“Get In Touch With God, Turn Your Radio On”

The Grand Ole Opry and Country Music as a Reflection of the South

By: Michelle Phipps Harris, University of North Alabama

In the 1920s, while the Agrarians were developing a literary culture at Vanderbilt University and the upper echelon of Nashville society was striving to uphold the city as the “self-described ‘Athens of the South,’”[1] the creation of a radio station would completely transform the city of Nashville, Tennessee. Started by National Life and Accident Insurance Company as both a pet project for one of the executive’s sons and as an avenue for advertising, the station went on air on October 5, 1925 with one thousand watts of power and the call letters WSM.[2] The station’s thousand watts of power made it “one of the two strongest stations in the South, and stronger than 85 percent of all the other broadcasting stations in the country at the time.”[3] While its original conception was that of an advertising venture (WSM represented “We Serve Millions,” the tagline of the National Life Insurance Company), it became the broadcaster of the Grand Ole Opry, which would become synonymous with the city of Nashville itself. As the Grand Ole Opry and “hillbilly” music became a national phenomenon, the Opry can be seen as a metaphor for Nashville and the southern region of the United States at large. Social hierarchies, racial tensions, urban versus rural antagonism, the prevalence of evangelical Christianity, nostalgia, and fear of change can all be found through the history of the Grand Ole Opry and country music. As Louis Kyriakoudes writes, “few institutions in modern America so completely reflect the culture and sensibilities of the white rural South as the Opry.”[4]

At the time, Nashville was a relatively small city that was, as Charles Wolfe writes, “an odd mixture of the old and new South.”[5] Downtown was dirty and the air was fetid from industrialization and the trains that ran through Union Station, which was located on Broadway, one of the main thoroughfares in Nashville. The west end of town was much more genteel, with steeplechase courses, horse farms, Belle Meade Country Club, and the Belle Meade Plantation. During this time, “fully one fourth of the Nashville population was black,”[6] and there was a vibrant jazz and blues scene in the city. However, this scene never flourished in Nashville as it did in other cities because of Nashville’s orientation towards radio, which limited Black accessibility.[7] Many of the future musicians of the Opry would come from the rural areas surrounding Nashville, which would lend an air of authenticity to “the rural folk culture that it claimed to celebrate.”[8] With Nashville’s upper class striving to uphold the genteel identity of the Old South, and the majority of the musicians not being Nashvillians themselves, the city was surprisingly disinterested in hillbilly music. Wolfe theorizes that this was due to the urban Nashvillians not actually being the Opry’s intended audience: its audience was those who lived in “the outlying communities reached by the radio stations and newspapers.”[9] While Nashvillians might not have been interested in the music itself, they were definitely interested in the economic possibilities that the Opry and hillbilly music presented to the city. Despite the burgeoning popularity of the Opry performers, some Nashvillians were not happy about that popularity: they were “discontent with the spectre of hillbilly music emanating from ‘the Athens of the South.’”[10] This tension between the urbanites of Nashville and the rural audience of the Opry mirrored the urban/rural divide in the South in general.

Despite this initial pushback by some Nashvillians, the Saturday Night Barn Dance remained on WSM. The name change from the Barn Dance to the Grand Ole Opry famously took place when DeFord Bailey played the program introduction with his harmonica. As a response to the previous program’s classical music, Barn Dance host Judge Hay remarked, “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.”[11] This moniker proved to be an apt description, “for the story-telling songs on [the] barn dance bore a close resemblance to the dramatic stories embodied in opera.”[12] The musicians “told stories that were familiar to an audience, which involved the most pressing concerns of their life…and in an idiom they understood, thus serving much the same function as opera in its origins and early integrity.”[13]

