Grand Ole Opry

Grand Ole Opry, country music show in Nashville that debuted as a radio broadcast on November 28, 1925, playing traditional country music (then called hillbilly music). It is the longest-running weekly radio program in the world, and it initiated and promoted the creation of Nashville as the center of country music. Founded by a local insurance company and radio announcer and program director George Dewey Hay—who had helped organize a similar program, the WLS National Barn Dance, in Chicago—the show was originally known as the WSM Barn Dance. It acquired its lasting name of the Grand Ole Opry in 1927.

The Opry’s early years

It was largely Hay, nicknamed “the Solemn Ol’ Judge,” who determined the course of the Opry’s early development. The show originated as a program to help promote the National Life and Accident Insurance Company, which was based in downtown Nashville. In October 1925 the company launched a radio station from the fifth floor of its office building; the call letters WSM stood for the company’s slogan “We Shield Millions.” Hay, a former newspaper reporter in Memphis, Tennessee, was hired as program director a month later. The first broadcast featured him as the announcer and tunes by a fiddler in his 70s known as Uncle Jimmy Thompson. An immediate success, the WSM Barn Dance became a weekly Saturday night broadcast that December.

Eventually, the program attracted fans, who would show up and watch the broadcast through the radio station’s window while standing in the hallway. Larger studios were built to accommodate a growing audience, including a space that seated about 500 people.

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In 1934 the show moved to the Hillsboro Theater, an auditorium about three miles from downtown Nashville. About this time the program began to feature advertising spots and sponsored segments. Two years later the Opry relocated to the 3,500-seat Dixie Tabernacle, a religious meeting hall in the East Nashville neighborhood. By this time the show had become popular enough to require advance tickets, although admission remained free. In 1939 the program moved again, this time to the city’s War Memorial Auditorium. Although this venue offered fewer seats (2,200), its smaller size justified a newly introduced admission fee of 25 cents.

From the Ryman to Opryland to the 21st century

The Opry found its most fabled home, the Ryman Auditorium, in June 1943. A 2,300-seat Victorian-style former religious revival house located in downtown Nashville, the Ryman soon became known as “the Mother Church of Country Music.” Many storied events occurred at the Ryman, including Hank Williams’s Opry debut in 1949 (he set a record with six encores) and Elvis Presley’s sole performance on the program in 1954.

The Ryman was the program’s home until March 15, 1974, closing out with a performance by tenor singer George Morgan (father of 1990s country star Lorrie Morgan) singing his hit “Candy Kisses.” The next evening the show broadcast from the new 4,400-seat Grand Ole Opry House at the Opryland USA amusement park and entertainment center. Opening night at the new Opry House featured country legend Roy Acuff singing his classic “The Wabash Cannonball,” an appearance by U.S. Pres. Richard Nixon (who spun a yo-yo onstage), and a “Happy Birthday” serenade to First Lady Pat Nixon.

A 1978 fundraising special for PBS was the occasion of the Opry’s first live televised performance, and regular TV broadcasts began in 1985. Opryland USA shuttered in 1997 and was eventually razed, but the Opry House remained and endured as a popular tourist attraction, and the Opry continued as a weekly broadcast.

Meanwhile, the Ryman Auditorium fell into serious disrepair, but with the publicity generated by country singer Emmylou Harris’s 1991 concert at the venue and an accompanying live album released in 1992, its renovation became a rallying cause. The restored Ryman opened in 1994. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 2001, the venerable building hosts regular Opry broadcasts in the winter months as well as year-round concerts and events.

In 2025 the Opry celebrated its 100th anniversary with year-round events as well as a televised concert in March featuring a bevy of country stars. As with many previous all-star events at the Opry, the show closed with a singalong of its unofficial theme song, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a tune originating with the Carter Family’s 1935 hit “Can the Circle Be Unbroken,” which was adapted from a 1907 hymn. (Immediately after the Opry’s final broadcast at the Ryman in 1974, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash were among those who joined in on a jamboree of the song onstage.)

Keeping with tradition, WSM continues to broadcast the Opry program on the radio, and the show is available on many streaming platforms.

Cultural meaning and Opry membership

More than a country music program, the Opry is hailed as a cultural institution. For many country fans, its long-running success symbolizes the genre’s enduring popularity. Along with country music itself, the show flourished through the heyday of radio and on into the television era. Such widening exposure led to tours of Opry stars and in the 1940s to Opry films. The music of the Opry developed from Uncle Dave Macon’s ballads of rural laborers in the 1920s, through the string bands, cowboy music, and western swing of the 1930s, and back to the traditional music characterized by the career of Acuff, who was promoted into stardom by the Opry in the late 1930s. After World War II, the honky-tonk style of Ernest Tubb, the bluegrass music of Bill Monroe with Earl Scruggs, the honky-tonk music of Hank Williams, the crooning of Eddy Arnold and Tennessee Ernie Ford, and the singing of such vocalists as Kitty Wells were all Opry staples, as were comedy routines, notably by Minnie Pearl.

Some country stars become Opry members by invitation of the management on the basis of industry recognition and achievement in the form of record sales and radio airplay. In the Opry’s first 100 years, only three Black artists were inducted as members: harmonica player DeFord Bailey (one of program’s earliest performers), singer Charley Pride (1993), and singer and guitarist Darius Rucker (2023). Pride was the first Black solo singer to appear at the Opry, in 1967; two years later singer Linda Martell became the first Black female artist to perform there.

The Opry circle

One of the Grand Ole Opry House’s notable features is a circle made of lighter-colored wood in the center of the stage. It was constructed from an eight-foot piece of wood cut from the stage of the Ryman Auditorium, shortly before the final Opry broadcast there in 1974. The stage piece also connects the Opry House to the Grand Ole Opry’s signature song, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”