read: “JIM DENNY EXITS OPRY.” The story said that Denny had been “separated from all connections with the station in a surprise move by the station’s management.” Denny told the paper that the separation had little to do with his ownership of Cedarwood. “It is strictly a personal matter between DeWitt and myself in which DeWitt feels that no employee of the station should be better off financially than himself.” Denny went on to say that he intended to pursue the rest of his career in country music, and he asked people to “stop by and say hello” at his new offices on Seventh Avenue North, just a block from National Life.
The same story reported that D Kilpatrick would be the new Opry manager. In a telegram to Opry talent, DeWitt wrote, “We have felt for some time that it would be advisable to have one person to whom all matters pertaining to the Grand Ole Opry would be referred, and we feel that Mr. Kilpatrick is well qualified to handle this position.” As for Lamb, the story put his paper on the map. “I scooped Billboard and Cashbox,” he said. He flew with a stack of papers to New York and handed them out personally at the Brill Building.
Denny was handling twenty-seven acts with over one hundred performers when he left WSM. Now those artists had a wrenching choice to make. Opry singer Martha Carson and her manager/husband hosted a secret meeting where Denny explained what had happened to about fifty people, including some of the biggest names in country music. He told them about his new Jim Denny Artist Bureau, which stood ready to continue on as their booking agent without interruption. The artists had to ask themselves what the Opry really meant to them and why they should remain loyal. Many saw DeWitt as imperious and uncommunicative, and his frequent mass communiqués by letter had only hardened an impression of a man with an impersonal touch. Moreover, Denny was lining up the biggest package tour in country music history, remarkable for its number of artists, its free tickets, and its sponsor, Philip Morris, arch competitor of Opry sponsor R. J. Reynolds.
“The artists all seemed to be on Jim’s side,” Carson said. “We had all heard that DeWitt had threatened to fire any Opry act he caught doing business with Denny, but we decided to go with Jim anyway.” The mutiny included Carl Smith and Webb Pierce, who were partners in Cedarwood publishing, and some hot newcomers, including Jim Reeves, Jean Shepard, Kitty Wells, George Jones, June Carter, and Faron Young. In a telegram to DeWitt, they and their managers collectively said Denny “will represent our acts and ourselves for all phases of radio and television, both local and network.”
Irving Waugh was furious. “We lost a hell of a lot of people,” he recalled. “It wasn’t necessary.” Waugh thought Denny had been railroaded and was more than ready to turn his acidic scorn on DeWitt and new Opry manager Kilpatrick. At their first meeting at the cabin workshop behind DeWitt’s home, “I was ugly with Kilpatrick,” Waugh admitted. The encounter pretty much sealed how those two men felt about each other forever. Kilpatrick observed years later that whenever he was in Waugh’s presence, “he looked like he was always smelling something just a little off-color.”
Kilpatrick had been in town six years when he got the top Opry job. He was well liked and had produced some solid records for Mercury. But not everybody understood the choice of an A & R (artists and repertoire) man with no booking or management experience to helm the Opry and its Artist Service Bureau. Kilpatrick’s chief concern was the age of the artists, especially after so many current stars had departed. “They were as old as Methuselah,” he remembered. He set about recruiting new blood, and before his brief tenure was over, he would sign tall Missourian Porter Wagoner, Cajun-influenced Rusty and Doug Kershaw, Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper, and future rock and roll heroes the Everly Brothers.
Kilpatrick also tried to reassure the shaken Opry artists with a plan to “increase the attendance at your personal appearances by more attractively and comprehensively plugging your dates.” At its core was an overnight record show promoting the Opry. WSM had inaugurated overnight record shows in 1955 or 1956 with Music All Night, hosted alternately by Eddie Hill and another beloved country DJ, T. Tommy Cutrer. That show had been spurred in part by a new Cold War mandate that kept clear channel stations on around the clock for civil defense purposes and likely by WLAC’s longstanding success in the overnight slot. But where Hill and Cutrer played a broad array of country music, Kilpatrick built his show around Opry artists. With DJ Cutrer’s blessing (he was tired of the grueling shift), Kilpatrick hired Tom Perryman from Texas for the overnight slot.
