The ultimate symbol of the Grand Ole Opry’s longevity is carefully preserved and ever present. But the hundreds of thousands of visitors who take in the country variety show each year can’t spot it from the Grand Ole Opry House pews. They can only get a glimpse by taking the guided tour that includes an on-stage photo op at the microphone — the same one that broadcasts Opry stars’ singing and stage banter to AM radio listeners. It’s when visitors stand in the spot where the performers do that they can see it: a 6-foot sphere of battered, blond wooden flooring.
A half century ago, that circle was cut from the stage of the Opry’s previous home, the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville, then transported to the suburban theater that’s been its primary venue ever since. Between those two locations, artists of so many different styles, sensibilities and generations have performed on those floorboards that collectively comprise country music’s most lasting and defining lineage.
“There’s maybe some Hank Williams or Patsy Cline DNA somewhere,” Gina Keltner, the Opry’s associate producer of talent, says of the significance of that antique circle of stage. She wasn’t around when either of those foundational country figures were on the show, but as caretaker of present-day Opry lineups, she’s accustomed to hearing the performers she books speak of that stage as sacred ground.
The Opry has aired every Saturday night for the last 100 years, which makes it the longest running live radio show in the world. When it was first broadcast from Nashville on November 28, 1925, country music wasn’t yet a recognized genre. But radio barn dances were beginning to take off elsewhere, so local radio station WSM launched its own as part of what was initially a grab bag of musical programming intended to bolster the reputation of its parent company, National Life and Accident Insurance. (The station’s call letters stood for the motto We Shield Millions.)
The talent the Opry drew from the surrounding area had backgrounds in older forms of entertainment, like vaudeville in the case of yarn-spinning old-time banjo picker Uncle Dave Macon and the hoedown circuit in the case of harmonica virtuoso DeFord Bailey, whose family carried on the Black string band tradition. The show’s mix went on to include an array of rube comics, dancers, Appalachian balladeers, family harmony singers and sentimental crooners.
The Opry was a site of potent conservatism — full of songs romanticizing the good, old days and prone to reinforcing the color line by ultimately dismissing Bailey and going the next half-century without a Black cast member — but also of innovation. It was where Bill Monroe developed his hard-driving, new bluegrass style, and downhome stars Roy Acuff and Minnie Pearl became iconic personalities of a new variety. Over time, performers who played the Opry stage helped define who and what fit beneath the big tent of country music.
Since the Opry played to in-person audiences and AM radio listeners simultaneously, its rowdy crowds outgrew a succession of Nashville venues over its first two decades before landing at the Ryman in 1943. And as its popularity and profile grew further — especially with the massive nighttime reach of its clear channel signal and its national syndication — it had the juice to catapult performers to stardom, to the extent that getting on the show was viewed as essential to a country artist getting somewhere. People working in the Opry’s orbit started recording studios and publishing companies that laid the foundation of the modern, centralized country music industry in Nashville. And that industry recognized that the future of country radio was DJs spinning the latest studio recordings.
By the time the Opry moved to its newly constructed digs at the Grand Ole Opry House in 1974, situated within the Opryland USA theme park, it was evolving into a bridge between pop culture and cultural preservation. In the years to come, Opry priorities would further diverge from an industry whose investment in country legends tended to wane once their commercial relevance declined.
Artists’ relationships to the Opry changed too. Elders like Acuff and Pearl anchored its lineups with a sense of devotion, protective of the show’s legacy, while rising stars like Kathy Mattea, who first topped the country charts in the mid-’80s, appeared on the show as a way to honor and uplift the institution.
“There have been seasons when the Opry was the vehicle for the artists to get known and widen their range,” she reflects now. “And then there were seasons when the artists helped the Opry keep its momentum.”
The Opry’s own priorities regarding the continuity of its lineups have evolved considerably. Keltner, along with vice president and executive producer Dan Rogers and the rest of its current leadership, want Opry members to function as a multigenerational family with its matriarchs and patriarchs.
“I don’t think we’ll ever have another generation like we had with Porter Wagoner and Jim Ed Brown and Jeannie Seely as far as their work ethic and their readiness and willingness to be here on a weekly basis,” Keltner says of elders who’ve passed away during her tenure.”But we’re in a different season where some of our Opry members who were newcomers, they are now taking over in that legendary role.”