DeFord Bailey, the African American harmonica player who was indirectly responsible for the Grand Ole Opry name, was representative of racial attitudes of the South during the early to mid-twentieth century. Bailey was born in rural Smith County, Tennessee, just east of Nashville, in 1899. Jessica Janice Jones writes, Bailey “recall[ed] that his father, a fiddler, played what he call[ed] black hillbilly music, and he considered his uncle the best banjo player around.”[14] Bailey himself took up the harmonica at a young age after contracting infantile paralysis at the age of three, and as a result he was bedridden for a year.[15] Wolfe writes, “Somebody gave him a harmonica to amuse himself with, and he quickly mastered the instrument,”[16] imitating sounds that he could hear from his bed, such as trains and animals. Bailey was only four feet ten inches tall as a result of his illness, and “this disability was partially responsible for forcing him into a musical career, much as blindness forced many other old-time musicians [such as Doc Watson] into music.”[17] Bailey moved to Nashville, where he would eventually get the opportunity to play on WSM. Initially, Bailey’s race did not seem to be a factor, but once the Opry began touring around the South, Jim Crow laws caused issues for the traveling Black musician. Bailey could not eat at the same restaurants or stay in the same hotels as the white performers. However, some of the other musicians stepped in to help: “Uncle Dave Macon would get [Bailey] into his hotel room by insisting that he was his valet and refuse to stay in a hotel that would not let him take DeFord into his room with him.”[18]

When the Grand Ole Opry cut him loose in 1941, Bailey was left with a bitterness that kept him out of music for the rest of his life. In The Nashville Sound, Paul Hemphill writes of going to the same shoeshine parlor that Bailey worked at when he first moved to Nashville almost fifty years later. In the late 1960s, urban renewal was altering former black neighborhoods such as the area south of downtown Nashville where Bailey worked at the shoeshine parlor “just for something to do.”[19] Hemphill attempted to get Bailey to talk about his days in the Opry, but he was hesitant to share. Hemphill, however, did elicit a compelling response to one of his questions. Hemphill asked Bailey, “Do you think country music is the white man’s music? ‘Huh, colored people got this music in ‘em that white people can’t ever learn.’”[20]

With Bailey’s immense popularity on the Grand Ole Opry, it does seem strange that he is not more well-known or seen as more influential on the musicians that came after him. Wolfe posits that “the fact that his music represented a complex and demanding synthesis of two distinct musical forms, hillbilly and blues, and that as these two forms became increasingly segregated in the 1930s and 1940s, he could not find a real home in either.”[21] Kyriakoudes similarly thinks that “Bailey was caught between his biracial string band tradition, to which he was devoted, and the emerging mass-media definitions of what was white and what was black.”[22] The contemporary string band Old Crow Medicine Show has attempted to correct this neglect of Bailey. In their song “DeFord Rides Again,” they pay tribute to the “Harmonica Wizard:”

Just a baby boy with a silver toy

And the polio strikin’ fire and wind

At four foot nine, just one of his kind

The greatest there ever been

Blow, blow, DeFord blow

Play that Pan-American

Oh, oh, where did he go?

DeFord Bailey rides again

Arise, gals and gents, for the show to commence

There’s a good-natured riot on the air

Little DeFord’s on the loose with them Muscle Shoals Blues

Let the Jim Crow South Beware[23]

DeFord Bailey’s story reflects the plight of many black Southerners during the time period, with his rural upbringing, serious childhood illness, and racial segregation a common story for many people. His controversial firing from the Grand Ole Opry likely had racial overtones, and urban renewal destroying his home in a black neighborhood was a common occurrence as well. Finally, current attempts to give Bailey his due by Old Crow Medicine Show are a good example of progressive Southerners trying to come to terms with the region’s past. In May of 2023, thanks in large part to Bailey’s grandson Carlos DeFord Bailey, a street in the Edgewood neighborhood of Nashville (where Bailey lived and had his shoeshine shop) was renamed DeFord Bailey Avenue. Long overdue for this recognition, it took only four months from petition signature gathering to approval of the name change.[24]

Indeed, the segregation of Southern music into hillbilly and blues music likely has its basis in the racial and class hierarchy of the southern region. As Rebecca Thomas writes, “the music of poor blacks and whites share a cultural history immersed in tales of bad love, long suffering, violence, oppression, and musical release.”[25] Both genres of music were a way to cope with the ills of poverty and the human condition, yet “a mutual aversion born out of years of racial and cultural biases kept them apart.”[26] Early Opry and country musicians freely admitted to being taught and influenced by black musicians (and less freely admitted to outright theft of some of the music itself), but between racial bias and Jim Crow, the country music industry that developed became the realm of whites.