Lamb’s newspaper ran a story and a photo of Perryman. He had horn-rim-topped glasses perched on his forehead, a face creased by the Texas sun, and a plaid western-cut suit. He gabbed into a WSM microphone, his hand raised as if in emphasis about a particularly good record. Perryman held a contest to name the show, promising a “lifetime gold-plated admission ticket to the Grand Ole Opry” for the winning entry. And Opry Star Spotlight, a show that would become a WSM institution, began in the fall of 1956. “Because of WSM’s dominance in the country music field,” the story said, Perryman “expects to hear from lumbermen in Oregon, truck drivers in Texas, waiters in all-night restaurants in Florida and stay-up-late housewives from coast to coast.” On his opening night, October 6, many celebrities and well-wishers “dropped by to wish him luck.”
It seemed as if the tempests might be over. Program director Jack Stapp had quietly opted to separate from Tree Publishing and remain at WSM. Life magazine ran a big spread about country music and the Opry that he had worked hard to pitch. The first big event of WSM’s new year was the latest hoopla homecoming by Dinah Shore. She was greeted as she got off the airplane at Berry Field by the state’s first lady. She addressed the state legislature, then wafted through Nashville smiling, glad-handing, and declaring the visit “the most memorable occasion I’ve ever known.” That night, her regular NBC variety show was telecast from the Ryman, where she appeared with Acuff in “Dinah’s version of a Tennessee Barn Dance.”
Trouble loomed, however, at WSM’s most ambitious new project, a state-of-the-art television tower. While WSIX and WLAC had launched Channels 8 and 5 respectively in 1953 and 1954, WSM-TV, or “King Four” as it billed itself, remained the city’s undisputed ratings leader, with Jud Collins as the city’s most trusted newsman. So the decision to build a new transmitter in early 1957 looked like a good investment in staying number one. The site was a 670-foot hilltop in a residential neighborhood. The tower, a 1,262-foot megalith by the same Blaw-Knox company that had built the old WSM-AM tower, was to be the third highest in the country. It consisted of a triangular tube held up by guy cables at 300-foot intervals. The steel was a new alloy so special that Blaw-Knox was preparing a trade magazine ad featuring WSM’s new TV tower. Jack DeWitt had told the city two years prior, “The tower we propose is a very heavy and strong tower which has safety factors far beyond anything ever built in the South.”
In early February the new television studio building was complete, and a team of engineers was wiring the place up, with George Reynolds in charge. A General Electric tower engineer had come to town from Syracuse to oversee the hoisting of the actual TV transmitter to the top of the tower. On the afternoon of the fourth, four steel workers were working on the mast. Jack DeWitt and Aaron Shelton were downtown working on a new device in the WSM shop. Jack’s brother Ward, whose construction company was in charge of the new TV studio building, was driving into town from the east, and he reached a point on the highway where he was used to seeing the tower—except this time, it wasn’t there. At the same time, George Reynolds Jr., the engineer’s son, was downtown in his office at International Printing, where he could see the TV tower, a slash on a hill in the middle distance, going up from his window. He noticed it, turned to answer a question from a colleague, turned back, and the tower was missing from the landscape. Viewers of WSM-TV’s late-afternoon soap opera Modern Romance heard a bizarre audio malfunction. An alarmed, disembodied voice said over the broadcast, “Oh my God! Send help! The tower has just fallen down!”
Reynolds recalled that it took ten seconds for what had happened to register in his mind. “I missed it coming down,” he said.
Reynolds’s father had been walking under one of the guy lines when he heard an explosion and the sound of shearing metal. He and Carl Jenkins dived in a ditch and covered their heads as hundreds of tons of steel and cable slammed to the earth. Eyewitnesses said the top of the structure flew apart and showered to the ground, while about half of the tower toppled over. All four steel workers—Ray Maxwell, 27, George Presler, 33, Robert Lee Kirshner, 30, and Donald Ward Kinnan, 25—were killed. One victim landed on the roof of the broadcast building. Three trucks and a car were crushed. A dog was beheaded. Though none of the many houses nearby took a direct hit, a quiet residential neighborhood reeled at the shocking sight of morgue wagons, twisted iron, and fallen shrapnel in backyards. Blaw-Knox canceled its advertisement in the nick of time.
“To this very day, none of us closely connected to this tragedy knows exactly what went wrong,” wrote Aaron Shelton in the 1980s. But some had their suspicions. George Reynolds Jr. said his father believed the tension was allowed to get radically out of balance among the three sets of guy wires and that when one became slack, the other two pulled the structure apart and then to the ground. DeWitt at least knew WSM wasn’t responsible for the tower at the time of the collapse; Blaw-Knox and GE still owned it, with plans to formally turn it over to DeWitt when he was satisfied the job was done right. Still, though he was able to build a new tower of the same design on a more remote hill, DeWitt couldn’t help but be haunted by the gravest engineering failure he’d ever been a party to.