She offers Vince Gill, who almost never says no to playing the Opry when he’s in town, as an example.
Wagoner, Seely and Brown, who had a group called The Browns with his sisters, joined the Opry during its Ryman era. Back then, management would decide an artist should be on the show and make them part of the cast on the spot, which carried an obligation to perform 26 times a year. There was no ceremony involved. By the time Gill joined in 1991, the Opry enlisted veteran members to make presentations honoring new ones, and the rites and rituals have only grown from there. Now Opry inductions are preceded by public invitations and accompanied by a trophy-size replica of the show mic, all delivered by peers and predecessors with whom the inductee feels close. Attendance requirements have relaxed considerably. Even giving a debut performance on the Opry, a step that comes long before membership, is an event.
This far into the show’s history, the late legends it pays tribute to are great in number and towering in reputation. The industry itself has evolved toward a more high-volume, virality-replicating business model. So the selection of new members is a more involved decision. Keltner says the show’s leadership still wants to catch country stars in the making, but needs more than buzz to go on.
“It blows my mind the number of artists that are out there,” she marvels. “And a lot of them do look the same, sound the same, not discrediting their music at all — it’s all good music. But it is hard to set yourself apart these days.”
In earlier eras, she argues, “no one else was a Johnny Cash or a Dolly [Parton]. Everyone had such a unique style, and they’re now icons. So it will be interesting to see, among this class of country music [hitmakers], who really does rise to the surface and become those next icons.”
That’s the standard that Lainey Wilson — the biggest current country superstar to join Opry membership in half a decade — has been aiming for. She grew up in a tiny hamlet in north Louisiana and made her first visit to the Grand Ole Opry on a family trip to Nashville in 2001. Though she was just nine years old, witnessing a lineup full of legends — including Little Jimmy Dickens, who first appeared on the show in the late ’40s — put her in a serious state of mind.
Wilson recalls her mom checking on her during the show with a hint of concern: “‘Lainey, are you having fun?’ Because I wasn’t up dancing around. And it was because I was doing homework. I was studying. I was just paying close attention to their every move,” she says. “Even from [the perspective of] an outsider looking in when I was nine years old, it felt like if you are a member of the Opry, you have country music’s stamp of approval. You were inducted into the family. I knew that if you were playing the Opry stage, that you weren’t just a flash in a pan.”
Wilson moved to Nashville — famously staying in a camper that didn’t always have heat or hot water to keep her overhead down — in 2011. But it took nearly a decade for her to develop the qualities that would set her up for durable country stardom. She’d learned from predecessors like Reba McEntire that she should shape her rural, rodeoing upbringing and youthful dreams of being a country singer into a robust, relatable artistic identity.
Wilson worked at writing songs that conveyed emotional backbone through downhome imagery. And she released a couple of largely overlooked albums before finding a producer, Jay Joyce, who helped her greatly punch up her sound, so that it felt like a hard country band with a penchant for Southern boogie rock and lively, eccentric departures. Arriving at her signature vocal attack was equally important — the difference between simply being a strong singer and an instantly recognizable one who delivers hearty, full-bodied performances, accentuates her hard-edged twang and applies her expressive abilities to frisky flourishes and vividly melancholic curlicues.
“I had tried big notes and things like that, but I had never put the pedal down and really just went for it,” she explains.
Another thing Wilson eventually realized she needed was an identifiable look, like her forebears: “If you could tell who somebody is from their silhouette — you think of Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Dolly Parton — then you got something that people will be able to latch onto.”
Wilson opted for a cowboy hat and bell bottoms. “People looked at me like I had four heads,” she laughs, “because they were not in style. And I said, ‘I’m just trying to get people’s attention.'”
It certainly worked on Keltner and her colleagues when they had Wilson come in for an informal Opry audition in 2019.
“Oh gosh, I remember Lainey so well,” says Keltner. “She did just stand out. The minute she opened her mouth, her look, everything was just something that you wouldn’t forget.”
