As the uniquely American sound of country music surges in global popularity, the Grand Ole Opry radio show, which put Nashville, Tennessee, on the map as Music City USA, celebrates its 100th birthday.
On November 28, 1925, the Nashville-area WSM radio station broadcasted the first installment of the WSM Barn Dance, featuring a local 77-year-old fiddler, known as Uncle Jimmy Thompson. The Opry’s current name emerged a couple of years later, when announcer George D. Hay ad-libbed while transitioning from another radio program, saying, “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,’” echoing a Southern dialect.
Over the next decades, during which more than 5,000 consecutive weekly shows aired, the Opry became a springboard for country music stars and helped turn their music into a global phenomenon. Thanks to WSM’s powerful radio signal, U.S. audiences nationwide tuned in to the show every Saturday night. When live shows began in 1943 at the Ryman Auditorium, people lined up around the building to get tickets.
In 1974, the Opry played its first show at its current location (the Grand Ole Opry House), and then President Richard Nixon joined the performers and played Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” on piano.
“That was the home of country music. That was where everyone wanted to be,” says historian Byron Fay, who blogs about the Grand Ole Opry. “It became the dream of a lot of people around the country to go to Nashville and see it in person.”
The growth of the Opry coincided with early efforts to record artists who played what was once called “hillbilly music” — songs of rural, Southern life, accompanied by a banjo or guitar — that would evolve into today’s country music.
The Opry still draws crowds from all over the world, and country music, as popular as ever, is a staple of music festivals as far as Germany and Australia. In 2024, listeners to country music on the streaming service Spotify increased by 20 percent.
Among the talents who became big stars by performing at the Grand Ole Opry are Patsy Cline, a deep-voiced singer from Winchester, Virginia, Fay says. And Loretta Lynn, whose songs recall her childhood in Kentucky’s coal-mining country, first sang at the Opry in 1960. Country star Dolly Parton made the first of her many appearances in 1959 at age 13. “As I heard the band play my introduction, I lifted my head and looked up toward the lights,” she says on her website. “I smiled at the people in the balcony and then let ‘er rip.”
“There was a time when the Opry could make or break a performer,” Fay says. Hank Williams, considered one of the greatest country artists in history, “would have never had the success that he had as famous as he was if it weren’t for the Opry.”
The Opry’s influence extends beyond country music. On September 1, 2006, a 16-year-old girl from West Reading, Pennsylvania, made her first major concert appearance at the historic venue and exclaimed, “Oh, my God, I’m on the Opry.”
Many more career milestones would follow for Taylor Swift on the way to becoming a global superstar.