Roy Acuff Grand Ole Opry
Did Roy perform at the Grand Ole Opry?
Did Roy Acuff perform at the Grand Ole Opry?
In 1938, the Crazy Tennesseans moved to Nashville to audition for the Grand Ole Opry. Although their first audition went poorly, the band's second audition impressed Opry founder George D. Hay and producer Harry Stone, and they offered the group a contract later that year. On Hay and Stone's suggestion, Acuff changed the group's name to the Smoky Mountain Boys, referring to the mountains near where he and his bandmates grew up. Shortly after the band joined the Opry, Clell Summey left the group and was replaced by the dobro player Beecher (Pete) Kirby--best known by his stage name Bashful Brother Oswald--whom Acuff had met in a Knoxville bakery earlier that year. Acuff's powerful lead vocals and Kirby's dobro playing and high-pitched backing vocals gave the band its distinctive sound. By 1939, Jess Easterday had switched to bass to replace Red Jones, and Acuff had added the guitarist Lonnie "Pap" Wilson and the banjoist Rachel Veach to fill out the band's lineup. Within a year, Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys rivaled the long-time Opry banjoist Uncle Dave Macon as the troupe's most popular act. In spring 1940, Acuff and his band traveled to Hollywood, where they appeared with Hay and Macon in the motion picture Grand Ole Opry. Acuff appeared in several subsequent B-movies, including O, My Darling Clementine (1943), in which he played a singing sheriff; Night Train to Memphis (1946), the title of which comes from a song Acuff recorded in 1940; and Home in San Antone (1949), in which he starred with Lloyd Corrigan and William Frawley. Acuff and his band also joined Macon and other Opry acts at various tent shows held throughout the Southeast in the early 1940s. The crowds at these shows were so large that roads leading into the venues were jammed with traffic for miles. Starting in 1939, Acuff hosted the Opry's Prince Albert segment. He left the show in 1946 after a dispute with management. CANNOTANSWER
the band's second audition impressed Opry founder George D. Hay and producer Harry Stone, and they offered the group a contract later that year.
Roy Claxton Acuff (September 15, 1903 – November 23, 1992) was an American country music singer, fiddler, and promoter. Known as the "King of Country Music", Acuff is often credited with moving the genre from its early string band and "hoedown" format to the singer-based format that helped make it internationally successful. In 1952, Hank Williams told Ralph Gleason, "He's the biggest singer this music ever knew. You booked him and you didn't worry about crowds. For drawing power in the South, it was Roy Acuff, then God."

Acuff began his music career in the 1930s and gained regional fame as the singer and fiddler for his group, the Smoky Mountain Boys. He joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1938, and although his popularity as a musician waned in the late 1940s, he remained one of the Opry's key figures and promoters for nearly four decades. In 1942, Acuff and Fred Rose founded Acuff-Rose Music, the first major Nashville-based country music publishing company, which signed such artists as Hank Williams, Roy Orbison, and the Everly Brothers. In 1962, Acuff became the first living inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Early life

Acuff was born on September 15, 1903 in Maynardville, Tennessee, to Ida (née Carr) and Simon E. Neill Acuff, the third of their five children.  Roy Acuff is of Scottish ancestry, and his ancestors came to North America during the colonial era, settling in the mountains of Virginia and the Carolinas. The Acuffs were a fairly prominent family in Union County. Roy's paternal grandfather, Coram Acuff, had been a Tennessee state senator, and his maternal grandfather was a local physician. Roy's father was an accomplished fiddler and a Baptist preacher, his mother was proficient on the piano, and during Roy's early years the Acuff house was a popular place for local gatherings. At such gatherings, Roy would often amuse people by balancing farm tools on his chin. He also learned to play the harmonica and jaw harp at an early age.

In 1919, the Acuff family relocated to Fountain City (now a suburb of Knoxville), a few miles south of Maynardville. Roy attended Central High School, where he sang in the school chapel's choir and performed in "every play they had." His primary passion, however, was athletics. He was a three-sport standout at Central and, after graduating in 1925, was offered a scholarship to Carson-Newman University but turned it down. He played with several small baseball clubs around Knoxville, worked at odd jobs, and occasionally boxed.

In 1929, Acuff tried out for the Knoxville Smokies, a minor-league baseball team then affiliated with the New York Giants (now the San Francisco Giants). A series of collapses in spring training following a sunstroke, however, ended his baseball career. The effects left him ill for several years, and he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1930. "I couldn't stand any sunshine at all," he later recalled. While recovering, Acuff began to hone his fiddle skills, often playing on the family's front porch after the sun went down. His father gave him several records of regionally renowned fiddlers, such as Fiddlin' John Carson and Gid Tanner, which were important influences on his early style.

