Country's Voice
KEEL, BEVERLY
Country’s Voice The story of Nashville’s WSM. BY BEVERLY KEEL WSM, home of the venerable Grand Ole Opry, is the most important radio station in the history of country music. There’s a clich?...
...TNN ultimately became the testosteronefueled Spike TV...
...During radio’s most powerful years (1935 until the ’50s) WSM originated numerous shows for national networks...
...Gaylord bought the Country Music Television video channel in 1991, and his timing was impeccable: Country music’s sales and popularity were at an all-time high with artists such as Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, and Clint Black...
...In 1997 Gaylord sold TNN and CMT to Westinghouse, which was bought by CBS, which was bought by Viacom...
...WSM’s tower, still in use today, was the tallest in North America when built in 1932...
...When an orchestra league held its convention in Nashville in the late 1950s, the conductors asked that Chet Atkins perform...
...WSM also created the Disc Jockey Convention (now known as Country Radio Seminar) and Fan Fair, now dubbed CMA Music Festival, which attracts thousands of fans to Nashville each year to meet their favorite stars...
...Havighurst says bluegrass was largely invented in front of WSM’s microphones and promoted through WSM’s branding...
...In the turbulence, WSM, the country music station of the century and the accidental architect of Music City, would be taken to the brink of extinction,” writes Havighurst...
...publisher Jack Stapp, and media personality Ralph Emery...
...WSM offi cials considered themselves patrons of music...
...But if that tune can’t be heard by the public, not much else will follow the promising start...
...But experience should have taught that these good times would soon end as well...
...WSM-TV was sold to Gillett Broadcasting in Wisconsin in 1981, a move that raised about $40 million of the $60 million necessary to launch The Nashville Network (TNN...
...It was this sophisticated image that Nashville’s bluebloods wanted to portray to the world, not the embarrassing image of overall-clad, twangy-sounding hillbillies...
...But when he arrived at the prestigious venue, he was forced to enter through the kitchen...
...Not only did the station boost sales of insurance policies, but it indelibly shaped country music and the city of Nashville, which is still known by the “Music City USA” moniker created by a WSM announcer...
...In this swift-changing industry, will WSM-AM become a fond relic of yesteryear, or reinvent itself as an in-demand musical showplace in the global marketplace...
...A new Gaylord regime announced in 2002 it was turning WSM into a news/talk/sports station...
...Like so many songs on Music Row, the last verse remains unfi nished...
...Profi t wasn’t always the overriding motive at WSM...
...community protests, which drew coverage in the New York Times, convinced management to keep WSM country...
...Gaylord’s country music empire grew in size, power, and infl uence...
...Havighurst ponders how country music’s most important radio station will fulfi ll its destiny in the new century: “In a time when traditional country music fans are giving up on Top 40 commercial country radio, WSM with its international Web presence might be positioned as the on-air, online authority on country music worldwide,” he writes...
...WSM-AM was moved out of its freestanding offi ce and into the basement of an Opry building...
...It embraced all forms of music, especially during the 1940s-60s, its most infl uential years...
...WSM made Nashville a show town...
...Less than a decade later, WSM had the fi rst commercial FM station on the air in the United States, and by the 1960s, its executives were exploring cable television...
...in Nashville that says, “It all begins with a song...
...In 1982 National Life, which included WSM radio, the Opry, Opryland, and TNN, was purchased by another insurance company...
...Without these WSM-affi liated leaders, who formed Nashville’s fi rst recording studios, record label, publishing companies, and talent agency, one of the nation’s multibilliondollar music centers might have evolved outside of Middle Tennessee, leaving Nashville to emerge as another Charlotte, but without all that bank money...
...Country music took off in the ’90s because we controlled both TNN and CMT,” says Gaylord’s David Hall...
...We were the driving force in country music...
...Band leader Francis Craig, who wrote “Near You,” Nashville’s fi rst million-seller, was a popular WSM personality...
...In the 1960s and ’70s, WSM’s overnight DJ Ralph Emery was so powerful that he created national hits by adding them to his playlist...
...Even by the end of the next decade, when country music was earning impressive profi ts, many Nashville denizens didn’t celebrate its success: “The business community was happy to sell you a car, but they didn’t want their daughter to marry your son if you were in the music industry,” Havighurst is told...
...After struggling with its own identity, when it essentially sounded like every other contemporary country station, WSM-AM found its sound by century’s end, embracing country, Western, swing, and bluegrass music from the 1940s on...
...CMT is now run by the folks at MTV...
...While the era of local ownership was gone, Ed Gaylord loved country music and gave local management considerable discretion...
...Its live, in-studio orchestras were accompanied by Dinah Shore, Snooky Lanson, and the Anita Kerr singers...
...This is a vital book in the canons of country music history, but it’s also a delightful read because the corporate growth and technological advances are peppered with stories such as Ernest Tubb’s arrest for fi ring a gun in the National Life lobby and Hank Williams’s call from jail...
...And the following year those properties were purchased by the Gaylord Broadcasting Co...
...It became Tennessee’s largest employer, and by the end of the 1980s, TNN was the nation’s seventh largest cable network...
...And as Craig Havighurst notes, WSM helped lift country music from a regional, class-specifi c folk art to the edge of national commercial viability...
...Havighurst treats WSM as if it’s a character as rich and important as those it made famous, and he recreates the intangible studio moments that evaporate into thin air after reaching listeners’ homes...
...But Gaylord cut its budget and staff before selling WSM-FM to Cumulus Media in 2003...
...This infl uence came, in large part, through its massive broadcast reach, but also by the achievements of WSM employees and alumni, including legendary producer Owen Bradley, music Beverly Keel, who teaches about the recording industry at Middle Tennessee State University, writes about country music for The Tennessean...
...WSM is a story of visionaries and at least one technological genius, Jack DeWitt...
...The Nashville AM station was launched by the National Life and Accident Insurance Company in 1925 to promote its slogan “We Shield Millions”— hence WSM— and generate goodwill among its customers and the community...
...Roy Acuff once said, “I don’t care how poor you were, you found some way to own a radio...
...But as often happens in the corporate world, good things must come to an end...
...quality was...
...Thanks to WSM, that wasn’t a problem for country stars such as Roy Acuff, Loretta Lynn, and Marty Robbins because the clearchannel station’s airwaves eventually reached as far as New Zealand, Canada, Cuba, and Hawaii...
...In an era of oversaturated entertainment options, it’s diffi cult to grasp the importance of radio in the pretelevision lives of rural Americans...
...Gaylord’s new regime bulldozed Opryland to make way for a shopping mall, a horrible mistake that devastated Nashville’s tourism industry and delivered an emotional blow to the city...
...But the glory days didn’t last long...
...Of course, WSM didn’t initially play only country music...
...In the 1970s, WSM also built the Opryland USA theme park and hotel and the current Opry House...
...In his colorful account, Havighurst, a music journalist, chronicles the birth, success, and near death of WSM, which was in danger of converting from a classic country to a sports talk format in 2002 until protesters, such as George Jones and Vince Gill, added their voices to the cacophony of sign-waving, hornhonking protesters determined to save this cultural institution...
...The format, a country purist’s fantasy come true, reinvigorated the radio staff...
...The studio is now inside the Opryland Hotel...
Vol. 13 • January 2008 • No. 17
