The Whole Complex Is a StudioThe Whole Complex Is a Studio
Jack DeWitt’s retirement and Craig’s death coincided with the most radical changes yet for National Life. Chairman Dan Brooks and president Bill Weaver had both climbed to prominence through the company’s investment division, managing the billions of dollars in accumulated reserves insurers have to carry. Now they were as powerful as any businessmen in the state of Tennessee. That, combined with the trend of the day toward corporate diversification, made the company more interested than ever in new lines of business. In 1968, National Life merged with Third National Bank, under the name NLT, for National Life Third. A few years later, banking and insurance combinations were outlawed by the federal government, but even after divestiture of the bank, according to business historian Bill Carey, “the insurance company kept the name NLT and most of the conglomerate philosophy that led to its formation.” After a few years, NLT owned a real estate firm, a computer services company, and WSM, Inc. “Each,” said the NLT annual report, “is a synergistic development of expertise gained in the parent firm.”
Irving Waugh, DeWitt’s successor as president of WSM, quickly proved that he believed in synergy too, as well as rapid forward motion. In charge at last of radio, Channel 4, and the Grand Ole Opry, his pent up energy and ideas were unleashed in a torrent of new initiatives. Some had been set in motion by Weaver even before DeWitt left, perhaps another cause of the friction between the men. In June of 1967, Billboard magazine reported that WSM was looking to get into music publishing and the record business. That fall, the company acquired an FM station and took it to the air one year later, entering what was by then a crowded local market. At a time when FM was at last overtaking AM as the nation’s preferred form of radio, WSM-FM was the midstate’s strongest signal, with 100,000 watts, playing adult contemporary music like Montovani, Roger Williams, and Doris Day. David Cobb spun classical, and Hal Durham hosted “sophisticated jazz.”
When Waugh began to sift through his own priorities, the first thing he focused on was the Opry. “It had been neglected,” he said. “It needed much stronger management. I felt that it had become a backwater in the music arena.” Ott Devine, for all his years of service and his authoritative broadcasting voice, was drinking too much, and his relations with the artists had deteriorated. Wendell said he often wasn’t even there, sending his secretary in his stead. “He was in charge of some sixty acts, and he got so he would chew people out for no reason,” said Ralph Emery. “He finally alienated so many people at the Opry that Irving Waugh had to step him down.” That said, Devine was hardly alone in his struggles with alcohol. Drinking contributed to the premature end of general manager Bob Cooper’s career and probably his life as well. In truth, booze was nearly as grave and persistent a problem over the decades for WSM’s staff as it was for the country music community. Harry Stone, Jack Stapp, and Ralph Emery struggled with the bottle as surely as, though not as famously as, Johnny Cash or any number of other country stars that could be named. There don’t seem to be cases of the fatally toxic dependence of a Hank Williams or a Keith Whitley among the WSM crew, but as in so many families, men of great accomplishment buckled under all kinds of temptations, some of them private, some of them spilling into the arena of work and trust and effectiveness. And as with other families, support was offered even when mistakes had been made and feelings had been hurt.
Waugh’s choice to replace Devine with Bud Wendell was surprising too, given Wendell’s status as DeWitt’s protégé. Almost as soon as he’d been named president, Waugh called Wendell to his office and told him, “I’m going to make you manager of the Grand Ole Opry—now.”
Wendell wasn’t happy. “Irving, we’ve not had the greatest relationship and if you think this is the way to get rid of me, maybe you’re right,” he said. “But by God, I’ll go down there and run that Opry. You’re sending me down there because you think I’m going to fail and that’s your way to get rid of me!”
“So that’s the kind of relationship we had,” Wendell said in 2004. “We laughed about it a lot afterwards, because he always said, ‘I knew you better than you knew yourself, and I knew what you’d do down there.’ ”
Wendell’s first Saturday night could scarcely have produced a stranger circumstance, for the city had been placed under a curfew by Mayor Beverly Briley. Two days before, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated just two hundred miles west in Memphis. Wendell called the mayor personally and said, “I’m sure you mean everything except the Grand Ole Opry. We’ve got three or four thousand people coming to town.” The reply: “It includes the Grand Ole Opry. You will not do the show.” National Guardsmen had been deployed in the city to quell sporadic violence, though Nashville experienced nothing on the scale of the nation’s biggest cities, which were burning. That ominous weekend marked the first instance in a generation that the Opry had been preempted by anything, a signal of tempestuous times that, in Nashville, included important lunch counter demonstrations and other significant chapters of the Civil Rights Movement. These dramas played out just down the street from WSM’s headquarters and just outside the Ryman’s stained glass windows. But WSM’s news department gave civil rights demonstrations as little play as possible. Wendell put up mesh over the Ryman windows for the first time, for fear of flying bricks or flaming projectiles. He was, after all, a second-generation insurance man.
Inside the hall, as Waugh had hoped, Wendell brought his troubleshooter’s experience to the show. “I wanted him to meet and mingle in the current music community, to get to know people, to breathe more life into the Opry, and he did,” Waugh said later. More life meant new blood. Most members of the Opry, Wendell recalled, were like Marty Robbins, at least in their forties. The show’s old-time heartbeat came from a dwindling cadre of 1930s-era Opry fiddle and string band pickers who still played every week. But those performers didn’t need to tour and follow up on their hit singles. For those who did, Wendell liberalized the prevailing performance requirement for Opry members, from twenty-six weeks per year to twenty. Even Wendell had to admit that the lost income of playing Saturday nights in Nashville had grown, even as the Opry was less essential to any artist’s career. Most important, said Ralph Emery, Wendell brought the human touch back to the Opry backstage. “He bought watches that said ‘Grand Ole Opry’ for all the men and pins for the ladies. And he really began to give them a lot of fatherly love,” he said. The message: “‘We love you, we want you to stay here. We’re proud of you.’ And he smoothed out everything. They came to love and respect Bud. He was actually the perfect guy to do that.”
