"A Good-Natured Riot": The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry (review)

At the 1999 American Library Association conference in New Orleans, I was approached by a salesman for a new online used book supplier who bragged that he could find any book I could name. The first title that popped into my mind was Charles K. Wolfe's The Grand Ole Opry: The Early Years, 1925-1935, published in 1975 by Old Time Music, a British periodical. I became familiar with the work through a copy in the Folklore Collection at Indiana University, liked it, and had searched unsuccessfully at used bookstores myself for a copy to purchase. The salesman dutifully typed the information in the search box, clicked "Go," and then embarrassedly confessed to me that the title was not found.

With "A Good-Natured Riot": The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry, Wolfe has made my search for his earlier volume unnecessary. In this new work, he has taken his original project, incorporated 25 additional years of research and interviews with Opry stars and their families, and created a fascinating, readable history of the early days of this venerable radio program. "A Good-Natured Riot" brings us back to a time when "old-time" or "hillbilly" records were produced in small batches for regional sales only, radio was still considered a fad, and the Nashville establishment considered the Opry broadcasts an affront to the image of the city as the "Athens of the South." (Despite its new sobriquet of "Music City U.S.A.," there remains a palpable separation between the society of Nashville's old-money families and the participants in the city's most famous industry.)

The Grand Ole Opry was the brainchild of George Dewey Hay. Born in Attica, Indiana, in 1895, he was raised in Chicago and by 1919 was working in Memphis as a court reporter. He also wrote a humorous column called "Howdy, Judge" for the Memphis Commercial Appeal that described the interplay between a white judge and Black defendants. When the newspaper founded a radio station in Memphis and made Hay one of its announcers, Hay developed a radio personality for himself, blowing a steamboat whistle he dubbed "Hushpuckena." In 1924, he was hired by Sears to become the announcer on their radio station, WLS in Chicago. Hay was there when WLS inaugurated the WLS Barn Dance, the first successful radio program featuring old-time music.

In October 1925 he was invited to the opening of Nashville's WSM, owned by the National Life and Accident Insurance Company. (The station's call letters reflected the company's motto, "We Shield Millions.") Hay was offered directorship of the new station, and he accepted in November. He quickly saw that the station's tremendous broadcast range—on clear nights the broadcasts could reach both coasts—demanded more varied programming than the light classical and dance band music that had been scheduled. From his experience in Chicago, he knew that old-time music appealed to a broad range of listeners, especially in rural areas, and on 28 November 1925, Hay broadcast a fiddler named Uncle Jimmy Thompson from LaGuardo, Tennessee. The rest, as they say, is history.

Yet Wolfe describes the development of the Opry from a hit-and-miss programming operation of local talent into a highly structured cast of musical professionals. In the early chapters, Wolfe brilliantly lays out the context for the Opry both spatially (Nashville) and temporally (the early development of radio). His musical portrait of Nashville is especially fascinating; while many are aware that the city had no more hold on what would become country music than other southern cities, it did have a varied musical landscape of Black and white performers of its own. He describes the region in which the Opry was born as "a rural area rich in folk culture and steeped in tradition surrounding a relatively small Southern city—with a...