When was the old Grand Ole Opry first opened?
The Grand Ole Opry has become less of a physical venue and more of a cultural signifier of everything country music has come to mean in the modern day. It’s the bread and butter, the guiding North Star – and there’s no denying that the genre wouldn’t be the same without it.
The place has become such a cornerstone and part of the furniture of country music that it’s almost easy to lose sight of the fact that it hasn’t always just been there at our disposal. There had to be a birth of the Grand Ole Opry, and subsequently of country music, in a certain capacity at some point in history – but when that day arrived, the world was instantly changed forever.
As what has long been considered the biggest platform of country music in the world, the Grand Ole Opry was first opened as an homage to the music of its native Nashville, as well as the people within it – but it would be some time after it had first started filling the floors that it would actually come to be known by its famous name. The original idea, perhaps rather bizarrely, came from an insurance company with a love for music – but the eventual legacy sprawled further than they could have ever imagined.
In turn, the first and oldest Grand Ole Opry geared into life as the WSM Barn Dance on November 28th, 1925. No one could have had the premonition that, just shy of 100 years later, that heart would still be beating as strong as ever in pounding the drum of country music, which it will do for the rest of time. Yet from the moment the programme announcer George D Hay and fiddle player Uncle Jimmy Thompson took to the stage that night, they inadvertently changed the world.
What’s the history of the Grand Ole Opry?
The seismic legacy of the Grand Ole Opry was almost borne out of an accident, after a music lover who worked at the National Life and Accident Insurance Company convinced the bosses to launch a radio station in October 1925 called WSM, based on their slogan of ‘We Shield Millions’. From there, it was only a month later that they enlisted Hay, an announcer known for his work at barn dances in Chicago, to come down to Nashville to launch their own event.
However, even though the dances were in full swing, it was over two years later that the Grand Ole Opry officially got its name, after Hay proclaimed live on the radio following the broadcast of an operatic programme: “For the past hour we have been listening to the music taken largely from the Grand Opera, but from now on we will present the Grand Ole Opry.”
After that, the name essentially stuck, and became forevermore synonymous with the heart and soul of the country and west. It just goes to show how something seemingly so small in music can snowball into an entire life force – because without a random radio station being broadcast from the offices of an insurance firm in Nashville, we wouldn’t have country as we know it today. It’s quite crazy when you think about it.