Waugh’s other great concern was the Opry House itself. The Ryman had taken hundreds of nights of punishment in its almost thirty years of service. People call the building the “Mother Church of Country Music,” but National Life Executives began thinking of it as the mother of all firetraps. Summer temperatures inside reportedly topped 120 degrees. Some of the pews were literally held up with Coke crates and patrons were complaining of long splinters that tore clothing and flesh alike. “It scared the hell out of National Life,” said Wendell. “Scared the hell out of us that were down there. I read every now and then [that] the artists were just up in arms that we were going to leave the Ryman Auditorium. And hell, every one of them just couldn’t wait to get out of [there] and have parking and dressing rooms.”
By this point, the Ryman actually belonged to WSM. Weaver and DeWitt had negotiated its purchase from its board of directors in 1963 for $208,000. But even before then, WSM officials had been exploring new homes for the Opry, including a 6,000-seat coliseum at the state fairgrounds. Now the matter was urgent. Renovation of the Ryman appeared painfully expensive and not very practical given the goal of growing the audience. How, where, and when to find a new Grand Ole Opry House was Waugh’s concern. The answer began to jell, he said, during a visit to Houston for a golf outing set up by—of all people—WSM’s news pioneer Jack Harris, by then a Houston broadcasting power. On that trip was Judge Roy Hofheinz, a big thinker and doer after Waugh’s own heart, who had recently steered the $42 million Astrodome into improbable existence. Waugh saw the massive stadium—a huge, air-conditioned pleasure dome—with its adjacent complex of hotels and a theme park, and became intrigued. “I began to think if the Castle was Disney’s centerpiece on the West Coast and the Astrodome was Judge Hofheinz’s centerpiece for the complex that he’d constructed, then the Opry House could be a centerpiece.” But of what? For inspiration and refinement, he turned, as he often did in those days, to Elmer Alley.
A WSM veteran from the sound effects days of radio, Alley had, since the early 1950s, directed programming on WSM-TV. He’d made the jump far more reluctantly than many of his generation. “I didn’t want any part of [television],” Alley said in 2004. “I loved radio. [But] all of a sudden the live shows dried up, and it became sitting in a control room and being there for station breaks and playing announcements and playing records. It was just totally boring. So then I had an opportunity to go out there as a director and was scared to death. They more or less just set me down with the cameras and told me to do a show, which I promptly fouled up by getting cameras in the wrong position. I really did have to start over as a rank amateur. I’ve never liked it as well as radio.”
But Waugh knew how creative Alley was. In fact, he’d once talked him back to WSM-TV with an unusually rich offer after Alley left WSM for a time to continue in radio. Alley had made a morning ratings smash with his recruitment of Ralph Emery. He’d given Jud Collins a platform to become Nashville’s Walter Cronkite, both via the evening news and the long-running Nashville civic staple, the Noon Show. And he’d outdone Channel 5 in the afternoon with an American Bandstand–style dance show called the Five O’clock Hop.
Alley had also programmed or produced a slate of Saturday afternoon country music television in the late 1960s and early 1970s that, over WSM-TV or over the many other stations that aired them via syndication, inspired a new generation of musicians. At 4:00 p.m. came Ernest Tubb’s lanky Texas-meets-Nashville persona. Then, in half-hour blocks, there followed a parade of musically focused, live-performance shows that covered nearly every style of country music: the corny but venerable Stoneman Family, the entrepreneurial and ambitious Wilburn Brothers, the stylish Porter Wagoner, and, at 6:00 p.m., bluegrass stars Flatt & Scruggs, still sponsored by Martha White Flour after so many years. And those were just the hosts. Including guest appearances, nearly every country artist of consequence performed on WSM-TV in the afternoons in the 1960s, just as they had over radio in the 1930s and 1940s. A generation that grew up learning country through its ears gave way to one steeped in imagery of hay bales, barn dances, suits with string ties, gingham dresses, rhinestones, and rube comics.
Sometimes it seemed that Alley and Waugh relished taking different sides of an issue. “He and I would get into hellacious arguments,” Alley remembered. They had facing offices, and their verbal jousts could be heard down the hall and through the walls. “I love Irving,” said Alley in a common paradoxical impression of Waugh. “He knew I’d do anything in the world for him. I liked him because he would challenge you. He wouldn’t tell you what to do. He’d stop by my office, just stick his head in the door and say, ‘Surprise me, lad!’ And he meant it.”
Alley recalls that in that spirit he presented Waugh a memo outlining the vision of Opryland USA, well before Waugh went to Houston. The plan, Alley summarized, was to “go out and find a typical piece of Tennessee countryside along the river and design a park which would reflect different types of country music.” The new Opry House and a small motel would complete the entertainment complex. Waugh, in any event, took this plan to the NLT board, which, in good corporate fashion, demanded a feasibility study. President Bill Weaver was a stickler for return on investment. “Put a pencil to that,” he’d say. The study, by a West Coast firm, came back pessimistic. But Waugh more or less ignored the findings and promised Weaver a return he could live with. Because what Waugh knew and trusted in was a statistic gleaned from exit polls of Opry crowds—that the average Opry fan traveled over six hundred miles, usually by car, to see the show. How could a theme park—by then a hot form of American family entertainment—fail to be something those tourists would visit during the weekend? Waugh’s gamble—Opryland USA—was formally announced in late September 1969. Waugh called it “a logical and creative extension of a growing institution.” Dan Brooks promised a park “of great beauty” without “the garish, honky-tonk commercialism that has sprung up around some of the other amusement areas around the nation.”