While race was a signifier of “authentic” country music during its development, a clean reputation was also a necessary component of the Opry personality, due to the gospel influences of hillbilly music and the evangelical Christianity that was prevalent in the South. Hank Williams, Sr., like Jimmie Rodgers, Chet Atkins, and Bill Monroe, had learned his craft from an African-American musician, a “black street singer named Rufe ‘Teetot’ Payne.”[27] Williams’s songwriting (and even his magnetic stage presence) leaned heavily on the blues and the themes of  “loneliness, desolation, and isolation.”[28] Offstage, Williams’s behavior was a public relations disaster for the Grand Ole Opry, and antithetical to the image the Opry strove to portray. His well-publicized volatile marriage to “Miss Audrey” and his addictions became a threat to his promising career, and due to his alcohol and painkiller abuse, Williams was fired from the Grand Ole Opry. As Thomas writes, “while the audience thirsted for Williams’s hurtin’ songs, they shunned his self-destructive habits.”[29] With his unfortunate and untimely death, however, Williams cemented his legacy with the Grand Ole Opry and country music, and in true evangelical Christian style, was elevated to a symbol of salvation. He became “the born-again icon of human fallibility, [and was] transformed from the artist scorned to the artist enshrined.”[30] The South loves a tragic figure and redemption arc, and Hank Williams, Sr. (although his redemption was somewhat manufactured), was a great example. As opposed to DeFord Bailey, Williams was able to bridge the gap between blues and hillbilly music because he was white, and more representative of Nashville, which “symbolized white, Christian values.”[31]

Having stemmed from vaudeville roots, the early days of the Grand Ole Opry included minstrelsy and blackface, and according to Louis Kyriakoudes, “nowhere were [the] tensions between modernity and tradition more evident than in the Opry’s two-fold emphasis on blackface minstrelsy and music of the ‘folk.’”[32] Perhaps in an effort to sanitize and absolve the Opry and country music of acts that reinforced racial privilege, “the role of blackface minstrelsy is usually mentioned then quickly dismissed as peripheral to early country music and the Opry.”[33] George Hay, who hosted the original Barn Dance on WSM, built his career on minstrelsy and blackface, and carried that over to WSM and the Opry with his persona “The Solemn Old Judge.”[34] Hay added the blackface minstrel team of Lee Roy “Lasses” White and Lee David “Honey” Wilds to the Opry in 1934, and Lasses and Honey “played upon rural southerners’ growing integration into a national consumer and political culture.”[35] In keeping with the popularity of New Deal programs in the South, the Lasses and Honey duo “also offered unstinting praise to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal programs.”[36] This was a highly astute move to further connect to the southern rural listeners who were the Opry’s biggest demographic. Later, in the 1970s, Wilds attempted to justify his blackface by saying that “‘Jamup and Honey were as popular with blacks as whites…We didn’t think we were making fun of black people.’”[37] Kyriakoudes concludes that this is the truth in Wilds’s eyes. Wilds “was careful about being both ‘authentic’ to his subjects and sympathetic almost to the point of identification.”[38] Therefore, while blackface minstrelsy was clearly exploitative, Wilds’s view can be seen as somewhat paternalistic, keeping within the South’s traditional racial hierarchy and patriarchal society.

