Neither Craig Shelburne nor Brenda Colladay had seen the final version of their 350-page project before I handed them my advance copy in the studio.
“Is it heavier than you thought it would be?” I asked.
Shelburne thought so — but Colladay deadpanned: “It’s not quite the weapon I’d hoped, but, you know, it’s pretty sturdy.”
As the Grand Ole Opry marks its 100th anniversary, most aspects of the celebration are events that you can attend or tune into. But this new book, which weaves the live country music show’s entire eventful history into a unified narrative, is one that you can actually hold in your hands.
It’s not nothing that these two researchers created such a hefty volume out of the Opry’s ephemeral performances.
“Putting on a show anywhere from one-to-five times a week makes things pretty crazy,” said Colladay. “And it makes it difficult to document everything as you go, especially [since] for most of the time, it was a live radio show only, so there aren’t recordings. Documents weren’t saved. We don’t know who played every show.”
She initially took up the challenge of organizing artifacts when, on the heels of her graduate work in museum studies, she was hired as the first curator for the Opry, its radio home WSM and its former downtown home the Ryman Auditorium in 1997.
“I think they really did not know what a curator did or or what they would have me do,” she said, eliciting a chuckle from Shelburne next to her. “So I just kind of jumped in there. They were really looking for someone to dust the exhibits.”
She did far more than that, setting a standard for presenting Opry history to its visitors. Eventually, she even got in a rowboat to help rescue precious items from the 2010 Nashville flood.
“Maintenance people started pulling all of the glass out of the exhibit cases,” she recalled, “and we started focusing getting anything that might be sitting on the bottom of a case, like a guitar on a stand. The first thing I grabbed, I will say, is Minnie Pearl’s Mary Janes that she wore for over 50 years on on the Opry and all over the world.”
Shelburne had attended the Opry many times and covered plenty of its performers in his three decades as a Nashville music journalist. And he was tapped as primary author of the official centennial book, working alongside Colladay, who’d moved on from the Opry to numerous other projects but remains a recognized expert. They were given just 18 months to pull it off.
“We met for breakfast in East Nashville and talked it through how we were going to do it,” he remembered. “Brenda gave me a pep talk and we both just kind of jumped right in.”
They scoured the Opry archives, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s oral history collection, digitized newspapers and books devoted to individual Opry figures, like the recently reissued volume on DeFord Bailey. They also collected loads of firsthand accounts.
“We talked to artists that don’t always give interviews,” said Shelburne. “We talked to Barbara Mandrell for a pretty good long time.”
I can vouch from experience that’s a big get. They went to Dolly Parton’s compound, and sat down with Reba McEntire too. Almost all of the country celebrities they asked were willing to share their Opry memories
But Colladay says their research didn’t fixate only on fame: “A lot of times the the story gets told through the biggest stars. [But] the stories don’t only happen to the people who went on to have their own TV shows or biopics.”
In reality, the majority of the performers who’ve been on the Opry never became household names.
Shelburne chased down the story of how yarn-spinning, old-time banjo player Mike Snider — who calls himself the Opry’s most obscure member — first made it on.
“Mike had won a banjo pickin’ contest,” Shelburne recounted. “He came back to his hometown, and through some connections [with people at the Opry, they decided, ‘Let’s have him play on a slow Saturday night, and we’ll give tickets away to everybody in his hometown.’ They did it kind of as a publicity stunt, and it totally worked.”
Shelburne and Colladay made sure to also mention the numerous times in the last 100 years when it seemed like the Opry itself might not work any longer. A decade into its tenure, it caused tension with the life insurance company that founded WSM and housed the studio where audiences clogged the hallways, waiting to watch live Opry broadcasts on Saturday nights.
“Some executives showed up wanting to do some work late at night and couldn’t get into the building,” related Colladay, “because people thought they were cutting in line.
“That was the end of audiences for the Opry for a while.”
Because the Opry did keep going, through changes in venue and technology, and the rise of new generations and styles of country music, there were inevitable growing pains. Shelburne pointed to the time, in the ‘50s, when management took issue with the stage wear of young rockabilly star Wanda Jackson.
“There’s a story in there about Wanda Jackson wearing a dress with spaghetti straps,” he said. “And they made her wear a jacket over the shoulder.” At issue, he joked, was a conservative standard of feminine propriety: “Ladies should not be showing their shoulders on a radio show.”
“There’s definitely some bumps along the way in this history,” reflected Shelburne. “It was always my intention to make sure it’s a history that tells it the way it actually happened. ”
That also required cutting through the lore that’s calcified around Opry tales that have been told and retold, said Colladay: “Because if the story is that somebody made their Opry debut and had seven encores, but there’s not a recording, you know how those things build over time and get repeated. When it’s often-told stories, hyperbole sets in.”
But not everyone’s been around to hear this stuff. And Shelburne kept that in mind when he was writing the book.
“I got here in the ’90s,” he said. “Those legends were still alive. I got to meet some of them, take my picture with them at the Opry, and I loved it. I go to the Opry now, and there’s a new wave of members who weren’t around to see that. And so I guess in my heart, part of my hope was that those new members can read this book and understand why I love it so much.”
On Air - 90.3 WPLN-FM