Brooks’s remark was a veiled reference to downtown Nashville and the surroundings of the Ryman Auditorium. Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge may have incubated Nashville legends and inebriated the stars as the Opry’s cross-alley entertainers’ lounge, but Lower Broadway generally had become a magnet for cheap souvenir vendors, strip bars, and general seediness. The question remained: what to do with the Ryman? And with the same blind spot for history that led to the dumping of the WSM music collection, National Life’s top brass produced an idea so bad that it actually helped make Nashville, in a roundabout way, a more proud and progressive city. On March 20, 1971, Dan Brooks announced that the Mother Church of Country Music, approaching its one-hundredth anniversary, would be torn down and the bricks used to build a commemorative “Little Church at Opryland.” “The Opry House is a grand old lady, and we do not intend to let her come to an ignoble end,” said a completely sincere Brooks. A board of advisors on the design and placement of the chapel was named, including Brooks, Waugh, Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Bill Monroe, two local ministers, and the Reverend Billy Graham.
By happenstance, the Ryman had earned a wider national profile just two years before, when it housed the Johnny Cash Show, an ABC series taped between 1969 and 1971. Cash was easily the most popular figure in country music at the time, and perhaps its first star since Hank Williams to truly obliterate boundaries of genre or culture. The show, while not produced by WSM, Inc., was shot on what was essentially a National Life–owned sound stage. That exposure probably helped the Nashville historic community, which, alarmed and motivated, protested National Life’s plans for the city’s most venerated concert and assembly hall. The company paused and retreated to an outside consultant, which backed its client’s assumption: the Ryman was beyond repair. “It would be unprofessional for me as a theatrical designer . . . to recommend the preservation or the reconstruction of the Ryman,” wrote hired New York authority Jo Mielziner. Immediately, Benjamin H. Caldwell, president of the Tennessee Historic Sites Federation, protested, calling the report “incomplete” and “superficial.” City council hearings, letters to the editor, and even a visit from an interested Nixon administration followed. According to a landmark piece of Nashville reportage by Garrison Keillor for the New Yorker in 1974, which covered the history of the Opry and the imminent move to its new modern home, the Ryman’s heritage was sold locally more on the basis of its architectural significance and the Carusos and Paderewskis who had performed there than its status as country music’s holiest shrine. Another authoritative voice entered the fray at its testiest point. New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable dedicated a long Sunday column to Nashville’s “landmark.” National Life’s plans, she wrote, were rooted in “a mixture of architectural ignorance and astute business venality.” They would mean “abandonment of a neighborhood that needs help and speeding the death of downtown.” Good urban design, she wrote, would use the Ryman as a centerpiece of downtown redevelopment. As for the proposed Little Church, she offered “first prize for the pious misuse of a landmark.”
National Life argued, with some justification, that it couldn’t afford to build Opryland, an Opry house, a hotel, and renovate the Ryman too. It couldn’t make Opryland work by doing it halfway, and it didn’t want to build a competing attraction in a depressed downtown for weekend nights. So when the Grand Ole Opry moved, amid bittersweet tears and family togetherness, to its new showplace in the spring of 1974, the company put the Ryman in mothballs, opening it only for dollar tours, served by its tour bus division.
Elmer Alley, in keeping with Irving Waugh’s commands, saw to it that the ceremonies surrounding the new Opry House were different. Ribbon cuttings and golden shovels were forbidden. When ground was broken, Brother Oswald, Acuff’s dobro player of an astonishing thirty years, tilled the soil with a mule and plow, while the press took pictures. When the Opry staged its first-ever show from the new building—a modern concrete and timber abstraction of a church—Alley turned to Acuff himself. Vintage film of a young Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys performing “Wabash Cannonball” was projected on a large scrim at the front of the stage. After a verse and chorus, Acuff and the Opry cast were revealed from behind with a heart-stopping swell of the stage lights and a smooth segue from taped to live performance. A crisp new red-barn backdrop hovered behind the musicians. Guests and family sat on pews at the back of the stage, facing the audience. Musicians were still visible milling in the backstage wings. “People just gasped,” Alley said in 2004. “I heard about it for years.”
The other indelible memory from the Opry’s move was President Nixon’s visit to the show, less than a half year before his humiliating resignation. Protestors picketed him near the Opry House grounds. Jerry Strobel, Opry house manager, remembers struggling to find a photograph for the Opry program of Nixon smiling. When Nixon arrived, he was in fact jovial, famously singing “Wild Irish Rose” for his wife Pat (it was her birthday) and letting Acuff teach him how to spin a yo-yo. It was the first time a president of the United States had ever visited the Opry, and others—especially Republicans—seemed to make a point of it in the following years.
By this time, Opryland USA, essentially in the Opry House’s front yard, was two years old and already deemed by the Banner “a whopping success in which the entire Nashville community takes pride.” It had been carved and landscaped out of a stretch of woodland along the Cumberland about two miles upriver from downtown, accessible only by car, along a new highway named for Mayor Beverly Briley. It had indeed come out quite green and leafy. Four thousand trees had been transplanted by huge truck-mounted tree spades. Villages had been built with plazas and gazebos in a colonial Americana vein. Water flowed through much of the park. Two fully operational antique steam locomotives chugged around the perimeter. A hand-carved gondola ride that had spent years in Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens was reassembled from five thousand pieces. There were dancing chickens and goats.