Career

Early music career
In 1932, Dr. Hauer's medicine show, which toured the southern Appalachian region, hired Acuff as one of its entertainers. Acuff began his career as a blackface performer. The purpose of the entertainers was to draw a large crowd to whom Hauer could sell patent medicines (of suspect quality) for various ailments. While on the medicine show circuit, Acuff met the legendary Appalachian banjoist Clarence Ashley, from whom he learned "The House of the Rising Sun" and "Greenback Dollar", both of which Acuff later recorded. As the medicine show lacked microphones, Acuff learned to sing loud enough to be heard above the din, a skill that would later help him stand out on early radio broadcasts.

In 1934, Acuff left the medicine show circuit and began playing at local shows with various musicians in the Knoxville area, where he had become a celebrity and fixture in local newspaper columns. That year, the guitarist Jess Easterday and the Hawaiian guitarist Clell Summey joined Acuff to form the Tennessee Crackerjacks, which performed regularly on the Knoxville radio stations WROL and WNOX (the band moved back and forth between stations as Acuff bickered with their managers about compensation). Within a year, the group had added the bassist Red Jones and changed its name to the Crazy Tennesseans after being introduced as such by a WROL announcer named Alan Stout. Fans often remarked to Acuff how "clear" his voice was coming through over the radio, important in an era when singers were often drowned out by string band cacophony. The popularity of Acuff's rendering of the song "The Great Speckled Bird" helped the group land a contract with ARC, for which they recorded several dozen tracks (including the band's best-known track, "Wabash Cannonball") in 1936. Needing to complete a 20-song commitment, the band recorded two ribald tunes—including "When Lulu's Gone"—but released them under a pseudonym, the Bang Boys. The group split from ARC in 1937 over a separate contract dispute.

Grand Ole Opry
In 1938, the Crazy Tennesseans moved to Nashville to audition for the Grand Ole Opry. Although their first audition went poorly, the band's second audition impressed Opry founder George D. Hay and producer Harry Stone, and they offered the group a contract later that year. On Hay and Stone's suggestion, Acuff changed the group's name to the Smoky Mountain Boys, referring to the mountains near where he and his bandmates grew up. Shortly after the band joined the Opry, Clell Summey left the group and was replaced by the dobro player Beecher (Pete) Kirby—best known by his stage name Bashful Brother Oswald—whom Acuff had met in a Knoxville bakery earlier that year. Acuff's powerful lead vocals and Kirby's dobro playing and high-pitched backing vocals gave the band its distinctive sound. By 1939, Jess Easterday had switched to bass to replace Red Jones, and Acuff had added the guitarist Lonnie "Pap" Wilson and the banjoist Rachel Veach to fill out the band's lineup. Within a year, Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys rivaled the long-time Opry banjoist Uncle Dave Macon as the troupe's most popular act.
In the same period, he was initiated to the Masonic Lodge of East Nashville No. 560.

In spring 1940, Acuff and his band traveled to Hollywood, where they appeared with Hay and Macon in the motion picture Grand Ole Opry. Acuff appeared in several subsequent B-movies, including O, My Darling Clementine (1943), in which he played a singing sheriff; Night Train to Memphis (1946), the title of which comes from a song Acuff recorded in 1940; and Home in San Antone (1949), in which he starred with Lloyd Corrigan and William Frawley.

Acuff and his band also joined Macon and other Opry acts at various tent shows held throughout the Southeast in the early 1940s. The crowds at these shows were so large that roads leading into the venues were jammed with traffic for miles. Starting in 1939, Acuff hosted the Opry's Prince Albert segment. He left the show in 1946 after a dispute with management.

Acuff-Rose
In 1942, Acuff and songwriter Fred Rose (1897–1954) formed Acuff-Rose Music. Acuff originally sought the company to publish his own music, but soon realized there was a high demand from other country artists, many of whom had been exploited by larger publishing firms. Due in large part to Rose's ASCAP connections and gifted ability as a talent scout, Acuff-Rose quickly became the most important publishing company in country music. In 1946, the company signed Hank Williams, and in 1950 published their first major hit, Patti Page's rendition of "Tennessee Waltz".

Political ambitions
In 1943, Acuff was initiated into the East Nashville Freemasonic Lodge in Tennessee, of which he would remain a lifelong member. Later that same year, Acuff invited Tennessee Governor Prentice Cooper to be the guest of honor at a gala held to mark the nationwide premiere of the Opry's Prince Albert show. Cooper rejected the offer, however, and lambasted Acuff and his "disgraceful" music for making Tennessee the "hillbilly capital of the United States." A Nashville journalist reported the governor's comments to Acuff and suggested Acuff run for governor himself. While Acuff initially did not take the suggestion seriously, he did accept the Republican Party nomination for governor in 1948.

