Just got back from Music City USA and had a chance to take in the show from the Ryman Auditorium, home of the Opry for more than 50 years, a place that's revered as "the mother church of country music." Fun stuff.The Opry history is well worth looking into. It started as a live radio show (still is) and each show was recorded direct to lacquer discs. The discs were sent out to country music radio stations across the U.S. that the original broadcast couldn't reach. Those stations would play the records and the show would come out "live" in those markets, usually a week after it originally aired.
The 2010 show kicks off with a weak Minnie Pearl impersonator (well, maybe Minnie was weak herself) who lays out the ground rules amidst some stale jokes. The gist is it's a 2-hour show broken into four parts, each with its own host (the night I was there they were John Conlee; Little Jimmy Dickens, a novelty song singer; Marty Stuart, who looked closest to what I picture as a modern-day conutry singer with 80's New Wave hair, tight leather pants and a Nudie jacket; and Mike Snyder) who plays a couple of songs and then acts as emcee for several other bands. In between a live announcer standing on stage left reads ads for the sponsors (Martha White's Muffins, Bass Pro Shops, and Dollar General Stores... can you tell the market this show is aimed at?) and while that's going on the stagehands reconfigure the stage for the next act. The stage announcer also let's you know when to applaud (for the older big hits you probably dont know) and when to yippee! so the radio audience can tell it's live. They've got the timing down perfect (there's a clock you can see to track them) so each half hour ends with enough time to get a last promo in as the curtains close, then reopen just as the new host takes the stage.
And make no mistake about it, these folks can play and sing. The Opry house band supports all the acts and there wasn't a fumble or missed note all night. Riders in the Sky, a Sons of the Pioneers-type cowboy music outfit, was the highlight of the first set with a dusty meandering version of "Tumblin' Tumbleweeds," but the women in the crowd were partial to tall blue-eyed, white-teethed Clay Walker, who closed the set. Set two was bluegrassed focused with fine fiddle from the Virginia Boys. In set three Marty Stuart brought out Opry stalwart Connie Smith, a 69-year-old small-town housewife-turned singer who enjoyed her greatest success in the early 1970s. They were followed by an inexplicably popular Christian music trio of women who had the pipes but sang pitifully hackneyed "feminist" tunes that would have been trite in 1960. Seventy-five-year-old Jim Ed Brown, who got his start in a trio with his sisters on Ernest Tubb's radio program and the groundbreaking Louisana Hayride, highlighted the final half-hour with a "I Love You Because," a favorite of Presley fans that Brown improved be skipping the spoken section.
You don't have to like country music to enjoy a night at the Grand Ole Opry -- but it helps if you do. The format is the same of old, mixing unknown talent with established or waning stars as well as up-and-comers. It's a true slice of Americana that's worth a visit should you ever hit Nashville. A word of caution: The Opry is broadcast from the Ryman only from December through April. The rest of the year it's from a modern stage in Opryland -- so check out the Ryman if you can. If you want to see what it looks and sounds like check out Neil Young's Heart of Gold concert DVD which was filmed live at the Ryman.
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