Waugh, who had lost plenty of sleep in the final months, wondering if anybody would actually come to his colossal gamble of a theme park, was delighted to discover that the parking lot was too small. The planned motel had been upgraded to a four-hundred-room hotel with convention facilities. The Opry House had been tricked out with the latest television and sound gear, and it was ready for use.
Waugh had even managed to launch another Nashville country music institution in the run-up to the opening of Opryland’s first season in the spring of 1972. Fans had been coming to Nashville for years trying to be near the Country Music Festival. Although nobody resented the fans’ interest, they were becoming a nuisance at what was, ostensibly, a professional convention. Waugh, meanwhile, needed a galvanizing event to kick off the first season of Opryland. So he proposed a country music festival to be cosponsored by the record labels, WSM, and the CMA. He called it Fan Fair, another Elmer Alley suggestion. The CMA was wary, but ultimately agreed to be a partner after Waugh guaranteed WSM would cover any losses, which proved briefly necessary. Fan Fair’s first year at the downtown Memorial Auditorium, a new domed arena, was less than a success (despite a staggering lineup), chiefly because it was held in mid-April, before schools let out. A shift to June and, eventually, to the easier-to-manage state fairgrounds, made Fan Fair a profitable and popular event that the CMA manages to this day as the CMA Music Festival.
By 1974 most of the world had a mental picture of Nashville, however skewed. Robert Altman’s film Nashville, which portrayed Music City USA as a gothic enclave for redneck prima donnas and me-generation hippies, didn’t help the city’s self-image. Indeed, it made a lot of the city’s old-liners angry. On the other hand, only a handful of in-the-know music devotees knew of the Nashville portrayed in a much more intimate and realistic film of the period, Heartworn Highways. Home movies and interviews with songwriters Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, and their soon-to-be-famous brethren, offered Nashville as a new Left Bank for young writers of a sung American poetry.
Somewhere between the incisive parody and the bohemian documentary, a populist, family-friendly picture of Music City came radiating out of National Life, now fully in the come-to-Nashville business. Irving Waugh made Bud Wendell head of Opryland, as well as the Opry, and pushed ahead at last with NLT’s oft-delayed plans to build the Opryland Hotel. Wendell and Waugh wanted one thousand rooms. Bill Weaver gave them six hundred but acceded to their wishes to build extensive convention space. By the time the hotel opened in November 1977, it had prebooked $15 million worth of business. Just three years later NLT announced $40 million in expansions to both the rooms and meeting/exhibit space. Wendell’s choice to run the hotel, an L. A. veteran named Jack Vaughan, proved a dynamo, presiding over one of the largest and most successful hotel launches in history.
“He created the convention business in Nashville, Tennessee,” said Wendell. “And it worked beautifully for us, because conventions typically don’t meet in the summertime when you’ve got a park open. So you got all these people coming to fill those rooms. Conventions typically don’t meet on Friday, Saturday. They usually come in Sunday. So now we’ve got the Grand Ole Opry fifty-two weeks a year to plug those in on the weekends. We’ve got the park in the summertime and conventions to fill the rest of it out. And it was just a wonderful, wonderful formula. It just worked like a charm.”
Arguably the lynchpin of this synergistic boom off Briley Parkway was the maturation, under Wendell, of Opryland USA into a venue for live musical entertainment. Theme parks were everywhere in the 1970s and 1980s. All had shows, but none could match Opryland’s commitment to talent discovery and development. Other parks set performances to at least some taped backing. But Opryland used live ensembles as exclusively as NBC had in 1930s radio. “In the summers in those years we worked more union musicians in that one park than any one thing on the planet,” said Lloyd Wells, Opryland’s music director between 1974 and 1997. “We had something like 160 full-time union musicians working out there—double shifts.” And that’s not counting the singers and dancers. Wells and a staff of six flew around the country every winter, visiting scores of colleges and city auditoriums to audition between three thousand and five thousand singers and musicians for perhaps three hundred parts in Opryland shows. Young performers coveted the jobs for their training, their camaraderie, and as a springboard to larger things. Some early cast members went on to A Chorus Line, Las Vegas’s Follies Berger, and television’s Happy Days. Actor Jerry Dixon called Opryland “the College of How To Get To Broadway” in a 1993 Banner story. “After you do those four shows a day, outside in ninety-degree weather and ninety-percent humidity, you can do anything,” he said. By then, Opryland could claim among its alumni movie actors Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Jim Varney, Cynthia Rhodes, and Broadway performers Jodi Benson, Michael Blevins, Stephen Flaherty, and Reese Holland. Musicians Marty Roe, Dan Truman, and Jimmy Olander reconfigured their group for Music Row and became the hit band Diamond Rio. Country band Little Texas also jelled at Opryland, and two members of Restless Heart met there. Solo artists with Opryland work experience include gospel star Steven Curtis Chapman, country songwriters Dean Dillon and Skip Ewing, and glitzy singer Lorrie Morgan. Conductor Ted Taylor went on to the Chicago Lyric Opera and the New York City Opera.
The park’s signature show was a retrospective of early popular songs called I Hear America Singing, staged with elaborate My Fair Lady–style costuming. It was one big medley, a smoothed-over musical product geared to the tourist trade, but it and others like it offered dozens of musicians good day-job money, along with time getting better at their craft and profession, if not always their art. Another medley-based show traced the history of country music from the 1920s to the present day. Meanwhile, indoor and outdoor stages featured Dixieland jazz, bluegrass, modern pop/rock, and frequent spot shows by Grand Ole Opry stars, all coordinated in one-hour blocks designed to channel visitors from one venue to another past souvenir stores and eateries. There were rides, though nothing that would break any height or speed records. The more distinctive impression was of a hotbed of singers, dancers, accompanists, choreographers, and squads of assistants. There were constant vocal rehearsals and cleanup rehearsals in the morning before the show started. Said Wells: “It was like a factory.”