Oftentimes (perhaps due to the legacy of Hank Williams, Sr.), songs about alcohol seem to go hand in hand with hillbilly music. However, “Prohibition evoked ambivalent responses among hillbilly singers—reflecting a similar ambivalence in the culture that produced them.”[39] This is seemingly contradictory to the temperance movements led by (primarily women) evangelicals in the South, but Prohibition was a political issue in addition to being a moral issue, and on most occasions, country music tended towards the apolitical. According to Bill Malone and Tracey Laird, “much more common [than songs about alcohol or drugs]...were the assertions of male ego and sexual prowess, preoccupations that were important to many men who were otherwise socially and economically emasculated during the Depression era.”[40] This musical outlet for men during the Depression was especially important in the patriarchal society of the South.

Although there was some progress by women in hillbilly music during the Depression, the rigid gender roles of the South and country music prevented them from gaining much headway. As Malone states, “negative images still clung to women who dared to forsake their ‘traditional’ roles and venture into an area formerly reserved for men.”[41] When they did have any sort of success, especially when performing in a group that included men, they had to “at least giv[e] the impression that they were related, by blood or marriage, to the musicians with whom they played.”[42] It would be years before women entertainers would break through gender norms. The second wave of feminism in the 1960s would enable artists like Loretta Lynn to remain wildly popular, even as she was writing and singing about controversial topics such as the birth control pill.

Not only did World War II transform the South and the rest of the country, it brought changes to country music as well. Malone writes, “America’s rural population was liberated by the war, especially in the South, where poor white and black tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and mill workers left their meager farms and jobs and trekked to the urban areas in a quest for better economic and social conditions.”[43] This increasing mobility of Southerners helped expand the popularity of country music and the Grand Ole Opry beyond the region. Increased interest from the music industry at large, as well as increased income opportunity, “exerted terrific pressure on country musicians to modify their styles and performing images in order to attract a potentially new and larger audience.”[44] The migration of Southerners to northern and midwestern cities sometimes created hillbilly enclaves within these cities, so the “proprietors of the ‘hillbilly bars and taverns, as well as the jukebox operators, found it advantageous to feature songs by Jimmie Davis, Ernest Tubb, and other country singers.’”[45] Southerners enlisted in the military during the war spread the popularity of country music as well. Young men not only brought their musical tastes along with them to the military bases, but they sometimes even brought instruments to play the tunes that reminded them of home. The spreading popularity of country music led RJ Reynolds to pair with the Grand Ole Opry for the Camel Caravan, a traveling show with Opry stars in order to lift the spirits of the military (and advertise their tobacco products as well). According to Malone, “by late 1942, [the Caravan] had traveled more than fifty thousand miles in nineteen states (as well as Panama) and presented 175 shows in sixty-eight army camps, hospitals, airfields, and naval and marine bases.”[46] The Caravan helped solidify that the Grand Ole Opry was quickly becoming the most consequential and influential country music show.[47] As country music spread during the war years, it was rapidly becoming “the folk music of the working classes.”[48] The activities of the National Life and Accident Insurance Company during World War II was also contributing to the popularity of the Opry. During the war, the insurance company had to find alternative ways of doing business and developing other streams of income, so it involved itself in the war effort by selling war bonds. Edward Craig “reasoned that his sales force had to be kept occupied during the war and this was a good way to do it.”[49] The subsequent War Bond rallies were another method to keep WSM and the Grand Ole Opry in the national consciousness.

In addition to the Grand Ole Opry gaining a stronghold during World War II, Opry musician Roy Acuff’s popularity soared during the war years as well. Acuff would also become instrumental in developing the recording and publishing industry in Nashville, further transforming the city. Hailing from East Tennessee, Acuff finally made it to the Opry in 1938 after several tries. He became the first true breakout vocalist of the Opry, and eventually, “‘Roy Acuff’ and ‘Grand Ole Opry’ became almost synonymous.”[50] Acuff’s popularity during World War II could be attributed to both his style of singing and his congenial personality. He (and by extension, hillbilly music) was popular because “the war ‘caused people to turn to simpler and more fundamental things,’”[51] and when Acuff “raised his voice in his mournful, mountain style, he seemed to suggest all the verities for which Americans believed they were fighting: home, mother, and God.”[52] That is, Roy Acuff was the Southern rural culture personified.