Things continued to topple at the Opry as well. In late February, Webb Pierce, who’d quit the show and then come back, lashed out at the Opry in an ugly final parting. Kilpatrick announced to the newspapers that Pierce had been let go over “unwillingness to conform with long established rules and regulations.” Pierce said he’d resigned, over WSM’s 5 percent cut of every show he and other Opry stars played. “I do not feel they are entitled to charge us for being on the station,” he said. “They call it an ‘artists’ fee for services,’ but if I’ve ever gotten any services from them I’d like to know what they were!” Pierce also objected to the station using his picture and name in a National Life sales brochure. “I told Mr. Kilpatrick today that WSM should pay me for the use of my name if I have to pay them for the use of the Grand Ole Opry name,” he said.
Though hard to imagine, WSM suffered even more trouble from one of its loyalists. In the predawn hours of May 27, 1957, a Monday, DeWitt was wakened by the phone. He heard station news director Bill Williams say, “Jack, we got a real problem.” Williams explained that Ernest Tubb was in jail, arrested for firing a handgun in the National Life lobby. The trouble had started the previous week in Meridian, Mississippi, where annually for five years, Tubb, Hank Snow, and a slate of Opry stars had staged the Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Day Celebration, with a ticketed concert and a WSM remote broadcast from the Singing Brakeman’s hometown. That year, Denny routed his free Philip Morris Country Music Show into Meridian on the same weekend, drawing away crowds Tubb and Snow had worked for years to build up. The artists were furious and remained so for many years. But Tubb, who began something of a bender that weekend, took a notion of revenge right away. According to Tubb biographer Ronnie Pugh’s meticulously researched account, Tubb woke Denny with a phone call and berated him. Denny proposed a mano-a-mano confrontation on the steps of National Life. Then he rolled over and went back to sleep, while the inebriated Tubb drove downtown in his blue Cadillac, wearing house slippers and armed with a .357 Magnum. When he arrived in the lobby, Bill Williams and announcer David Cobb were on their way in for the morning shift.
A security guard known as Mr. Lawrence confronted the singer, “Ernest, you can’t have that gun in here.”
“The hell I can’t,” Tubb replied.
Mr. Lawrence invited more trouble: “Well, you sure can’t fire it.”
And with the words, “Like hell I won’t,” Tubb aimed more or less away from everyone and fired a round into the woodwork above the elevator.
An engineer upstairs called the police, who took Tubb to the drunk tank, with Williams in tow. Opry historian Jack Hurst wrote: “While Williams waited for him to complete the mandatory three hours incarceration for public drunkenness, Tubb bought cigarettes for the other inmates and sang to and with them.” The Banner reported that Tubb was released on bond at 9:00 a.m. and that at 10:00 a.m. he failed to appear for trial and automatically forfeited $60 in cash bonds. Harianne Moore, by then WSM’s PR director, told the Tennessean that the shooting incident “had nothing to do with the station. It was more or less a private matter with Ernest.”
The Tubb incident was the most outlandish fallout from the Denny affair, but not the last. Stapp was growing ever more aware of the fortune he could be making in publishing. Waugh had been upset by DeWitt’s ultimatum, fearing (correctly) that chasing off Denny would weaken WSM’s standing in the booming country music business. Moreover, he thought that DeWitt hadn’t followed the board’s instructions to give Denny the choice of divestiture or resignation, so tensions remained high at the station into the summer of 1957.
“We continued to battle inside for several months,” Waugh said. “I then decided that I would leave and go to WSIX to run the radio/television station.” DeWitt took this news poorly, blowing up at Waugh with all of his pent-up frustration over this recalcitrant, unmanageable broadcasting company. “Get the hell off the property!” he bellowed at Waugh. And another odd thing happened, Waugh said. “Stapp disappeared. I didn’t know where he was. I think he later told me he was in Cincinnati. And I think he was gone nearly four weeks.” Buddy Killen, Stapp’s business partner, remembered it slightly differently. “He took a week off. He checked into the hospital—if I remember correctly, Baptist,” said Killen with a laugh. “He didn’t want them to know where he was while he made a decision about what to do. Jack had the strangest ways of doing things sometimes. It was amazing. I knew where he was, and he and I stayed in touch. But he didn’t want them to be able to get to him, ‘cause he was actually working on going to work for WKDA.”