The park’s entertainment ambitions were supplemented by another division within WSM, Inc. Launched in 1974, Opryland Productions acted as an independent television company to exploit the Opry House’s television soundstage, which at the time was said to be the largest in the world. Besides jumping into the bustling world of syndicated country shows with Dolly, Marty Robbins’ Spotlight, That Nashville Music, and Porter Wagoner, Opryland Productions filmed Dance in America on the Opry House stage for public television. The division branched into sports, awards shows, and myriad specials. Late 1970s productions included Lucille Ball in Lucy Comes to Nashville with Mel Tillis, Barbara Mandrell, and others; Glenn Campbell’s Back to Basics; and the syndicated Pop Goes the Country with the likes of Ronnie Milsap, Tammy Wynette, Eddie Rabbitt, and Charley Pride.
For Nashville musicians like pianist Beegie Adair, the jazz aficionado from Printer’s Alley, the combination of WSM’s radio and television shows, Opryland Productions, and the theme park made Nashville an ideal place to live and work. “There were a lot of people like me,” she said in 2004. “A typical day would be to get up, do the Waking Crew, race home and have a shower, eat some lunch, go back and do the Noon Show, and play for completely different kinds of singers. Then I might go do the Ralph Emery show (when it moved to cable television in the evenings). Sometimes it would be all country. One day it was Robert Wagner who wanted to play all Count Basie tunes. Then maybe [I’d] go work in a club and play jazz or cocktail music, or go play a private party, or go do a record session. That’s what kept me going financially.”
For newcomers to Music City, the park and the productions often meant a first job, something to rely on while building a network. “For entertainers who came to town, it was just a safe, fairly stable training ground for people to transition from life in college or life in high school to the music business—a kind of system and program that I don’t know exists anywhere (today),” said Don Cook, who played bass in an Opryland country band his first summer in Nashville. Cook, who went on to produce platinum-selling albums for Brooks & Dunn and others, added that “I continued to work there for three years and met people who would go on to be friends and colleagues in the music business down the line. It was an invaluable place for just getting a lot of on-stage experience in a really concentrated period of time.”
Opryland Productions even sent out mobile units. Over the years they filmed a Christmas special in Disney World, followed the Pope in the Dominican Republic, interviewed Jimmy Carter at his Plains, Georgia, home, and won an Emmy for contributions to coverage of the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. The park and hotel themselves became favored locations for television. Mike Douglas taped his show beside the swimming pool. Crystal Gayle and Ray Stevens offered specials from the Stagedoor Lounge inside the hotel. “The whole complex is a studio,” wrote Caleb Pirtle in a 1979 history of the park. “It was made that way.”
The man who made it that way was David Hall, a one-time janitor at WSM-TV who studied audio/video engineering and launched a long, lucrative career under WSM’s umbrella. He’d wired Opryland and the Opry House before moving into management. In 1977 he was named Opryland Productions General Manager. By 1981 Hall was claiming Nashville’s arrival as a television town. “Traditionally, the film and TV industry was localized on the East and West Coasts. Now, Nashville is the Third Coast,” he told the Banner. (Hall claimed to have coined the term, which would define this era of Nashville’s entertainment history, and no one has convincingly contradicted him.) Already, Hall had overseen productions for the new Home Box Office and Showtime networks, plus a Ralph Emery talk/variety series called Nashville Alive, being readied for Ted Turner’s cable network in Atlanta. And he was in on the planning of something much bigger.
WSM’s ambitions in the ascent of cable began in the mid-1960s, when Bud Wendell built a cluster of local networks around Middle Tennessee at the behest of Jack DeWitt. “This country is going to go wired,” Wendell remembered DeWitt saying. “It’s going to be cabled. We need to explore this.” Wendell made the rounds of the early cable television expos, card table affairs in small hotels, where speculators learned how to lay claim to and run local franchises. Known then as Community Antenna Television, all the systems could do, in the absence of dedicated cable television networks, was offer a wired version of broadcast channels that couldn’t reach outlying markets. WSM, through a quiet and uncharacteristic joint venture with its insurance competitor Life & Casualty, formed Middle Tennessee CATV, delivering Nashville’s TV stations to towns like Cookeville and Tullahoma.
“Our real goal,” said Wendell, “was to get experience, because by then we all thought someday cable television is going to come to Nashville, Tennessee. We are then the logical people to get the franchise. We’re home folks.” That vision was stymied when a new federal law barred owners of local broadcast TV stations from also owning cable franchises. But more than ten years later, when Wendell was president and CEO of WSM and all it surveyed, Opryland Productions was successful enough that he and his management team began contemplating getting back into the cable business, not as a distributor but as a network. “I remember telling [the NLT executive committee] basically that we thought we had all the pieces to create a network, that it was going to be a long pull, it was going to take a lot of money, but that we were early in the game, and if we were successful, as we thought we could be, the sky was the limit,” Wendell said. The conservative NLT board likely would have passed on the idea in normal times, but Wendell’s plan coincided with unprecedented business struggles.
By the late 1970s, some said NLT had become overstaffed and complacent, relying on industrial insurance as its largest source of income, even as the product itself appeared to be fading into history. What had been a reasonable deal for low-income people now appeared to more and more like exploitation, and in 1979, 60 Minutes ran an exposé that focused on National Life and said as much. The company’s stock declined, and although NLT never lost money, profits in 1980 dipped for the first time in ten years. With analysts calling its stock undervalued and its huge pool of assets undermanaged, the company looked increasingly vulnerable to a corporate takeover. The most likely acquirer, American General Corporation of Houston, hovered over National Life for more than a decade.
