A Good-Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry (Co-published with the Country Music Foundation Press) - Hardcover

Wolfe, Charles K.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 082651331X ISBN 13: 9780826513311

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999

Synopsis

Winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award
Winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award

On November 28, 1925, a white-bearded man sat before one of Nashville radio station WSM's newfangled carbon microphones to play a few old-time fiddle tunes. Uncle Jimmy Thompson played on the air for an hour that night, and throughout the region listeners at their old crystal sets suddenly perked up. Back in Nashville the response at the offices of National Life Insurance Company, which owned radio station WSM ("We Shield Millions"), was dramatic; phone calls and telegrams poured into the station, many of them making special requests. It was not long before station manager George D. Hay was besieged by pickers and fiddlers of every variety, as well as hoedown bands, singers, and comedians--all wanting their shot at the Saturday night airwaves. "We soon had a good-natured riot on our hands," Hay later recalled. And, thus, the Opry was born.

Or so the story goes. In truth, the birth of the Opry was a far more complicated event than even Hay, "the solemn old Judge," remembered. The veteran performers of that era are all gone now, but since the 1970s pioneering country music historian Charles K. Wolfe has spent countless hours recording the oral history of the principals and their families and mining archival materials from the Country Music Foundation and elsewhere to understand just what those early days were like. The story that he has reconstructed is fascinating. Both a detailed history and a group biography of the Opry's early years, A Good-Natured Riot provides the first comprehensive and thoroughly researched account of the personalities, the music, and the social and cultural conditions that were such fertile ground for the growth of a radio show that was to become an essential part of American culture.

Wolfe traces the unsure beginnings of the Opry through its many incarnations, through cast tours of the South, the Great Depression, commercial sponsorship by companies like Prince Albert Tobacco, and the first national radio linkups. He gives colorful and engaging portraits of the motley assembly of the first Opry casts--amateurs from the hills and valleys surrounding Nashville, like harmonica player Dr. Humphrey Bate ("Dean of the Opry") and fiddler Sid Harkreader, virtuoso string bands like the Dixieliners, colorful hoedown bands like the Gully Jumpers and the Fruit Jar Drinkers, the important African American performer DeFord Bailey, vaudeville acts and comedians like Lasses and Honey, through more professional groups such as the Vagabonds, the Delmore Brothers, Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, and perennial favorite Roy Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys.

With dozens of wonderful photographs and a complete roster of every performer and performance of these early Opry years, A Good-Natured Riot gives a full and authoritative portrayal of the colorful beginnings of WSM's barn dance program up to 1940, by which time the Grand Ole Opry had found its national audience and was poised to become the legendary institution that it remains to this day.

About this title

About the Author

Charles K. Wolfe (1943-2006) was one of the leading experts on the history and development of country music. He wrote or edited around twenty books, including The Devil's Box: Masters of Southern Fiddling (Vanderbilt University Press/Country Music Foundation Press). Until his retirement in 2005, he was an English professor at Middle Tennessee State University. His work helped popular music scholarship gain academic acceptance.

Reviews

A highly readable and detailed account of the early years of Americas premiere country and western radio show, The Grand Ole Opry. Its hard to imagine that a book about the Opry could appeal to a broad audience, because, frankly, how many people have even heard of early Opry stars Uncle Jimmy Thompson, Uncle Dave Macon, or emcee George Hays? However, what makes Wolfes book so compelling is that it shows the intersection of the birth of the Opry with so many other important, and often overlooked, cultural moments. First, the Opry comes at the dawn of radio, and Wolfe spells out some of the more interesting features of the pioneering stations. WSM, the Oprys original station, was actually capable of broadcasting nearly coast-to-coast due to the clarity of the airwaves in those days. And its decision to present a program of what was then called old time music was extremely controversial. The city of Nashville, the Oprys home, prided itself on its high-brow aura, making it the soi-disant Paris of the South. Old time music seemed lowbrow, yet its popularity pushed the format forward. It is largely due to the Oprys location there that today Nashville is known as the home of country music. Wolfe also covers, of course, the issue of race, since the Opry was, in its early days, one of the few venues that featured both black and white musicians. That black musicians fell out of country music is an aspect of the transition from old time to country, and one that Wolfe handles sensitively. On the whole, a surprisingly interesting book that covers not only its putative subject, the first great country music radio show, but also the constellation of musical and cultural issues that swirled around the birth of a new music and a new South. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Perhaps there is no commercially successfully genre of music as misunderstood as country: even its most ardent fans seem content to embrace its aw-shucks image. Wolfe makes no such mistake, affectionately chronicling the savvy business decisions that gave birth to the Opry and to its careful "rustication." Emerging from 25 years of research on the Opry's beginnings, Wolfe's book includes an unprecedented number of interviews with the performers and their families and associates. Although he sometimes favors depth of detail over narrative shape, his work will be invaluable to historians of country, and of American music more broadly. Wolfe depicts a number of eager, opportunistic (not to mention talented and pioneering) performers and businessmen who made big bucks by fashioning old-time music into a slick commodity with mass appeal. Knowing that early Opry stars Uncle Dave Macon and Uncle Jimmy Thompson were in it for as much glory and money as they could come by should not decrease our appreciation of their music; no one minds that Elvis and the Beatles built fortunes along with their legends. Wolfe's book should help both country music's proponents and opponents realize that country is an important and substantial chunk of the music business, and that it has always involved both smarts and flair.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

