NASHVILLE, United States — The survival of the Grand
Ole Opry was anything but guaranteed when Bill Anderson started performing in
it six decades ago. Rock ’n’ roll was luring away fans. Radio stations were
abandoning barn dance-style programs. There were nights, he said, when musicians
could look out from the Opry stage and see empty seats.
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But Saturday night, as the curtain went up and he started
singing “Wabash Cannonball,” the house was packed, his music beaming out live
on WSM, the Nashville station that has carried the Opry since the fledgling
days of radio, and streaming online to viewers around the world.
The show Saturday was the 5,000th broadcast of the Grand Ole
Opry, a constant accompanying American life through generations of turmoil and
transformation, through the depression and recessions, wars, cultural upheaval
and, most recently, a pandemic.
The milestone — adding up to roughly 96 years worth of
weekly shows, an unparalleled achievement in broadcasting — was a testament to
the durability of the Opry as a radio program but also as a Nashville
institution that has inducted well over 200 performers as members.
“The Opry is bigger than any one artist,” Anderson, one of
the longest-serving members of the Opry cast, said in an interview. “As times
change and things evolve, somehow, the Opry has been able to remain the star of
the show.”
It was an evolution that was reflected in the two-hour show
Saturday, with an array of performances capturing the shifts and strides in
country music that all played out over the past century on the Opry stage.
Throughout the night, there were plenty of nods to the past.
But there were just as many contemporary songs, a recognition that nostalgia
alone was not enough to sustain the Opry.
The show included staples like Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s
Daughter,” Hank Williams’ “Jambalaya,” and “Can the Circle Be Unbroken,” a song
first released in 1935. Anderson joined Jeannie Seely, an Opry member since
1967, in a duet of “When Two Worlds Collide.”
Then, Seely introduced Chris Janson, a singer-songwriter who
was inducted in 2018, describing him as the “one we call the family wild child”
as he bounded onstage to perform one of his hits, “Buy Me a Boat.”
“It is the show,” said singer-songwriter Darius Rucker, who
performed Saturday — along with Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood and Vince Gill,
among others — and was inducted into the Opry in 2012. “I hope it keeps getting
more diverse and that people keep coming to see it and that it remains the show
in country music.”
As the Opry gained traction, covering a lot of ground with
WSM’s 50,000-watt signal and then NBC Radio picking it up nationally in 1939,
it emerged as a defining force in country music. The show minted stars and
established Nashville as the heart of the industry.
The Opry had been in danger of becoming encased in amber, a
museum piece that was treasured but no longer relevant. For a long spell,
particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, it had become “a little hidebound, a
little bit stuck in its ways,” said Robert K. Oermann, a country music historian
and a longtime contributor to Music Row magazine.
“You listened to the Opry to hear your old favorites,” he
added. “To hear the old-timers do their thing.”
But over time, the Opry was reinvigorated, fueled by country
music’s resurgent popularity, welcoming new performers and using technology to
expand its reach. In 2019, the Opry began broadcasting on Circle, a digital
television outlet named for the slice of wooden floor at the center of the Opry
House stage, brought over with the move from the Ryman Auditorium, the Opry’s
home until 1974.
“We are really trying to put the Grand Ole Opry left, right
and center before consumers all across this planet,” said Colin V. Reed, chair
and CEO of Ryman Hospitality Properties, which owns the Opry.
On Saturday night, the performers were doing back-to-back
shows. Backstage is a maze of dressing rooms, each one with a theme (“Stars and
Stripes,” “Honky Tonk Angels”) or named for a longtime Opry performer (Roy
Acuff, Little Jimmy Dickens).
Seely stepped out of the dressing room dedicated to Minnie
Pearl, the character comedian Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon portrayed on the Opry
for more than 50 years, and pointed to the long hallway of rooms, calling it
“testosterone alley.” Seely preferred the nook where the walls were lined with
photographs of women who had been fixtures of the Opry. “I just think it shows
the sisterhood as well as it can be shown,” she said.
Later, the Isaacs, a family bluegrass gospel group, piled
into “Welcome to the Family,” a dressing room set aside for newly inducted
members. In recent years, the Opry has added to its ranks, bringing in younger
stars like Carly Pearce and Dustin Lynch.
The Isaacs were certainly not newcomers, having made their
debut Opry performance nearly 30 years ago. But they were inducted as members
just last month.
As Brooks and Yearwood electrified the audience with a
medley of their hits, the Isaacs crowded into Gill’s dressing room with their
instruments — Sonya had her mandolin, Becky had her guitar and Ben Isaacs had his
bass. They played and sang, jamming for their own entertainment until they had
to go back onstage for the second show.
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