Acuff's nomination caused great concern for E. H. Crump, the head of a Memphis Democratic Party political machine that had dominated Tennessee state politics for nearly a quarter-century. Crump was not worried so much about losing the governor's office—in spite of Acuff's name recognition—but did worry that Acuff would draw large crowds to Republican rallies and bolster other statewide candidates. While Acuff did relatively well and helped reinvigorate Tennessee's Republicans, his opponent, Gordon Browning, still won with 67 percent of the vote.

Later career
After leaving the Opry, Acuff spent several years touring the Western United States, although demand for his appearances dwindled with the lack of national exposure and the rise of musicians such as Ernest Tubb and Eddy Arnold, who were more popular with younger audiences. He eventually returned to the Opry, although by the 1960s, his record sales had dropped off considerably. After nearly losing his life in an automobile accident outside of Sparta, Tennessee, in 1965, Acuff pondered retiring, making only token appearances on the Opry stage and similar shows, and occasionally performing duos with long-time bandmate Bashful Brother Oswald.

In 1972, Acuff's career received a brief resurgence in the folk revival movement after he appeared on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken. The appearance paved the way for one of the defining moments of Acuff's career, which came on the night of March 16, 1974, when the Opry officially moved from the Ryman Auditorium to the Grand Ole Opry House at Opryland. The first show at the new venue opened with a huge projection of a late-1930s image of Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys onto a large screen above the stage. A recording from one of the band's 1939 appearances was played over the sound system, with the iconic voice of George Hay introducing the band, followed by the band's performance of "Wabash Cannonball". That same night, Acuff showed President Richard Nixon, an honored guest at the event, how to yo-yo, and convinced the president to play several songs on the piano.

In the early 1980s, after the death of his wife, Mildred, Acuff, then in his 80s, moved into a small house on the Opryland grounds and continued performing daily on stage. He arrived early most days at the Opry before the shows and performed odd jobs, such as stocking soda in backstage refrigerators. He made a cameo appearance in the music video for Moe Bandy and Joe Stampley's 1984 parody hit song "Where's The Dress?" In 1988, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 1991, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts, and given a lifetime achievement award by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the first Country music act to receive the esteemed honor.

Death

Roy Acuff died at the Baptist Hospital in Nashville on November 23, 1992 of congestive heart failure at the age of 89. He is buried in the Hillcrest section (grave 6, lot 9) of Spring Hill Cemetery on Gallatin Road in Nashville.

Repertoire and legacy

Many of Acuff's songs show a strong religious influence, most notably "Great Speckled Bird", "The Prodigal Son" and "Lord, Build Me a Cabin". Such songs were typically set to a traditional Anglo-Celtic melody, which is most apparent on "Great Speckled Bird" and the 1940 recording "The Precious Jewel". Acuff performed popular songs of the day, including Pee Wee King's "Tennessee Waltz" and Dorsey Dixon's "I Didn't Hear Nobody Pray", the latter of which he appropriated and renamed "Wreck on the Highway". He also recorded a version of the Cajun fiddler Harry Choates's "Jole Blon". Traditional recordings included "Greenback Dollar", which he probably learned from Clarence Ashley while on the medicine show circuit, and "Lonesome Old River Blues", which he recorded with the Smoky Mountain Boys in the 1940s. Acuff and the Crazy Tennesseans recorded "Wabash Cannonball"—another traditional song—in 1936, although Acuff did not provide the vocals on this early recording. The better-known version of the song with Acuff providing the vocals was recorded in 1947.

In 1979, Opryland opened the Roy Acuff Theatre, which was dedicated in Acuff's honor (it was demolished in 2011 after suffering extensive damage in the 2010 Tennessee floods). Dunbar Cave State Natural Area was established in 1973 from a recreational area the state had purchased from Mrs. McKay King. The cave was owned by Acuff from 1948 to 1963. Two museums have been named in Acuff's honor—the Roy Acuff Museum at Opryland (now closed) and the Roy Acuff Union Museum and Library in his hometown of Maynardville. Acuff has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame located at 1541 Vine Street. He is pictured with other country singers at the new Smoky Mountain Opera in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.