Not only was Acuff a talented musician, he was an astute businessman as well. Since he had to be in Nashville every Saturday night to play the Opry due to its rules, he was unable to take advantage of the moneymaking possibilities of playing live elsewhere on those popular nights. Therefore, he sold songbooks comprised of his own songs, which was a common way for musicians to supplement their income at the time.[53] During the 1940s, publishing industries “were centered in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles,”[54] and those publishers wanted to buy Acuff’s songs from him, but he refused. He realized that “if the New York and Chicago publishers wanted to buy them…They must be worth something.”[55] To take advantage of this opportunity, Acuff needed someone to help him with the publishing side of the business, so he tapped songwriter Fred Rose for assistance. He and Rose created the Acuff-Rose Publishing Company, which officially began on October 13, 1942.[56] Acuff-Rose gave rise to Music Row, which would cement Nashville as the center of the country music publishing and recording industry, and “significantly, [it] was the first country music business to operate independently of the Opry.”[57]

Post-war, WSM and the Grand Ole Opry looked to capitalize on their nationwide popularity. In 1946, the Opry brought “a group of national newspaper and magazine writers to Nashville for a June weekend junket.”[58] WSM and the Opry were well-prepared for the visit, with assigned staff learning small bits of information about the print media attendees in order to make them feel like part of the Opry family. Over the weekend, the writers were wined and dined and treated to Nashville-centric activities and experiences. They also attended the Opry themselves, and “WSM staffers were under instructions that ‘the Opry story is good enough as it is—Do not try to embellish!’”[59] The advent of television could have sounded the death knell for WSM and the Opry, but visionaries such as Jack DeWitt (WSM and Opry manager at the time) wanted to expand into television, and “he saw to it that WSM was the first Nashville broadcaster to obtain a television license in the summer of 1948.”[60] Unfortunately for WSM’s initial foray into television, the biggest issue was access to programming, because AT&T’s cable from New York only reached as far as Louisville, Kentucky (the closest terminal to Nashville). Edwin Craig insisted upon having a live feed, so WSM and its engineers planned relay stations from Louisville to Nashville and leased property from five different individuals to put up towers (the rolling terrain along the path necessitated more than one tower). As Craig Havighurst writes, “thus did WSM begin building the longest privately owned TV relay facility in the United States.”[61] Although WSM did have issues with the new medium of television, and luckily for the station, while television did not replace radio, it did create some changes at WSM. The station “recommitted…to the live-radio ethic, with the Grand Ole Opry as a cultural and commercial showpiece.”[62]

Viewing the rise of the Grand Ole Opry and country music through the lens of the South and its culture does bring forth the question of exploitation, which has been an issue in the region throughout its history. While WSM was created as Edwin Craig’s pet project, “the station was seen not so much as a corporate investment as simply an elaborate advertisement.”[63] Advertising can be seen as inherently exploitative, so from that standpoint, it did take advantage of the rural poor who became its largest audience. However, the majority of the musicians were rural southerners themselves, so WSM and the Opry did present opportunities for rural southerners, by allowing them to play the music they knew, and the music that was a vital part of their own culture. Even if performers were not from rural areas, they created personas that made them more relatable to the audience. The most well-known and successful example was Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon, better known by her stage name Minnie Pearl. Educated at the exclusive Ward-Belmont College in Nashville, she made a name for herself as the backwoods, homespun Pearl, whose 1.98 price tag on her hat and her vivacious “How-dy!” are ubiquitous symbols of not only Minnie Pearl, but of the Grand Ole Opry itself. An article in the Chicago Tribune written by Casey Burko, who travels to Nashville in an attempt to understand the appeal of the Grand Ole Opry, relays a story that is a testament to her popularity. Burko is escorted backstage at the Grand Ole Opry by Miss Pearl herself, and he writes, “I become, just for a while, an object of undisguised envy among the other performers and guests: The one-and-only Minnie Pearl is holding my arm, her head tilted towards mine as she whispers to me, she in her best country dress and I in my suit.”[64] Cannon as her alter ego Minnie Pearl can hardly be seen as exploitative. Although she came from a privileged background, she was a native Tennessean, and would become deeply involved in philanthropic efforts in Nashville, including the cancer research center that bears her given name.

