"Country Music is Wherever the Soul of a Country Music Fan Is": Opryland U.S.A. and the Importance of Home in Country Music: An article from Southern Cultures 17:4, The Music Issue

By Jeremy Hill

Nixon's visit (only five months before his resignation) was seen by national journalists and politicos to be a trip to one of the few places where he would still receive a warm reception, and it was quite warm indeed. Nixon took the stage, played two songs on the piano, and bantered with Roy Acuff."

When the Opry changed sites it wasn't without a good deal of growing pains, angst, and rhetoric—but by taking old values to the new venue, not to mention a circle of the original old floor, country music survived the switch.

This article appears in the 2011 Music issue of Southern Cultures.

Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Release date: Dec 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780807872567

Jeremy Hill

Jeremy Hill received his PhD in American Studies from The George Washington University and his MA in American Studies from California State University, Fullerton. He researches and teaches U.S. cultural, urban, and southern history of the twentieth-century.

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Country Music Is Wherever the Soul of a Country Music Fan Is

Opryland U.S.A. and the Importance of Home in Country Music

Jeremy Hill

Country’s preeminent long-running live radio program, the Grand Ole Opry, generally resisted much of the change associated with the Nashville Sound, keeping acts on who had performed for decades, retaining its traditional mix of comedy, tomfoolery, and song, and not catering to the new breed of country stars. Because of the Opry’s inclination toward the traditional amid a season of change, the program had to delicately spin the 1974 decision to leave its home of over three decades, the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville. The Opry’s old downtown home, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

As a genre of popular music, country music has never been as homogenous, stable, or traditional as both its critics and fans have often made it out to be. Even as far back as its commercial beginnings in the 1920s, country music’s multiple sub-genres and sonic diversity have defied easy categorization, and performers as well as fans rarely have fit the hillbilly stereotype that has long attached to the genre. The late 1960s and early 1970s, however, did find country music in a moment of considerable flux and potential consternation over whether the genre could maintain a coherent connection with its roots in the rural trappings and rustic performances of the early part of the American twentieth century. The country-pop Nashville Sound ushered in new instrumentation and production techniques—orchestrated violins, background choral groups, and smoother lead vocals instead of the fiddle, steel guitar, and twang of the previous eras—that made Nashville’s country music seem less country to some contemporary observers, who called for a return to what they saw as the genre’s true roots. In contrast with these extremely successful hits recorded on Nashville’s Music Row, country’s preeminent long-running live radio program, the Grand Ole Opry, resisted much of the change associated with the Nashville Sound, keeping acts who had performed for decades instead of catering to the new breed of country star, and retaining its traditional mix of comedy, tomfoolery, and song.

Because of the Opry’s inclination toward the traditional amid a season of change, the program had to delicately spin the 1974 decision to leave its home of over three decades, the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville, for Opryland U.S.A., a new theme park complex outside the city limits, about nine miles from downtown. The size of the new complex—as well as its multiple commercial options, extravagant rides, and live animals—stood in stark contrast to the staid, cathedral-like old Ryman Auditorium. The Opry’s managers were aware that the live radio show’s historic location had been just as important as the list of performers who regularly plied their trade on stage every weekend. But the Opry’s corporate parent, National