Discography

Albums

Singles

Guest singles

References

External links
 Acuff-Ecoff Family Archives
 Biography at Who2
 Roy Acuff in the Country Music Hall of Fame
 
 

1903 births
1992 deaths
People from Maynardville, Tennessee
American country singer-songwriters
American Freemasons
American male singer-songwriters
American music industry executives
American people of English descent
Blackface minstrel performers
Country Music Hall of Fame inductees
Country musicians from Tennessee
Grand Ole Opry members
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners
Hickory Records artists
Kennedy Center honorees
United States National Medal of Arts recipients
Vocalion Records artists
Members of the Country Music Association
Music of East Tennessee
Musicians from Appalachia
Okeh Records artists
Columbia Records artists
Tennessee Republicans
Burials in Tennessee
20th-century American singers
20th-century American businesspeople
American country fiddlers
Singer-songwriters from Tennessee
20th-century American male singers
The Grand Ole Opry is a weekly country music concert show in Nashville, Tennessee, which began as a radio barn dance on November 28, 1925, by George D. Hay and has since become one of the genre's most enduring and revered stages. Each show consists of multiple guest artists as well as Opry members, who are selected by Opry management based on several factors including critical and commercial success, respect for the history of country music and commitment to appearing on the program. Publicly, once a new member is chosen, an existing member will ask the new member to join the Opry live on-air during the broadcast, usually when the new member is performing as a guest. Being invited to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry is considered one of country music's crowning achievements.

Opry members have permission to perform at any Opry show they wish, with each show typically consisting of between five and seven members. Each show is split into four "segments", each hosted by a different Opry member who entertains the crowd, performs and introduces other members and guest artists. As such, the Opry has featured a large, rotating ensemble of members ranging from all-time greats and neotraditionalists to contemporary stars. As the Opry is a running series, membership requires that the performer appear regularly (at least 12 shows per year, according to rules in place for most of the 21st century, down from 26 in the 1960s) on the program to remain a member of the show, and if a performer ceases performing regularly at the Opry or runs afoul of management, they can be stripped of their membership; if the exiled performer reconciles and renews their commitment to the show, they can be reinstated. Membership expires when the performer dies; if a single member of a duo or group retires or dies, the surviving members may continue to maintain Opry membership on the group's behalf.  The Opry, in general, allows performers who retire, or are no longer physically able to perform on a regular basis to stay as members. The Grand Ole Opry House maintains a wall of fame backstage that contains a name plate for every person who has ever been a member of the Grand Ole Opry.

There are currently 67 Grand Ole Opry members, seven of whom have retired from performing. Over the course of the program's history, over 200 acts have held Opry membership since the show's inception. As of 2021, Jesse McReynolds of Jim & Jesse is the oldest living Opry member and Lauren Alaina is the youngest.

Acts with a † are deceased.

1920s

1930s

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

2020s

References

Grand Ole Opry The Grand Ole Opry is a weekly American country music stage concert in Nashville, Tennessee, founded on November 28, 1925, by George D. Hay as a one-hour radio "barn dance" on WSM. Currently owned and operated by Opry Entertainment (a division of Ryman Hospitality Properties, Inc.), it is the longest-running radio broadcast in US history. Dedicated to honoring country music and its history, the Opry showcases a mix of famous singers and contemporary chart-toppers performing country, bluegrass, Americana, folk, and gospel music as well as comedic performances and skits. It attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world and millions of radio and internet listeners.

In the 1930s, the show began hiring professionals and expanded to four hours. Broadcasting by then at 50,000 watts, WSM made the program a Saturday night musical tradition in nearly 30 states. In 1939, it debuted nationally on NBC Radio. The Opry moved to a permanent home, the Ryman Auditorium, in 1943. As it developed in importance, so did the city of Nashville, which became America's "country music capital." The Grand Ole Opry holds such significance in Nashville that it is included as a "home of" mention on the welcome signs seen by motorists at the Metro Nashville/Davidson County line.

Membership in the Opry remains one of country music's crowning achievements. Since 1974, the show has been broadcast from the Grand Ole Opry House east of downtown Nashville, with an annual three-month winter foray back to the Ryman from 1999–2020. In addition to the radio programs, performances have been sporadically televised over the years. The Opry'''s television partner is currently Circle, a digital multicast network which is partially-owned by Opry Entertainment, and broadcasts portions of the live Saturday night performance on an irregular basis.

History

Beginnings

The Grand Ole Opry started as the WSM Barn Dance in the new fifth-floor radio studio of the National Life & Accident Insurance Company in downtown Nashville on November 28, 1925. On October 17, 1925, management began a program featuring "Dr. Humphrey Bate and his string quartet of old-time musicians." On November 2, WSM hired long-time announcer and program director George D. Hay, an enterprising pioneer from the National Barn Dance program at WLS in Chicago, who was also named the most popular radio announcer in America as a result of his radio work with both WLS and WMC in Memphis, Tennessee. Hay launched the WSM Barn Dance with 77-year-old fiddler Uncle Jimmy Thompson on November 28, 1925, and that date is celebrated as the birth date of the Grand Ole Opry.