Whether or not the Grand Ole Opry and country music were either exploiting or exalting their listeners, it likely did not matter much to the listeners themselves. It allowed them to hear people like themselves sing songs about their lives. As Paul Hemphill writes of his father, “the music was his music, and he liked it, and it did something for him when he heard it, and that is what music is supposed to be all about.”[65] It is no surprise, then, that the Grand Ole Opry and country music, both products of the southern culture that connected the region to its past, followed the evolution of the South as a whole. In good times and bad, they have reflected life in the South, celebrating joys and lamenting defeats, and will likely do so as long as they exist.

Photos from Left to Right:

1: Joe Haupt, Vintage Postcard - WSM - America's Tallest Radio Tower Located In Nashville, Tennessee, C.T. Art-Colortone, Made By Curt Teich & Company, 878 Feet Tall (1932 - 1939), https://www.flickr.com/photos/51764518@N02/51926365913

2: Daniel Schwen, Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, Tennessee, November 22, 2007, Photography. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ryman_Auditorium.jpg

3: Marilyn K. Morton, DeFord Bailey, 1970s, Photography. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DeFord_Bailey.JPEG

4:Michelle Harris, April 30, 2022 photography, Nashville, Tennessee.

Notes

[1] Craig Havighurst, Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), xvi.

[2] Charles K. Wolfe, A Good-Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry (Nashville: Country Music Foundation Press, 1999), 5.

[3] Charles K. Wolfe, A Good-Natured Riot, 5.

[4] Louis M. Kyriakoudes, “The Grand Ole Opry and the Urban South.” Southern Cultures 10, no. 1 (Spring 2004), 68

[5] Charles K. Wolfe, A Good-Natured Riot, 26.

[6] Charles K. Wolfe, A Good-Natured Riot, 29.

[7] Charles K. Wolfe, A Good-Natured Riot, 29.

[8] Charles K. Wolfe, A Good-Natured Riot, 31.

[9] Charles K. Wolfe, A Good-Natured Riot, 41.

[10] Charles K. Wolfe, A Good-Natured Riot, 20.

[11] Charles K. Wolfe, A Good-Natured Riot, 21.

[12] Paul K. Conkin, “Evangelicals, Fugitives, and Hillbillies: Tennessee’s Impact on American National Culture.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 54, no. 3 (Fall 1995), 266.

[13] Paul K. Conkin, “Evangelicals, Fugitives, and Hillbillies,” 266.

[14] Jessica Janice Jones, “DeFord Bailey.” Black Music Research Journal 10, no. 1 (Spring 1990), 29.

[15] Charles K. Wolfe, A Good-Natured Riot, 120.

[16] Charles K. Wolfe, A Good-Natured Riot, 120.

[17] Charles K. Wolfe, A Good-Natured Riot, 120.

[18] Charles K. Wolfe, A Good-Natured Riot, 125.

[19] Don Hemphill, The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2015), 166.

[20] Don Hemphill, The Nashville Sound, 167.

[21] Charles K. Wolfe, A Good-Natured Riot, 128.

[22] Louis M. Kyriakoudes, “The Grand Ole Opry and the Urban South,” 82.

[23] Jerry Pentecost, Ketch Secor, and Molly Tuttle, songwriters, “DeFord Rides Again,” Paint This Town (ATO Records), 2022, compact disc, track 9.