Waugh continues the story: “When I left and Stapp disappeared, DeWitt felt that the departure of both of us jeopardized possibly his position—that it looked like there was a major problem with reasonably important people in the organization. He contacted me to see if I could help him find Stapp, not to fire him but I think to try to get him to come back. I was gone only two to three days to WSIX. Mr. Craig came back to town [and] was kind enough to want me to come back. I really was not happy going to WSIX. If I’d have had an ownership position I would have felt differently. I came back, and when I did, Stapp came into the station with a written resignation, put it on DeWitt’s desk, and left.”
When Stapp’s departure was announced on June 11, DeWitt was cordial. “Much of the success of our programming during [the last eighteen years] can be attributed to Jack Stapp,” he said in the Banner. Lamb wrote at the time: “Affable, imperturbable, ready to work long hours whether at his desk or in rehearsal, Stapp’s friends say he has lifted both the office of program manager and the programs which he directed to new highs in acceptance.” And apparently, there really were no very hard feelings, for Stapp continued to produce the Prince Albert Opry for NBC. Chiefly though, he became general manager of WKDA, a fledgling rock and roll station, and returned as a partner in Tree. Ott Devine replaced Stapp as WSM program director.
At the same time, DeWitt made the most sweeping reorganization of his tenure, splitting WSM into two divisions. Bob Cooper, sales manager since 1955, and Waugh were named general managers of radio and television respectively. It marked the first time the radio station had a general manager since Harry Stone, and the demarcation of power was probably long overdue. Each broadcaster had grown rather vast. Radio included nine departments, 250 announcers, musicians, disk jockeys, news writers, copywriters, engineers, traffic, and clerical personnel. Its assets, said the Country Music Reporter, included “an eight-man news department, a widely recognized farm department, and one of the South’s most active sports departments.” TV had nearly one hundred employees on the producing, writing, and technical side, with access to a talent pool of over two hundred people, many of whom worked both stations. Waugh also hired two men who would leave major marks on WSM’s televised future: sales manager Tom Griscom and executive producer Elmer Alley, formerly of WSM radio.
Even so, stability remained elusive. Jimmy Dickens quit the Opry within a week of Ott Devine’s promotion to be on Denny’s Philip Morris show. In August, six-year veteran DJ Eddie Hill signed with the Jim Denny agency. The father of seven cited, in all frankness, “opportunities that will mean more to me financially.” He sent his “sincere regret” to Bob Cooper. Perhaps toughest of all, R. J. Reynolds ended its sponsorship of the Prince Albert Opry after almost twenty continuous years. Harry Stone, whose drive and faith and friends at the Esty agency had kept the relationship strong for the first ten years, was of course long gone. People weren’t rolling their own cigarettes as much anymore either, which Kilpatrick said was undermining demand for Prince Albert itself. Probably most important, NBC was simply going out of the live radio business. When The Prince Albert Opry wrapped on NBC on December 28, 1957, it marked the last of the radio network’s live musical shows, making it one good candidate for the last gasp of the golden age of radio. Cold comfort that was to the artists and the station losing a coveted national platform. For Kilpatrick, it was a blow to his pride. “It broke my heart,” he said in 2004. “I damn near cried.”
As the 1957 DJ festival got rolling, twenty-four-year-old Ralph Emery couldn’t help but notice that people were treating him better than he’d ever been treated in his life. Artists were approaching him, and other DJs acted subtly deferential. He’d been to two of these confabs before, but this was his first as an employee of WSM. Few people in the room had climbed so far. Emery grew up poor in tiny McEwen, Tennessee. In his autobiography, he called his father a drunk and his stepfather “a bum.” But his mother was a devotee of WSM, and she noticed Ralph’s delight in the station enough to note in his baby book that the Air Castle of the South was his favorite. He idolized Grant Turner, Louie Buck, and David Cobb. So after a difficult and introverted childhood, Emery found a job with a tiny radio station in Paris, Tennessee, which led to a better job at Nashville’s WNAH. In radio he saw a career where he could be somebody and overcome a long-standing “inferiority complex.” Emery studied under WLAC DJ John Richbourg at the Tennessee School of Broadcasting, where he learned to read wire copy and worked to rid his voice of its hillbilly twang.