While collecting oral histories from old-timers of the Grand Ole Opry, award-winning country music historian Wolfe (English, Middle Tennessee State Univ.; The Devil's Box: Masters of Southern Fiddling) saw a need to gather written material to back up what he was hearing. Beyond the standard histories and journals of country music, Wolfe combed the files of the Tennessean and the Nashville Banner as well as materials at the Tennessee State Library and Archives, the Country Music Foundation, and the Grand Ole Opry collection at Vanderbilt University. The result is a thoroughly researched yet entertaining study of the Grand Ole Opry from its beginning to 1940. Wolfe is meticulous in his research and writingAa good match for the Country Music Foundation and Vanderbilt University Press in their efforts to produce sterling works on the history of country music. Recommended for collections on American music in public and academic libraries.AKathleen Sparkman, Baylor Univ., Waco, TX
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Including Uncle Dave Macon, the Crook Brothers, Brother Oswald, and the Carter Family, the early Grand Ole Opry resembles a family reunion minus the green bean casseroles. Here Wolfe introduces family members and their reminiscences. There were more legends than facts available, he says, when he undertook the show's oral history, and his goal became the creation of a "factual body of data." This book, however, expands an earlier one by covering five more years of the Opry, detailing its story from its 1925 inception to 1940, when its NBC network affiliation began and it won greater exposure in a Hollywood movie. That was the end of the beginning but hardly the beginning of the end for the Opry. Vintage pictures that amount to a Country Music Hall of Fame portrait gallery complement Wolfe's gleanings from interviews with Opry luminaries, of whom Roy Acuff and Bill Monroe are just two of the most famous. A vital history of the phenomenon that brought country music out of the U.S. Southeast to, eventually, the world. Mike Tribby

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Chapter 3. Any consideration of the musicians of the early Opry-the artists who formed the cornerstone of the new edifice-must begin with Dr. Humphrey Bate. Bate, a harmonica player whom George Hay called the "dean" of the Opry, was almost certainly the first musician to play country music over WSM and probably the first to play such music over Nashville radio in general. His role has been overshadowed by more colorful characters like Uncle Jimmy Thompson, the traditional "founder" of the Opry. But had not Dr. Bate paved the way and shown that audience interest in old-time music existed, Uncle Jimmy might never have been allowed to play on the famous November 28 broadcast. Indisputable documentary evidence exists showing that Dr. Bate played on WDAD a full month before WSM even started broadcasting and that he played on WSM weeks before George Hay arrived on the scene.

Dr. Bate, described by Hay as "a very genial country physician from Sumner County, Tennessee," was not as charismatic or as eccentric as Uncle Jimmy, and he might not have evoked the immediate and dramatic audience response that Uncle Jimmy did. But his role in the development of the early Opry is actually as great as, if not greater than, that of Uncle Jimmy. He recorded more than Uncle Jimmy, and in many ways his music was richer and more complex than that of his white-bearded fiddling colleague. Certainly Dr. Bate was on the air more regularly than Uncle Jimmy, especially after 1926; in fact, in terms of airtime Dr. Bate's string band was probably on the early Opry more than any other band. He soon was given the 8:00 p.m. slot, where he opened the show with "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight." He also worked closely and often with Hay to build up the show and recommended a number of acts, including harmonica player DeFord Bailey. In 1926, for instance, the good doctor appeared on 29 out of 39 logged shows, and in 1928 on 25 out of 52 logged shows. (A logged show is one for which we have at least a tentative lineup.) Often he performed for as much as an hour, often twice a night. Dr. Bate was in the first Opry tour group sent out in 1931, and he was one of the few early artists who saw the full potential of the Opry's development. He repeatedly told his daughter Alcyone, "Honey, you know we may have really started something down there."

But even if Dr. Bate had not been historically important, he would have been musically vital to the development of the show. His band had one of the most individual sounds in old-time music and reflected the characteristic Middle Tennessee string band tradition, with its emphasis on the harmonica sharing the lead with the fiddle. His music influenced many other Opry regulars, from the Crook Brothers to Uncle Dave Macon. His core repertoire, which has been preserved (see below), was one of the most extensive and, to use a term of the folklorist, "authentic" of any Opry performer. Yet it included a refreshingly eclectic variety of other numbers, from ragtime to Sousa marches. Dr. Bate's own harmonica style was clean, pure, and exact, reminding one more of a fiddle than a blues harp. His style anticipated the later Nashville work of artists like Jimmy Riddle and Charlie McCoy. But most important, perhaps, was the fact that the band was a team. They were no pickup group and had relatively few personnel changes for over fifteen years. They perfected a collective ensemble sound not unlike that of early New Orleans jazz, and there was nothing quite like it in old-time music.

Like most other performers on the early Opry, Dr. Bate did not make a living from his music. For most of his career he was a full-time practicing physician who saw music as a hobby and as a means to relax. He was born in 1875 in Sumner County, Tennessee, some forty miles northeast of Nashville and about halfway between Nashville and the Kentucky state line. His father before him had been a physician for about forty years at Castalian Springs, near Gallatin, Tennessee, and young Humphrey took over his practice at about the turn of the century. He had graduated from the Vanderbilt Medical School just prior to the Spanish-American War of 1898, during which he served in the Medical Corps. After the war young Dr. Bate reportedly turned down several offers to practice in urban centers, preferring the life of a country doctor and the rustic pleasures of hunting and fishing.

Edition details

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082651331X
• ISBN 13: 9780826513311
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 328