Grand Ole Opry (February/March 1979 | Volume: 30, Issue: 2)

Grand Ole Opry

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Authors: William Price Fox

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February/March 1979 | Volume 30, Issue 2

The Nashville winter of 1974 was the Grand Ole Opry’s last season at the Ryman Auditorium, its home for thirty-three years. The 150 singers, pickers, comics, and doggers, who must agree to make twenty-one appearances each year to become members of the Opry company, had agreed to play down any misgivings they might have about moving out to the new Opryland, and four- and five-color brochures urged: “Come Share the Wonder of OPRYLAND , U.S.A., where the best of country music blends with the strains of Bluegrass, Dixieland, Western, Rock and all of the other exciting sounds of music from this great wide country of ours.”

Roy Acuff, the veteran “King of Country Music” whose rendition of “The Wabash Cannonball” is a country anthem, reportedly said he was glad to be moving out the nine miles on Route 40 East, that old Ryman was a firetrap, that he was worried about the walls falling down. But there were cynics like the beer drinker I talked to at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, the tavern behind Ryman Hall that has acted as a watering hole for many of the stars and sidemen: “Why shouldn’t old Roy want to move?” he asked. “Ain’t they naming that roller coaster out there ‘The Wabash Cannonball’? By God, this is one old boy that ain’t setting foot inside that place. Hell, you can’t even buy a beer out there.” And a producer on Nineteenth Street, the center of the music publishing business: “Honey, Fm never going in there again. I went once and I had to leave. I began crying. Crying. That was the worst thing they could have done to country music. Oh, I just hate it. All that plastic and Astroturf. And that air conditioning is going to ruin country music. A country boy has got to sweat or he ain’t nothing.”

The final performance at Ryman Hall on March 9, 1974, in the old red-brick tabernacle, with the oak floors, the handcarved pews, the ecclesiastical windows, the tiny dressing rooms, and the galvanized steel trough in the men’s room, ended with Johnny Cash standing center stage with Maybelle Carter, Hank Snow, June Carter Cash, and fifty others singing the last number, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” During the show most of the cast had tried to make it seem like any other night at Ryman, but many wouldn’t, some couldn’t. Jean Shepard, right in the middle of her song, broke into tears and ran offstage crying. Pete Axthelm, who writes for Newsweek , was there and wrote, “I loved Jean Shepard for that burst of unconcealed emotion and I drank to her later, enthusiastically and at length in the bar [Tootsie’s] that the Opry left behind.”

The fifty-three-year-old Grand Ole Opry didn’t actually begin at Ryman Hall, but at Studio A in the National Life Building in downtown Nashville. Then it moved to the Hillsboro Theatre, then to the Dixie Tabernacle