American General did acquire Life & Casualty in 1967, plus at least two other insurers in the meantime. In the early 1970s, American General began buying National Life stock until, by 1978, it owned 5 percent of the company, sparking speculation that it was about to pounce for control. In a defensive move, National Life acquired Great Southern, another Houston insurance company, in a deal designed to make themselves too big to swallow. It didn’t work. Nashville business historian Bill Carey wrote that “by 1979, NLT was under siege” with suitors that included American General, Charter Oil, and the Seagram Company. That’s when NLT Chairman Rusty Wagner declared at a board meeting that unless NLT made a bold move to bolster the company’s stock price (“hit a home run” is how Wendell remembers him saying it) they’d likely be acquired. So Wendell put the cable network back on the table, and the board gave it the green light—at least a $60 million gambit in an emerging medium that would take at least five years to return profits, if it ever did.
The new direction wouldn’t come without sacrifice. In the fall of 1981, WSM-TV was sold to Gillett Broadcasting of Wausau, Wisconsin. The first sale of a WSM media property in history, shocking because it was so remote to the corporation’s culture, was a calculated move to raise funds—about $40 million as it turned out—toward the $60 million launch of The Nashville Network (TNN). Most employees who didn’t stay with Channel 4 (now WSMV) moved over to the TNN side, notably Elmer Alley, whose job was to build the new network’s programs, with David Hall running the show as general manager. The would-be network set up in a suite of trailers behind the Grand Ole Opry House. WSM radio, an ever smaller piece of a growing media company, moved to a new home near the Opryland Hotel, a one-story colonial that looked a bit like the old Brentwood transmitter house, whose elegant 1932 tower was still very much in use.
Bold though it may have been, The Nashville Network wasn’t enough to mollify all of the company’s old family shareholders. “National Life was a pretty paternalistic company,” said Ridley Wills. “And some members of the third generation, my generation, who didn’t work at National Life, wanted to maximize their profits and thought it ought to be putting out more dividends. That often happens to third generations; they want their money. None of us who were up there wanted to sell it.” According to Wills, his family and the Craigs fought to hold on while members of the Fort and Tyne families paved the way for corporate suitors. In the spring of 1982 American General formally bid for National Life. National Life made a counteroffer, which the larger company fought in court.
Margaret Ann Robinson, Edwin Craig’s daughter, remembers a time of “grieving and fighting” over a company that had become far more than a livelihood for her siblings. It was a literal extension of the family, run by uncles, cousins, and in-laws—the very focal point of their social and ethical universe. It was hard enough to watch the old Home Office at Seventh and Union—literally in the shadow of the new NLT tower—crumble under the wrecking ball in 1981. When National Life finally lost its fight to remain independent in July 1982, it was like losing a patriarch. “I did not know who I was or what I was without the National Life behind me,” Robinson said in 2004. “It’s still very tender.” The Craigs’ Belle Meade relatives kept mum about the whole difficult affair, in stoic southern fashion. “I didn’t say anything, because it was kind of like somebody had died,” said Donia Craig Dickerson, Francis Craig’s daughter. “I remember being purposely quiet about it. I wasn’t going to discuss it . . . I just thought it was the end of a beautiful era, the end of a beautiful story.”
The story was far from over for hundreds of TNN, WSM, and Opry employees who were still working in a fog of suspense. What would become of them in the hands of an out-of-state insurance giant? It became clear to Wendell almost immediately that all of the former National Life’s entertainment properties would be sold yet again, in whole or as parts. So amid the throes of getting TNN up and running, a new round of corporate courtship began. “We’re running absolutely full speed—hiring people every day, turning cameras on, doing deals with Westinghouse for distribution,” said Carl Kornmeyer, then a National Life financial analyst. “We are going literally twenty-hour days, seven days a week. And then the tire kickers start. People are coming in deciding whether they want to buy this stuff. They want to see everything.” On the list of leading suitors: Anheuser-Busch of St. Louis, Marriott, U.S. Tobacco, and the New York investors Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts. In the mix as well was a sentimental favorite, a consortium of investors that included Neil Craig (ready to commit the family fortune), Ridley Wills II, and a prominent local businessman named Bronson Ingram. When the bidding got too rich, the old National Life families had to drop out, while Ingram remained interested as a long-shot bidder. What happened next could hardly have been stranger. Neil Craig’s home phone rang. It was Minnie Pearl, with a way out of the whole mess.
Minnie Pearl, now nearing seventy years old, wore many more hats than her famous straw sun blocker with the $1.98 price tag. She was a devoted wife to Henry Cannon, a pilot and owner of a charter air company that delivered Opry stars all over the United States; a dedicated board member for numerous Nashville charities and civic organizations; an international persona; and a down-to-earth Nashville neighbor. Margaret Ann Robinson was one of many who thought of her as Sarah Cannon and who regarded her as the essential ambassador between cultural Nashville and country music Nashville. “She was always invited to be on the list and to be on the board of everything that came along,” Robinson said. “She was constantly trying to get the artists—the country music people like herself—and the city of Nashville together. And she died trying. She never quit trying. If you wanted to reach fund-raising for the Symphony, you got Sarah to come to your ball. And Sarah would get up three tables and pay for everybody that you can think of.” Eddie Jones, the Banner TV columnist who didn’t have a TV, freely admits he used Miss Minnie “unmercifully” when he became chief of the chamber of commerce between 1967 and 1987. “If we had an industrial development prospect or a site relocation thing and had some reason to believe the decision-makers had a country music interest, we’d bring Minnie into dinner, and she’d regale them. She’d say, ‘Hey, you fellas need to come on down here. We do this all the time.’ She was a great salesperson.”