Some of the bands regularly on the show during its early days included Bill Monroe, the Possum Hunters (with Humphrey Bate), the Fruit Jar Drinkers with Uncle Dave Macon, the Crook Brothers, the Binkley Brothers' Dixie Clodhoppers, Sid Harkreader, DeFord Bailey, Fiddlin' Arthur Smith, and the Gully Jumpers.

Judge Hay liked the Fruit Jar Drinkers and asked them to appear last on each show because he wanted to always close each segment with "red hot fiddle playing." They were the second band accepted on Barn Dance, with the Crook Brothers being the first. When the Opry began having square dancers on the show, the Fruit Jar Drinkers always played for them. In 1926, Uncle Dave Macon, a Tennessee banjo player who had recorded several songs and toured on the vaudeville circuit became its first real star.

Name
The phrase "Grand Ole Opry" was first uttered on radio on December 10, 1927. At the time, the NBC Red Network's Music Appreciation Hour, a program with classical music and selections from grand opera, was followed by Hays' Barn Dance. That evening, as he was introducing the show and DeFord Bailey, his first guest, George Hay said the following words:
For the past hour, we have been listening to music largely from Grand Opera, but from now on, we will present 'The Grand Ole Opry'.

Larger venues
As audiences for the live show increased, National Life & Accident Insurance's radio venue became too small to accommodate the hordes of fans. They built a larger studio, but it was still not large enough. After several months with no audiences, National Life decided to allow the show to move outside its home offices. In October 1934, the Opry moved into then-suburban Hillsboro Theatre (now the Belcourt) before moving to the Dixie Tabernacle in East Nashville on June 13, 1936. The Opry then moved to the War Memorial Auditorium, a downtown venue adjacent to the State Capitol, and a 25-cent admission fee was charged to try to curb the large crowds, but to no avail. In June 1943, the Opry moved to Ryman Auditorium.

One hour of the Opry was nationally broadcast by the NBC Red Network from 1939 to 1956, and for much of its run, it aired one hour after the program that had inspired it, National Barn Dance. The NBC segment, originally known by the name of its sponsor, The Prince Albert Show, was first hosted by Acuff, who was succeeded by Red Foley from 1946 to 1954. From October 15, 1955 to September 1956, ABC-TV aired a live, hour-long television version once a month on Saturday nights (sponsored by Ralston-Purina) that pre-empted one hour of the then-90-minute Ozark Jubilee. From 1955 to 1957, Al Gannaway owned and produced both The Country Show and Stars of the Grand Ole Opry, both filmed programs syndicated by Flamingo Films. Gannaway's Stars of the Grand Ole Opry was the first television show shot in color.

On October 2, 1954, a teenage Elvis Presley had his only Opry performance. Although the audience reacted politely to his revolutionary brand of rockabilly music, Opry manager Jim Denny told Presley's producer Sam Phillips after the show that the singer's style did not suit the program.

1960s
In the 1960s, as the hippie counterculture movement spread, the Opry maintained a strait-laced, conservative image with "longhairs" not being featured on the show. The Byrds were a notable exception. Country rock pioneer Gram Parsons, who was a member of The Byrds at the time, was in Nashville to work on the band's country rock album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo. The band's record label, Columbia Records, had arranged for The Byrds to perform at the Ryman on March 15, 1968, a prospect that thrilled Parsons. However, when the band took the stage the audience's response was immediately hostile, resulting in derisive heckling, booing, and mocking calls of "tweet, tweet" and "cut your hair" The Byrds further outraged the Opry establishment by ignoring accepted protocol when they performed Parsons' song "Hickory Wind" instead of the Merle Haggard song "Life in Prison," as had been announced by Tompall Glaser. Two decades later, long after Parsons's death, members of The Byrds reconciled with the Opry and collaborated on the 1989 album Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Volume Two.

Another artist that ran afoul of the Oprys stringent standards was Jerry Lee Lewis, who made his first and only appearance on the show on January 20, 1973, after several years of success on the country charts. Lewis was given two conditions for his appearance – no rock and roll and no profanity – and he proceeded to disregard both, even referring to himself as a certain unairable maternal insult at one point. In a continuous 40-minute set, Lewis played a mixture of his rock and roll hits and covers of other singers' country songs. It has been said that he was bitter about how he was treated when he first arrived in Nashville in 1955, and he supposedly used his Opry appearance to exact revenge on the Nashville music industry.

Country legend Johnny Cash, who made his Opry debut on July 5, 1956 and met his future wife June Carter Cash on that day, was banned from the program in 1965 after, drunkenly, smashing the stage lights with the microphone stand. Cash commented on the incident years later: "I don't know how much they wanted me in the first place," he says, "but the night I broke all the stage lights with the microphone stand, they said they couldn't use me anymore. So I went out and used it as an excuse to really get wild and ended up in the hospital the third time I broke my nose. "  Cash was accepted back in 1968, after the success of his At Folsom Prison album and his recovery from addiction.

