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Air Castle of the South
Started by the National Life and Accident Insurance Company in 1925, WSM became one of the most influential and exceptional radio stations in the history of broadcasting and country music. WSM gave Nashville the moniker \"Music City USA\" as well as a rich tradition of music, news, and broad-based entertainment. With the rise of country music broadcasting and recording between the 1920s and '50s, WSM, Nashville, and country music became inseparable, stemming from WSM's launch of the Grand Ole Opry, popular daily shows like Noontime Neighbors, and early morning artist-driven shows such as Hank Williams on Mother's Best Flour. _x000B__x000B_Sparked by public outcry following a proposal to pull country music and the Opry from WSM-AM in 2002, Craig Havighurst scoured new and existing sources to document the station's profound effect on the character and self-image of Nashville. Introducing the reader to colorful artists and businessmen from the station's history, including Owen Bradley, Minnie Pearl, Jim Denny, Edwin Craig, and Dinah Shore, the volume invites the reader to reflect on the status of Nashville, radio, and country music in American culture._x000B_
eBook
A Code and a Concern
Bob Cooper wanted the world to know that the 1960 DJ convention was on the level. The general manager of WSM radio knew that Congress was investigating record and radio ethics and that rock DJs like Alan Freed were being pilloried on a national stage. Besides outright payola (money in exchange for airplay of specific records), the government had accused record labels of financing junkets by DJs to music conventions. To avoid guilt by association, Cooper invited two leading congressional payola investigators to Nashville that November. He disclosed that WSM had spent about $16,000 from its publicity budget on the
Book Chapter
The Balance of Power Has Shifted
Americans lived with the idea of television, the bewitching vision of it, for decades before the TVs themselves arrived like an army of flying saucers in department stores across the nation. Even before WSM radio went on the air, popular-science magazines showed people gathered around color television sets, and in 1928 Charles Jenkins, an inventor in Wheaton, Maryland, was issued the first TV broadcast license in the United States. In 1930 Jenkins broadcast the first television commercial, and the BBC began regular TV transmissions, even though there were scarcely any television receivers to pick them up. Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir
Book Chapter
Air Castle of the South
Late in the fall of 1933, WSM transmitter engineer Jack Montgomery stirred himself at about ten minutes to five in the afternoon and left the white transmitter house in the meadow in Brentwood. The sun was setting early now, heralding the nightly coming of the skywave that would amplify WSM’s signal over thousands of miles. The tower soared above his head, poised as if for take off, caught in the sunset like a tall flame against a darkening sky. Gravel crunched beneath Montgomery’s feet as he walked out the gate and down Calendar Road toward the road cut. A half
Book Chapter
We Must Serve These People Tonight
With two additions between 1929 and 1934, the National Life Home Office grew into a muscular, U-shaped edifice just off Nashville’s Capitol Hill. Out front, Union Street dropped down a block to the Hermitage and Andrew Jackson hotels and the grand quadrangle that was War Memorial Plaza. And from WSM’s fifth-floor studios, it was easy to see the cylindrical cupola of the capitol building just one block away. A visitor coming up Union Street would have seen National Life across a sunken garden, watched over by a bronze tribute to “Confederate Womanhood”—two women in Greek robes ministering to a
Book Chapter
The Whole Complex Is a Studio
Jack DeWitt’s retirement and Craig’s death coincided with the most radical changes yet for National Life. Chairman Dan Brooks and president Bill Weaver had both climbed to prominence through the company’s investment division, managing the billions of dollars in accumulated reserves insurers have to carry. Now they were as powerful as any businessmen in the state of Tennessee. That, combined with the trend of the day toward corporate diversification, made the company more interested than ever in new lines of business. In 1968, National Life merged with Third National Bank, under the name NLT, for National Life Third. A few
Book Chapter
One of Our Boys Shoots the Moon
By 1943 troops nearly outnumbered civilians in greater Nashville, and the city was frequently overrun with soldiers in training or in transit. They filled the hotels, the bars, the theaters, and the streets. Sometimes, when space simply ran out, they slept in parks or on the steps of the post office on Broadway. Many of them loved the Grand Ole Opry, and olive uniforms became as common in War Memorial Auditorium as dresses and overalls. The only problem was they were punishing the governor’s beautiful theater, and Harry Stone had to answer for it. “By now I had developed a
Book Chapter
Jack, We Got a Real Problem
“Howdy you’nses! This is your bald-headed, hand-spanked, corn-fed, gravy-sopping, snaggle-toothed, cross-eyed old country boy, Eddie Hill, telling you he crochiates your cards and letters and is a hawg about you!”
In coat and tie, surrounded by records, he sat before an open microphone and a pair of industrial-weight turntables in a small studio on the fifth floor of the National Life building on a winter’s night in 1952. Wide-eyed and wired with enthusiasm, “Smilin’” Eddie Hill sounded like nothing that had ever been broadcast from the Air Castle of the South. He was a thirty-year-old hillbilly singer, instrumentalist, and humorist
Book Chapter
It Helped Everybody in the Long Run
Harry Stone felt betrayed. Over nearly twenty years he’d managed WSM from a part-time local station to a national powerhouse with a signature show. Just one year before he’d been named vice president and general manager of WSM. And then, without warning, old man Craig made Jack DeWitt his boss, at a much higher salary. It was but one reason that by 1947, Stone looked weary, with deep creases in his cheeks and forehead and gray streaks in his hair. He oversaw a ten-person staff of his own plus sixteen in production and a small army of sometimes unpredictable musicians.
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