Eventually, he landed a job at WSIX, one of Nashville’s big three radio stations, for $75 a week. There, Emery discovered his penchant for long, on-air interviews. A frequent visitor was newcomer Marty Robbins, a Jimmy Dickens discovery from Phoenix. “Marty would visit my show, and when the microphone was turned off, he shouted and waved his fist at the window facing WSM,” Emery remembered. “‘Those sons of bitches won’t play my records!’ he’d yell. He was especially angry at WSM’s Eddie Hill.” Emery did a stint at WMAK, the city’s new rock and roll station. But he was fired there after a short time for warning a fellow DJ that he was going to be fired.
Out of work, Emery applied for the only open job in town—one that seemed out of reach. WSM’s overnight slot was open again, and because he auditioned against announcers who didn’t know how to spin records and talk at the same time, Emery got the job. Like so many others, he was happy to take a pay cut to go to WSM. “Every day in the studio on the bulletin board they posted your assignments,” he said in 2000. “Just to see my name alongside all of those names, who as far as I was concerned were almost immortal in broadcasting, they’d been doing it for so long. And here at the end of the day was ‘Emery, 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.’ That was a real kick.”
Morale surged at the 1957 and 1958 DJ conventions. Country music seemed back on track. Columbia Records’s Mitch Miller, arguably the most powerful A & R man in the world, told the gathering, now two thousand strong, that country risked losing its soul by chasing crossover dreams. “Country writers noticed that the pop singers were taking their stuff and making hits,” he said. “So they started writing their stuff for the pop singers instead of from the heart or guts, like they had been. Well you can guess what happened then. Country music lost its appeal. But the writer . . . went back to the simple, honest, straight-from-the-heart writing, and now country music is stronger than ever.”
Tom Perryman remembers that around that time, disc jockeys actually started to go to seminars during WSM’s confab. The two big issues he remembered were the transition from 78-rpm records to the new, lighter, harder-to-break 45s, and a musical trend being embraced by producers Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley—lush, orchestrated background vocals. The Anita Kerr Singers and the Jordanaires, an all-male counterpart, were working all the time, bringing a pop gloss to country recording sessions by the likes of Jim Reeves, Ferlin Husky, and Patsy Cline. “We had some dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist disc jockeys who, if it had [background] voices on it, then they wouldn’t play it,” Perryman said. “Jim Reeves was one of the very first who did that. When they took fiddle and steel out and put voices and arrangements, God . . . But some of us liked it.” Lovers of traditional country music aren’t famous for their adaptability to new musical trends, but they learned to live with, and eventually embrace, this so-called Nashville Sound. Pop-sensitive and TV-friendly, it ushered in a blockbuster era in the life of Music City.
The Country Music Disc Jockey Association, however, wasn’t faring so well. After four years, the group lacked mission and money. In something of a desperation play, the CMDJA arranged a fund-raising show in Miami, tied to a record merchants’ convention. D Kilpatrick and Wesley Rose helped line up talent, but the show barely covered its expenses, and at a meeting the next day, the DJs were desperate. That’s when prominent Washington-area show promoter Connie B. Gay made what Kilpatrick called a “hellfire and brimstone” speech, to the effect that country music needed an industry-wide trade association, not a DJs-only support group. Such an organization could coordinate the interests of artists, managers, publishers, record companies, and radio stations, through an evenly parceled out board of directors. With that, the disbanding of the CMDJA was set in motion, and its remaining $1,250 was offered toward the launch of the Country Music Association (CMA).
The CMA’s first organizational meeting at the 1958 DJ convention empowered Kilpatrick to hire a secretary for the fledgling trade association. An associate of Jack Stapp suggested her friend Jo Walker for the job. Walker only took it because she knew and respected Gay and Rose and because she was restless. “I knew nothing about country music,” she said. “In fact I’d never been to the Grand Ole Opry.” It scarcely mattered. Walker’s role was to assist a hand-picked executive director—in other words, a man.
In WSM’s Studio C, on November 20, 1958, a CMA board of directors was selected. When Ernest Tubb suggested recruiting Harry Stone as the first executive director, all other candidates were dropped. Everyone, it seemed, wanted Stone back in a managerial role again, and when asked, he agreed to move from New Orleans, where he was managing a television station, to take the job.
“I always thought he was a perfect person for that position,” Walker (now Jo Walker-Meador) said in 2004. “Harry was homesick, I think, and anxious to come back to Nashville.” Unfortunately, the nascent CMA had no budget and no plan for revenue, an oversight that caught Stone off guard. “Harry thought that the big record companies were already putting money into CMA,” said Walker. “[In fact] the board was looking to Harry to find ways to raise funds to support the association. It was sort of a general misunderstanding there. We had no money. My salary was practically nothing. So Harry just stayed ten months.” All wasn’t lost for Stone. His many friends in the country music business made some introductions and helped him land a job with the Tennessee Electric Cooperative Association, which he kept until he died in 1968.
