The Brand New Opry? Maybe.
In its 75th year, the Grand Ole Opry, America’s longest-running live weekly radio show and a live-show institution, is instituting substantial changes to meet the city’s increasing entertainment competition and the economic doldrums afflicting country music.
Under the leadership of new manager Pete Fisher, who is rooted in music-publishing and artist-management operations rather than Opry tradition, the old show recently departed its lavish suburban Grand Ole Opry House this month and temporarily returned to the historic Ryman Auditorium downtown in an effort to boost the public consciousness of the Opry.
And the venture, taking the Opry to the doorsteps of two of its young corporate sisters, the National Hockey League’s Nashville Predators and the trendy Wildhorse Saloon, is just the beginning. Fisher says that in June, the Opry will begin 14 months of events to celebrate the Opry’s 75th anniversary.
In addition, for the first time in decades, the show is reaching out to Nashville’s Music Row by offering more performance slots to current and up-and-coming stars.
Why is all of this necessary? The Opry’s focus has traditionally been on history and older performers, so its audience has tended to be heavily weighted toward older people. To remain viable in the competitive Nashville entertainment market, it needs to attract a younger crowd.
“If we want to make the statement that we are where country music has come from and where it is and where it’s going, we have to present an event that is respectful of the history in the way we produce the event but very mindful (of) what it takes to entertain,” Fisher says.
Mike Dungan, senior vice president and general manager of Arista-Nashville Records, sees the Opry as a “major treasure” and piece of Americana comparable to, say, Wrigley Field in Chicago; it’s a place tourists should seek out and one whose continued existence “will guarantee the preservation of our art form.”
But when tourists do go see it, he says, “they need to see a show they can relate to,” meaning one in which longtime Opry cast members “Little Jimmy Dickens and Billy Walker [are] there right beside [current country stars] Brad Paisley and Alan Jackson.”
This October the Opry will celebrate its 75th anniversary. It first aired in the dawn of American radio as one of several vaudeville-style, large-cast “barn dance” programs to appeal to the nation’s farm population, and it has managed to retain its historic character and survive American urbanization, spawning Nashville’s music industry in the process.
But it hasn’t survived the onset of rock `n’ roll and periodic economic downturns without changes, says Steve Buchanan, president of Gaylord’s Opry Group of entertainment businesses. He says interested observers can expect a continuance of the Opry’s hereditary “process of change.”
Those will include adding 10 more members to the show’s 70-act regular cast, upping the production’s guest-artist performance ratio to 40 percent from 10 or 15 percent, and possibly taking abbreviated versions of the production to college campuses.
The move to dramatically increase the percentage of guest performances is “tremendous,” Dungan says, because “I think they need to do a much better job of tapping into younger stars and making it more relate-able to a younger audience.”
In the Opry’s history, the most profound and precedent-setting change came early on, in the middle to late 1930s, when its advertising-minded management broadened its cast from all-but-anonymous bib-overalled string bands to such “star” vocalists as Roy Acuff and Bill Monroe and, later, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn.
This strategy has kept the show alive but has also allowed the Opry to become a living showcase of the history of recorded country music. As Fisher notes, its ranks now includevirtually every kind of country music from bluegrass to Cajun to western to contemporary, and every era from the ’30s to the new millennium.
But its audience hasn’t followed. Brian Hughes, program manager at the TNN country cable network, says that although the Saturday evening time-block anchored by a one-hour Opry segment normally pulls comparatively strong cable ratings of 1.4 or 1.5, or an average audience of 1.5 million, that audience 82 percent is 55 or older. Hughes says the Opry’s televiewing audience is so much older than the network’s other viewership that Saturday evening is virtually “an island unto itself.”
This age gap clearly is one of the problems Fisher hopes to challenge with such innovations as taking Opry shows to college campuses.
“College kids like to be into what’s not commercially in,” Fisher notes. “Even though the Opry includes commercially successful artists, a good portion of our show relates to artists that are not in the commercial spotlight.”
The Opry has endured over the decades partly because it has had the strong corporate backing of an insurance company that owned the radio station on which it was born. But there have been several cracks in that structure in the past couple of years.
Now a property of the Oklahoma-based Gaylord communications combine, the Opry in 1998 saw the dismantling of Opryland USA, a theme park that had been built in Nashville’s suburbs in the early 1970s, in part to try to guarantee the Opry a perpetual audience in the changing entertainment environment. When Opryland closed, all of Nashville’s tourist industry felt the pinch, and it, like the Opry, now awaits the same-site opening this spring of a mega-shopping mall called Opry Mills. Opry Mills is projected to attract 15 million visits to the area, as opposed to Opryland’s annual 4 million or fewer.
Strategists are hoping the shopping center, which won’t require an admission like that of Opryland, will be a steadying influence to the Grand Ole Opry.
“Opry Mills will be a great addition to our property, as it makes us even more of a year-round destination,” Buchanan says.
Fisher says Opry attendance has been down 10 to 15 percent since the closing of Opryland, but he points out that that figure seems lower than the ones quoted by downtown tourist businesses, whose spokesmen have complained of deficits in the 20 percent range.
That’s because of another Opry corporate sister, the neighboring Opryland Hotel. The hotel’s business drop in the absence of the theme park has been “modest,” says Gaylord spokesman Tom Adkinson, since a large part of its annual patrons are conventioneers rather than tourists. Many of the hotel’s conventions include on their programs a night at the Grand Ole Opry House, located a few hundred yards behind the hotel.
Besides Opryland, the Opry lost another corporate relative two years ago when Gaylord sold TNN to CBS. Recently, CBS axed “Primetime Country,” a live evening talk-and-music show that included Opry acts among its fare, and neither Buchanan nor Hughes speculates much on whether the Opry’s stint on the country cable channel will run past the current contract expiration date of 2002.
Just as there is a question as to how comfortable TNN is in trying to dovetail the Opry televiewers with the rest of a weekend audience that has tuned in for motorsports and hunting and fishing shows, there is another: whether the Opry really needs TNN exposure. In fact, the link to the Opryland Hotel may be more beneficial.
Despite the loss of Opryland USA, the clouding picture on TNN and the uncertainties of a continually fluctuating entertainment environment, the Opry appears to be positioning itself to endure. As Fisher and Buchanan both point out, the Grand Ole Opry it is a magnificent anachronism that at age 75 has long since become an entertainment institution.
“In a world where sometimes in country music we struggle with nameless and faceless artists, the Grand Ole Opry is a worldwide-known brand,” Fisher says. “When you start with a brand like that, it’s a powerful thing to build on.” Country music