Grand Ole Opry House

Ryman Auditorium was home to the Opry until 1974. By the late 1960s, National Life & Accident desired a new, larger, more modern home for the long-running radio show. Already 51 years old at the time the Opry moved there, the Ryman was beginning to suffer from disrepair as the downtown neighborhood around it fell victim to increasing urban decay. Despite these shortcomings, the show's popularity continued to increase, and its weekly crowds were outgrowing the 3,000-seat venue. The Opry's operators wanted to build a new air-conditioned theater, with greater seating capacity, ample parking, and the ability to serve as a television production facility. The ideal location would be in a less urbanized part of town to provide visitors with a safer, more controlled, and more enjoyable experience.

National Life & Accident purchased farmland owned by a local sausage manufacturer (Rudy's Farm) in the Pennington Bend area of Nashville, nine miles east of downtown and adjacent to the newly constructed Briley Parkway. The new Opry venue was the centerpiece of a grand entertainment complex at that location, which later included Opryland USA Theme Park and Opryland Hotel. The theme park opened to the public on June 30, 1972, well ahead of the 4,000-seat Opry House, which debuted nearly two years later, on Saturday, March 16, 1974. The last show of the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium was held on March 15, 1974.

Opening night was attended by sitting U.S. President Richard Nixon, who played a few songs on the piano. To carry on the tradition of the show's run at the Ryman, a six-foot circle of oak was cut from the corner of the Ryman's stage and inlaid into center stage at the new venue. Artists on stage usually stood on the circle as they performed, and most modern performers still follow this tradition.

The theme park was closed and demolished following the 1997 season, but the Grand Ole Opry House remains in use. The immediate area around it was left intact, even throughout the construction of Opry Mills, which opened in May 2000. The outside is decorated with the commemorative plaques of country music Grammy winners, formerly of Opryland's StarWalk.

The Grand Ole Opry continues to be performed every Tuesday, Friday, Saturday, and occasionally Wednesday at the Grand Ole Opry House from February through October each year, and the site was added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 27, 2015.Todd Barnes, [Grand Ole Opry House added to National Register], The Tennessean, February 27, 2015.

The Grand Ole Opry House was also the home of the Country Music Association Awards from 1974 to 2004, and hosted three weeks of tapings for the long-running game show Wheel of Fortune in 2003. The venue has also been the site of the GMA Dove Awards on multiple occasions.

On December 21, 2018, the backstage band room was officially named the Jimmy Capps Music Room in honor of Capps's 60th anniversary on the Opry.

 Return to Ryman Auditorium 
Following the departure of the Opry, Ryman Auditorium sat mostly vacant and decaying for 20 years. An initial effort by National Life & Accident to tear down the Ryman and use its bricks to build a chapel at Opryland USA was met with resounding resistance from the public, including many influential musicians of the time. The plans were abandoned, and the building remained standing with an uncertain future. Despite the absence of performances, the building remained a tourist attraction throughout the remainder of the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1991 and 1992, Emmylou Harris performed a series of concerts there and released some of the recordings as an album entitled At the Ryman. The concert and album's high acclaim renewed interest in reviving Ryman Auditorium as an active venue. Beginning in September 1993, Gaylord Entertainment initiated a full renovation of the Ryman, restoring it to a world-class concert hall that reopened with a broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion on June 4, 1994.

On Sunday, October 18, 1998, the Opry held a benefit show at Ryman Auditorium, marking its return to the venue for the first time since its final show on March 15, 1974.

Beginning in November 1999, the Opry was held at Ryman Auditorium for three months, partly due to the ongoing construction of Opry Mills. The Opry returned to the Ryman for the three winter months every year until 2019-20, allowing the show to acknowledge its roots while also taking advantage of a smaller venue during an off-peak season for tourism. While still officially the Grand Ole Opry, the shows there are billed as Opry at the Ryman. From 2002 to 2014, a traveling version of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular took up residence at the Grand Ole Opry House each holiday season while the Opry was away. It was replaced by Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical from 2015 in 2017 and by Cirque Dreams Holidaze in 2018.

2010 flooding
In May 2010, the Opry House was flooded, along with much of Nashville, when the Cumberland River overflowed its banks. Repairs were made, and the Opry itself remained uninterrupted. Over the course of the summer of 2010, the broadcast temporarily originated from alternate venues in Nashville, with Ryman Auditorium hosting the majority of the shows. Other venues included TPAC War Memorial Auditorium, another former Opry home; TPAC's Andrew Jackson Hall; Nashville Municipal Auditorium; Allen Arena at Lipscomb University; and Two Rivers Baptist Church.