She lived in a large house next door to the Governor’s Mansion in the Forest Hills neighborhood, and she was a familiar sight on Belle Meade Country Club courts in her crisp tennis whites. Pianist Beegie Adair remembered being one of hundreds if not thousands of Nashvillians in and out of the music business who exchanged sincere hellos and visited with her in the grocery store. Pearl had even survived a public scandal in the late 1960s—an extraordinary comedy of errors involving the downfall of an eccentric would-be governor and a fried chicken franchise with her name on it. But Minnie endured and deepened into a southern player for the ages. She and Roy Acuff, the power-broker of the Opry as long as he was alive, became close friends and allies. When Bill Weaver needed to settle something down at the Orpy, he’d call Roy and Minnie to come have lunch in his office and talk it over. They’d work quiet solutions and pave the way for new ideas in the always-guarded Opry cast. “I don’t know how Bill would have managed WSM with all else he was trying to manage if he hadn’t had Roy and Minnie,” said Weaver’s widow, Elizabeth Proctor. And “if you couldn’t go through the Craig/Weaver/Robinson power structure and you wanted to get something done,” Eddie Jones said, “the smart thing to do was to take Minnie to coffee and say, how can we make this work? She had great credibility with her peers. If she came and said something was a good idea, we’ve got to get behind this, you had it whooped.”
For thirty or more years, as the Opry’s signature comedienne, Minnie Pearl became a favorite guest on the Tonight Show, The Carol Burnett Show, and The Jonathan Winters Show. The producer of the latter, Sam Lovullo, tapped her to join a new country comedy and music show called Hee Haw in 1969. Hillbilly to its core, Hee Haw became the most popular country television show of all time, a hit in syndication all through the 1970s and 1980s. With Minnie as one anchoring cast member, the show revived a number of careers and introduced new ones. Grandpa Jones, a veteran singer, banjo player, and songwriter, was a throwback to Uncle Dave Macon. Buck Owens and Roy Clark, a dazzling singer and picker respectively, anchored the show musically, while the buxom “Hee Haw Honeys” burst out of their Lil’ Abner getups.
The show’s owner, Oklahoma City publishing and media executive Ed Gaylord, sincerely loved country music. A much older fellow, he and wife Thelma used to come to Nashville to hang out on the set when the show was being taped in thirteen-week runs at the Opry House. The Gaylords knew Minnie Pearl well, and she and Lovullo helped introduce Ed Gaylord to Bud Wendell. The two men struck up an easy, trusting relationship. Thus, when Gaylord’s self-named company bought Opryland, the hotel, and all of the related radio and cable properties in 1983, the locus of corporate control may have left Nashville, but to everyone’s relief, the locus of decision making did not.
“Ed Gaylord invested in Bud Wendell,” explained Kornmeyer. “He didn’t spend any time telling Bud Wendell, ‘here’s what you ought to do.’ He bought into Bud Wendell as much as he bought into Opryland USA, Inc.” His only mandate: “Keep doing what you’re doing.” That included TNN, which went on the air just three months before the sale of Opryland was finalized. It also included a pet project of Wendell’s that had been churning for some time—a paddle wheel showboat that would offer tourists and conventioneers one more experience during their lengthening stays, as well as a floating homage to the Nashville of one hundred years before.
There had been, after all, a happy ending, a white knight who was happy to let the company continue along as it had been. Veterans of the Opry and WSM say they felt no real shifts, with Wendell at the helm before, during, and after the transition. “Of all the people that tried to buy Opryland—if it couldn’t be us, Ed Gaylord was our first choice,” said Margaret Ann Robinson. “Ed Gaylord understood country music and the country musician. And we knew as long as he was the buyer, for his lifetime, it would all be all right.”
The Nashville Network went live at 8:00 p.m. Tennessee time on March 7, 1983, with Ralph Emery hosting a “coast to coast party.” It began with an hour-long musical salute from the Opry House with Roy Acuff balancing a fiddle and bow on his chin (a trademark move) and Patti Page in a sequined gown. Tammy Wynette appeared by satellite from Chicago, Bill Monroe and Emmylou Harris from the set of Austin City Limits, and Tanya Tucker and Hoyt Axton from the Palomino Club in Los Angeles. Opry star Bill Anderson said optimistically, “Years from now, people will remember March 7, 1983, just like they do the day the Grand Ole Opry went on. A hundred years from now they’ll be talking about us.”
Emery anchored the network with a Johnny Carson–style talk show that focused on country artists without being limited to them. Over the years, he interviewed Lily Tomlin, Jay Leno, Jimmy Stewart, Robert Duvall, President George H. W. Bush, Barbara Eden, Wayne Newton, and Tommy Lasorda, among many others. His country-star guests included the ascendant and the transcendent: Reba McEntire, Merle Haggard, George Strait, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Ronnie Milsap, Dolly Parton, and on and on. In 1986 Cable Guide magazine named Emery the most popular personality on cable television. He is widely seen as instrumental in launching the careers of Randy Travis and Lorrie Morgan, and he gave Oklahoman Garth Brooks some of his earliest national face time. The show wasn’t without controversy on Music Row. Some executives thought TNN overexposed country stars, robbing them of their mystique. And often the record labels counseled their artists to stay away from Emery’s lengthy, unpredictable, and sometimes aggressive interviews. Media coaches in town actually role-played Emery in exercises designed to prepare artists for what they regarded as the toughest interview they’d ever have.