They agreed it was time for Wilson to make her Opry debut in February 2020. She was about to blow up commercially too, earning radio hits, an acting role in the popular Western TV drama Yellowstone and a Wrangler sponsorship. She built up to headlining sold-out arenas, collecting her industry’s top trophy, Country Music Association entertainer of the year, and even hosting the CMA Awards.
But for Wilson, none of that overshadowed her official 2024 induction to the Opry, and the involvement of her heroes. It was McEntire who issued the invite and Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood who did the honors. When the married superstars made their presentation on the Opry stage, they both gushed about how much Wilson “gets it.” Brooks prophesied longevity: “If it’s up to you — which I think it will be — your career’s gonna be as long as you want.”
Wilson’s operating at a level of fame that comes with all-consuming demands, and they could very well increase as she zeroes in on expanding her fan base overseas. But her longtime manager Mandelyn Monchick says her client still makes sure to get back to the Opry, which pays a pittance compared with Wilson’s other gigs, as often as she can.
“It’s a little bit because it’s home,” Monchick says, “and a little because it’s a respect thing and [she’s] making sure she pays tribute to the people that paved the way for her.”
The Opry’s current management has also sought to remedy what it views as the oversights of previous regimes by belatedly inducting artists who’ve displayed their commitment to the institution. Keltner considers it one of the “most gratifying” aspects of her job “to see those who might’ve thought they would never be members, yet they were still devoted to this place, and to make them members.”
Of the 21 artists the Opry’s inducted since 2020, the vast majority are well beyond their country hitmaking eras, or never had that type of profile in the first place. That’s as clear a sign as any that stewardship of the show’s lineage has become central to its mission.
In October, Mattea became the Opry’s most recent addition. The fact that membership came so late in her career — four decades beyond her heyday as a mainstream recording artist — made her see it differently than she would’ve early on.
“I appreciate it more now,” she says. “And to have it come now with the whole body of work that I have, it’s like someone patting you on the back and saying, ‘You did good.'”
The approach that led to Mattea’s ’80s breakthrough also prepared her for eventual Opry candidacy. The slick urban cowboy fare that characterized the start of that decade was regarded as disposable, but she helped usher in a movement of country troubadours who favored thoughtful, narrative-oriented songwriting. She favored naturalistic production and selected songs that captured intimate human interactions. Over the years, her catalog has held up.
And after getting her start as a chameleonic demo singer, Mattea gave special attention to fleshing out her own vocal style.
“I would sit and I would say lyrics,” she recalls, “and then I would try to sing them and feel the same way I felt when I said them. And that was when people stopped saying, ‘You sound like Anne Murray. You sound like Karen Carpenter.’ All of a sudden, all that fell away and I had my own way into a song.”
Her vocal hallmarks were folk modesty, fully present perception and a sumptuous, even tone.
Over the last half-century of the Opry’s existence, countless artists have moved from youth through middle age and into their golden years on its stage. There was a time, under a different leadership regime in the mid-200os, when elders began to feel sidelined and a singer with a 50-year tenure on the show named Stonewall Jackson sued, and won, for age discrimination. Outside of that period, though, the Opry has been just about the least ageist platform in country music, providing the genre with pivotal templates for older artists sustaining their performing careers: how to keep on as their voices get creaky; how to honor the audience’s desire to hear them endlessly reprise their signature numbers.
Those were matters Mattea worked through herself during her many years guesting on the Opry. After singing her hits “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” countless times, she realized she’d begun to do it on autopilot and “gave myself a talking to.” And when menopause radically altered her vocal range and made certain notes seem inaccessible, she spoke openly about the labor she took on with a vocal coach to relearn how to use her instrument.
When Mattea placed her ankle boots within the venerable circle on stage to finally accept her Opry membership on a Saturday night last month, she experienced it as “a beautiful symbol of continuity.” And a small, rectangular, gold name tag bearing her name was added to an ever-expanding backstage gallery that includes all 200-plus members spanning the first century of the Opry’s existence.
And the value of being in that lineage won’t be lost on the next 200, says Keltner.
“They’ll want to be on that wall to not just be significant today, but to know that hopefully a hundred years from now, they’re still going to be known as a Grand Ole Opry member. That’s never going to go away.”
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