Much of the auditorium's main floor seating, the backstage areas, and the entire stage – including the inlaid circle of wood from Ryman's stage – was underwater during the flood. While the Grand Ole Opry House's stage was replaced, the Ryman circle was restored and again placed at center stage in the Grand Ole Opry House before shows resumed. The renovations following the flood also resulted in an updated and much-expanded backstage area, including the construction of more dressing rooms and a performer's lounge.

The Opry returned to the Grand Ole Opry House on September 28, 2010, in a special edition of the Opry entitled Country Comes Home that was televised live on Great American Country. The evening was filled with one-of-a-kind Opry moments. Martina McBride and Connie Smith sang Smith's signature hit "Once a Day" together, and other collaborations included Dierks Bentley and Del McCoury ("Roll On Buddy, Roll On"), Josh Turner and Lorrie Morgan ("Golden Ring"), and Montgomery Gentry and Charlie Daniels Band ("Devil Went Down To Georgia"), among others. The show closed with an all-star guitar jam featuring Brad Paisley, Keith Urban, Steve Wariner, Ricky Skaggs, and Marty Stuart.

COVID-19 pandemic response
The Opry closed its doors to spectators and trimmed its staff in March 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States but continued to air weekly episodes on radio and television, relying on advertising revenue to remain solvent. The Opry resumed allowing spectators on a limited basis in October, and resumed full operations in May 2021. Due to the restrictions, the show did not move to the Ryman Auditorium in November 2020 as was customary. The Winter Ryman residency did not resume in 2021-22, partly due to scheduling conflicts from Ryman concerts postponed during the pandemic closure.

The Opry livestreams were celebrated by viewers as something to look forward to during the pandemic, with the majority of viewers being under lockdown. According to Pollstar, Opry Live was the number one most-watched livestream series in 2020 across all genres and received more than fifty million viewers from over fifty countries throughout the year, with two individual episodes (Vince Gill/Reba McEntire and Brad Paisley/Carrie Underwood) placing at numbers nine and ten respectively in the top ten. President of Opry Entertainment Scott Bailey explained that "as the stewards of the Grand Ole Opry, it was never a question of if the Opry would play on, but how could it provide a safe and much-needed source of comfort during what has been an extraordinary year around the world. We are proud of this tremendous result and the numbers of viewers who have tuned in, not only for what it has meant for Circle, but also for what it says about the country music genre and country music fans. On behalf of all of us at the Grand Ole Opry and Opry Entertainment, I'd like to thank the artist community, industry and music lovers around the world for their continued support".

Broadcasts

The Grand Ole Opry is broadcast live on WSM-AM at 7 p.m. CT on Saturday nights, changed from a previous time start of 6:30. A similar program, Friday Night Opry, airs live on Friday nights. From February through December, Tuesday Night Opry is also aired live. Wednesday shows are typically presented in the summer months, while an "Opry Country Classics" program sporadically airs on Thursdays, devoted solely to older artists. Additional Christmas-themed shows, entitled Opry Country Christmas, began production during the 2021 holiday season.

The Opry provides a fourteen-piece house band for performers should they not have a band of their own.

The Opry can also be heard live on Willie's Roadhouse on channel 59 on Sirius XM Satellite Radio, and the program streams on WSM's website. ABC broadcast the Grand Ole Opry as a monthly series from 1955 to 1956, and PBS televised annual live performances from 1978 to 1981. In 1985, The Nashville Network, co-owned by Gaylord, began airing an edited half-hour version of the program as Grand Ole Opry Live. The show moved to Country Music Television, also owned by Gaylord, where it expanded to an hour, and then to the Great American Country (GAC) cable network, which no longer televised its Opry Live show after both networks channel drifted towards generic Southern lifestyle programming. Circle, a new over-the-air digital subchannel network operated by Gray Television and Ryman Hospitality Properties, resumed telecasting the Opry as its flagship program when it launched in 2020, and former WSM radio sister station WSMV-DT5 is the network's flagship station. RFD-TV carries reruns of Opry telecasts under the title Opry Encore.

Membership

Regular performers at the Grand Ole Opry can be inducted into the organization as a member. Opry management, when it decides to induct a new member, directs an existing member to publicly ask them to join, usually during a live episode; an induction ceremony happens several weeks later, where the inductee is presented with a trophy and gives an acceptance speech. As the Opry is a running series, membership in the show's cast must be maintained throughout an artist's career, through frequent performances, and expires when the performer dies. Duos and groups remain members until all members have died; following the death of a member, the others maintain Opry membership. More recent protocols have allowed performers who are incapacitated or retired to maintain Opry membership until they die, with three such members holding that status as of 2021: Barbara Mandrell, Jeanne Pruett, and Randy Travis (though Travis still makes limited appearances). The Opry maintains a wall of fame listing every member of the Opry in the show's history, including those that have died or lost/relinquished their membership. Receiving Opry membership is considered an honor that is similar in prestige to a hall of fame induction, with the caveat that a number of prominent country musicians never received it. The most recent induction took place on November 2, 2021, when Mandy Barnett became the 217th member of the Opry. With her induction, along with the death of Stonewall Jackson on December 4, there are 67 living, standing members.