With eighteen hours initially and eventually twenty-four hours to fill, just about every kind of Nashville music and entertainment style and outlet was put on TNN in its early days. Beegie Adair got to play jazz from the Maxwell House Hotel with saxophonist Dennis Solee. Johnny Rodriguez played his Tex-Mex country from Nashville’s Cannery. The call went out for “hot country dancers” trained in “all facets of dance, including jazz, ballet, adagio and clogging” for a show called Dancin’ U.S.A. Teddy Bart, by then a news anchorman on Channel 2, was tapped for a midday, thirty-minute interview show with musicians. The Riders in the Sky, a Nashville-born cowboy revival band with Grammy Awards in its future, were hired to host Tumbleweed Theater, a Western movie showcase. And some familiar country artists stepped into some odd new roles, no more so than singer/songwriter Bill Anderson hosting a game show about country music trivia. A broadcast of Willie Nelson’s all-day Farm Aid concert from Champaign, Illinois, in the fall of 1985 put TNN on the map nationally.
In its early years, TNN was by turns quaint, brilliant, slick, brassy, and cheesy, but by the late 1980s, the network had helped make Opryland USA (now the blanket corporate name for Gaylord’s country music empire) Tennessee’s largest private employer with 3,227 permanent employees and $350 million in gross revenue annually. Opryland drew 65,000 people on most Saturdays and more than two million visitors a year. The hotel kept its 1,891 rooms mostly full.
By 1987 Hall could call TNN “the hottest thing in cable television.” It would be the first profitable year for the network, the first of many. Most of its shows were either produced in-house or by TNN crew working with freelance producers like Jim Owens. By the end of the 1980s it was the seventh-largest cable network in the United States and the most watched, curiously, in Canada. TNN reached forty-nine million households and it featured the Opry for thirty minutes weekly, to strong ratings. It had earned its way onto cable TV in Manhattan, bolstering the image of country on Madison Avenue. The network’s diverse live music lineup included concert specials by Johnny Cash, George Jones, Bill Monroe, Don Williams, and many others.
In 1991 Gaylord acquired Country Music Television (CMT), a fledgling video channel in the model of MTV. CMT and TNN were managed separately, under David Hall’s direction. At the same time, country music accelerated out of a mid-1980s lull, shattering all prior records for sales and radio success. With a neotraditional pendulum swing usually attributed to Ricky Skaggs and Randy Travis, the vaunted “Class of ’89” graduated superstars and class acts like Clint Black, Brooks & Dunn, Dwight Yoakam, and Alan Jackson, a one-time employee of the TNN mailroom. In 1991 the career of Garth Brooks surged toward megastardom, moving the bar for what constituted major label success in the country music format up several feet, for better or worse.
Gaylord’s country-TV networks pushed and benefited from that growth. Hall is clear which came first in his mind. “Country music took off in the nineties because we controlled both TNN and CMT,” he said. “We were the driving force in country music. Where else does a brand like country have two networks pounding out twenty-four-hours a day, seven days a week, what the music is about. We drove that acceleration because we used TNN and the live shows to build the personality, and we used CMT to sell the music.”
Never had so many Nashville musicians worked so steadily. The offices of the cable networks, the production company, the park, and the hotel were all within walking distance of one another in a growing complex of theaters. Roy Acuff moved into a house adjacent to this new Music City microcosm, turning the Opryland complex into his backyard. One longtime employee likened the operation at its height to the back lot of Twentieth Century Fox, with its constant flow of musicians, technicians, and stars. Usually remembered as the apex of tourism in Nashville, 1990s Opryland also had an incalculable effect on the musicians who made up the real fabric of Music City.
Then in 1994 Wendell spearheaded a project that crystallized WSM’s legacy in modern Nashville, while bolstering the city itself. The Ryman Auditorium, notwithstanding a badly needed cosmetic upgrade in 1989, had largely languished for twenty years, home to tours and a handful of movie shoots and special concerts that couldn’t accommodate balcony guests for safety reasons. At last, Gaylord invested $9 million to renovate the venue top to bottom. The pews were scraped of gum and restored. A new foyer reoriented the box office side from Fifth Avenue to Fourth Avenue and made space for the building’s first ever HVAC system. A proscenium wall was built for the first time, with multiple floors back stage making room for up-to-date dressing rooms and all-new broadcast technology. Museum cases around the back of the hall showcased the pre- and post-Opry history of the 110-year-old building.
And that was far from all. Gaylord launched another thousand-room expansion of Opryland Hotel. Workers were so scarce, Gaylord recruited hotel workers from Puerto Rico and bought a 150-room motel on Murfreesboro Road to house them. Gaylord built new corporate headquarters on Briley Parkway and introduced a new Nashville On Stage live music series. It opened the Wildhorse Saloon, a new country dance club, on Second Avenue, and promoted it with a daily show on TNN. Its investments that year totaled $200 million. “There’s no indication that the company has hit a ceiling on growth,” wrote Mary Hance in the Banner. Or on imagination. The next summer, the U.S. kayaking championships were held on the fabricated Class III rapids of Opryland’s Grizzly River Rampage as part of a run-up to the Atlanta Olympics of 1996.
Just about anything seemed possible. Gaylord Entertainment had taken the WSM legacy of investing in entertainment and built it to international stature, using the newest forms of mass media. But this magic kingdom, so long in the making, so fruitful for its home city, was in a more precarious position than any of its visitors or its thousands of employees could have imagined. By the early 2000s Opryland USA and TNN would not exist. Gaylord, under new leadership, would change direction and make major decisions that would mystify investors and the local community alike. And in the turbulence, WSM, the country music station of the century and the accidental architect of Music City, would be taken to the brink of extinction.