Jo Walker, however, stepped up and patiently built an organization that sponsored industry-wide awards and marshaled demographic data for the nation’s advertising agencies. It lobbied radio stations to adopt an all-country format; a great many of them did. The CMA could count only eighty-one full-time country stations in America in 1961. By the time Jo Walker-Meador retired in 1991, there were more than 2,100.
Jack DeWitt, an engineer accustomed to control and finely machined moving parts, must have wondered whether he’d done the right things for WSM during the turbulent 1950s. The upheavals couldn’t have been entirely his doing, he would have rationalized. He didn’t condone guns going off in lobbies and off-the-books shenanigans. But had he sold the Opry out, dethroned it prematurely? Or had he steered the soberest possible course through a personality crisis and an inevitable bubble burst?
The best answer to this question lies in what happened to country music in Nashville as a result of DeWitt’s most courageous decision—to ban moonlighting and live with the consequences. WSM’s short-term loss was Nashville’s boon. When Stapp and Denny were forced to leave WSM, their businesses achieved a legitimacy and autonomy they had not enjoyed before. Cedarwood, Driftwood, and Tree joined Acuff-Rose to further flesh out the skeleton of Nashville’s new music business. Their rivalry fueled profits, which hired new writers and inspired further competitors to get into the business. Their cooperation, both in the context of the CMA and the day-to-day sharing of ideas and even songs, described a new community that was about to seduce a large part of the music and business culture out in the United States.
When Castle studio closed in 1955, it had a similar effect on recording. New studios began to meet the demand that Castle had fostered and served. The most important, indeed the seminal Music Row business, was Owen Bradley’s studio at 804 Sixteenth Avenue. In about 1955, Owen and brother Harold knocked the first floor out of a house to create a high-ceilinged audio study. About a year later, they had a soon-to-be-famous Quonset hut erected on the same property for sound and film. Bradley got away with his own, less-disruptive moonlighting until producing for Decca became more lucrative and all consuming than his WSM work. In May of 1958 he officially resigned after eighteen years with the station and made Bradley Studios the local headquarters of the thriving Decca Records. He was replaced at WSM by Marvin Hughes, a dapper little man who played nine instruments and whose résumé included Dot Records, the Nashville Symphony, and the direction of the old National Life company chorus.
One year later, in May 1959, D Kilpatrick, who had never really settled into a groove with the Opry or WSM’s top management, was replaced by WSM program director and veteran announcer Ott Devine. Some thought Devine too reserved for Opry management, but he got off to a good start by calling an industry-wide meeting that included WSM officials, artists, managers, publishers, Harry Stone, and even Jim Denny. It cleared the air. It lasted three hours, and afterward, Ernest Tubb called it “the greatest thing that has ever happened.” Devine also updated the Opry stage and modernized its sound, allowing drums (actually a single snare drum) for the first time.
A certain understanding had been achieved. Although WSM would never again dominate the country music business, that had never been its objective. Denny’s perhaps-too-free enterprise bolstered the whole community and capitalized on the World War II country music boom just when that was necessary. DeWitt’s decision to ban moonlighting ended an unhealthy near-monopoly at the core of country music in Nashville, creating conditions for real competition and growth. The decade about to dawn would be Music City’s biggest ever, and that would be good news for National Life, the Opry, and WSM, just as it would be for Music Row.
Most conversations at the 1959 convention were about how and why country music was on the make again, with radio stations converting over now in significant numbers, and spectacular songs like Harlan Howard’s “Heartaches by the Number” emerging as exemplars of a new creative ferment in Nashville. The BMI Awards moved uptown, from a hotel breakfast to a banquet at the Belle Meade Country Club. Pop singers looked to Nashville for material more than ever, and country singers took determined aim at the pop charts. A growing cadre of brilliant studio pickers and players had time to simply sit and invent and spark each other on creatively, because that’s what musicians do when they’re fed and sheltered.
An observation made by Charlie Lamb a couple years before in his newspaper proved more valid than ever. Music buyers, he’d written, were leaping genres without prejudice, looking for anything that moved them. “It is a recognition that the categories have merged, that one category today is borrowing successfully from the other; that like so many different rivers converging, they are all finding the welcoming sea.”