[24] Jewly Hight, “At Long Last, DeFord Bailey Gets a Street in His Name,” WPLN.org, May 19, 2023, https://wpln.org/post/at-long-last-deford-bailey-gets-a-street-in-his-name/

[25] Rebecca Thomas, “There’s a Whole Lot O’ Color in the ‘White Man’s’ Blues: Country Music’s Selective Memory and the Challenge of Identity,” The Midwest Quarterly 38, no. 1 (September 22, 1996), 73-4.

[26] Rebecca Thomas, “There’s a Whole Lot O’ Color,” 75.

[27] Rebecca Thomas, “There’s a Whole Lot O’ Color,” 77.

[28] Rebecca Thomas, “There’s a Whole Lot O’ Color,” 77.

[29] Rebecca Thomas, “There’s a Whole Lot O’ Color,” 80.

[30] Rebecca Thomas, “There’s a Whole Lot O’ Color,” 80.

[31] Rebecca Thomas, “There’s a Whole Lot O’ Color,” 78.

[32] Louis M. Kyriakoudes, “The Grand Ole Opry and the Urban South,” 76.

[33] Louis M. Kyriakoudes, “The Grand Ole Opry and the Urban South,” 77.

[34] Louis M. Kyriakoudes, “The Grand Ole Opry and the Urban South,” 78.

[35] Louis M. Kyriakoudes, “The Grand Ole Opry and the Urban South,” 78.

[36] Louis M. Kyriakoudes, “The Grand Ole Opry and the Urban South,” 79.

[37] Louis M. Kyriakoudes, “The Grand Ole Opry and the Urban South,” 79.

[38] Louis M. Kyriakoudes, “The Grand Ole Opry and the Urban South,” 79.

[39] Bill C. Malone and Tracey E. W. Laird, Country Music USA (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020), 124.

[40] Bill C. Malone and Tracey E. W. Laird, Country Music USA, 125.

[41] Bill C. Malone and Tracey E. W. Laird, Country Music USA, 140.

[42] Bill C. Malone and Tracey E. W. Laird, Country Music USA, 141.

[43] Bill C. Malone and Tracey E. W. Laird, Country Music USA, 208.

[44] Bill C. Malone and Tracey E. W. Laird, Country Music USA, 209.

[45] Bill C. Malone and Tracey E. W. Laird, Country Music USA, 214.

[46] Bill C. Malone and Tracey E. W. Laird, Country Music USA, 215.

[47] Bill C. Malone and Tracey E. W. Laird, Country Music USA, 217.

[48] Don Hemphill, The Nashville Sound, 55.

[49] Don Cusic, “The Emergence of the Country Music Business: 1945-1955.” Studies in Popular Culture 17, no. 2 (April 1995), 23.

[50] Bill C. Malone and Tracey E. W. Laird, Country Music USA, 224.

[51] Bill C. Malone and Tracey E. W. Laird, Country Music USA, 227.

[52] Bill C. Malone and Tracey E. W. Laird, Country Music USA, 227.

[53] Don Cusic, “The Emergence of the Country Music Business,” 21.

[54] Don Cusic, “The Emergence of the Country Music Business,” 21.

[55] Don Cusic, “The Emergence of the Country Music Business,” 22.

[56] Don Cusic, “The Emergence of the Country Music Business,” 23.

[57] Don Cusic, “The Emergence of the Country Music Business,” 27.

[58] Craig Havighurst, Air Castle of the South, 142.

[59] Craig Havighurst, Air Castle of the South, 143.

[60] Craig Havighurst, Air Castle of the South, 149.

[61] Craig Havighurst, Air Castle of the South, 162.

[62] Craig Havighurst, Air Castle of the South, 177.

[63] Charles K. Wolfe, A Good Natured Riot, 5.

[64] Casey Burko, “City Boy Goes to the Grand Ole Opry,” Chicago Tribune, June 18, 1989, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1989-06-18-8902100336-story.html.

[65] Don Hemphill, The Nashville Sound, 13.