Controversies
In April 1963, Opry management made a rule that members had to perform on at least 26 shows a year to keep their memberships active. WSM dropped the number of required performances to 20 in January 1964, and the minimum number was 12 in 2000. Although the minimum number of performances has been reduced over the years, artists offered membership are expected to show their dedication to the Opry with frequent attendance.

Another controversy raged for years over allowable instrumentation, especially the use of drums and electrically amplified instruments. Some purists were appalled at the prospect; traditionally a string bass provided the rhythm component in country music, and percussion instruments were seldom used. Electric amplification, new in the beginning days of the Opry, was regarded as the province of popular music and jazz in the 1940s. Although the Opry allowed electric guitars and steel guitars by World War II, the restrictions against drums and horns continued, causing a conflict when Bob Wills and Pee Wee King defied the show's ban on drums. Wills openly flouted the rule. King, who performed at the Ryman in 1945 after Franklin Delano Roosevelt's death, did not technically defy the ban.  He did not use his drums on the Opry, but this particular Saturday night, the Opry was cancelled due to FDR's death. He and his band were asked to perform their theater show (with their drummer) because a number of fans showed up assuming the Opry would go on.

Stonewall Jackson, an Opry member since 1956, sued the Opry management in 2007 alleging that manager Pete Fisher was trying to purge older members of the Opry from its membership and committing age discrimination. Jackson settled the lawsuit in 2008 and resumed appearing on the program until retiring in 2012.

Commercialization

The company has enforced its trademark on the name "Grand Ole Opry," with trademark registrations in the United States and in numerous countries around the world. It has taken court action to limit use of the word "Opry" – not directly trademarked – to members of the Opry and products associated with or licensed by it and to discourage use of the word in ways that would imply a connection to the Grand Ole Opry. In late 1968, for instance, WSM sued Opry Records, a record label that was independent of WSM, and the court decided that "the record is replete with newspaper and magazine articles and clippings which demonstrate conclusively that the term 'Opry,' standing alone as defendant has used it, is constantly used in country and western music circles in referring to plaintiff's 'Grand Ole Opry'." The court also stated "the defendant has appropriated, at its peril, the dominant or salient term in the plaintiff's mark, a term which identified the 'Grand Ole Opry' in the mind of the public many years before the inception of 'Opry Records' – the name adopted by defendant."

In another case, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board granted summary judgment that the term "Opry" is a generic term (and thus no more protected than the words "Grand" or "Ole"), but the Federal Circuit court reversed this decision. As recently as 2009, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board granted judgment against Texas Opry House, LLC, which had filed a trademark application for TEXAS OPRY HOUSE.

In 2004, the Grand Ole Opry sold naming rights to its first "presenting sponsor," Cracker Barrel. As of 2021, the Opry is sponsored by insurer Humana and retail chain Dollar General.

Honors
 Peabody Award, 1983
 National Radio Hall of Fame induction, 1992

See also

 Country Music Association
 Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
 Music & the Spoken Word - "The longest-running continuous network radio program in the world" (began July 15, 1929).

Notes

References
 Hay, George D. A Story of the Grand Ole Opry. 1945.
 Kingsbury, Paul (1998). "Grand Ole Opry". In The Encyclopedia of Country Music. Paul Kingsbury, Editor. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 208–9.
 Wolfe, Charles K. A Good-Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry. Nashville: Country Music Foundation Press, 1999. .

External links

 
 Grand Ole Opry on TV Internet Archive'' Complete show of April 28, 1956 in black & white 
 Library of Congress Local Legacies Project: Grand Ole Opry

 
Concerts in the United States
1920s American radio programs
1925 radio programme debuts
American country music radio programs
Country music television series
Culture of Nashville, Tennessee
Ryman Hospitality Properties
History of Tennessee
Landmarks in Tennessee
Peabody Award winners
Sirius XM Radio programs
Television series based on radio series
Tennessee culture
United States National Recording Registry recordings
Tourist attractions in Nashville, Tennessee
Organizations based in Nashville, Tennessee
1925 establishments in Tennessee
Theatres on the National Register of Historic Places in Tennessee
NBC radio programs
National Register of Historic Places in Nashville, Tennessee