Nashville: How Country Music Became an Industry

Nashville was a publishing and insurance center before it was a music city. The transformation happened because of a radio program. The show that became the Grand Ole Opry began on Nashville's WSM radio station in nineteen twenty-five and took that name in nineteen twenty-seven, and because WSM was a clear-channel station operating at fifty thousand watts, it could be heard on clear nights across most of the eastern United States.

The audience that heard the Opry heard Nashville. The musicians, publishers, and session players followed the signal. By the nineteen fifties, Music Row, the two-block stretch of recording studios south of downtown, had become the center of American country music production in the same way that Tin Pan Alley had once been the center of popular music publishing.

The producers who refined the Nashville Sound in the late nineteen fifties and sixties, Chet Atkins, Owen Bradley, deliberately stripped out the fiddles and the steel guitars and added orchestral strings and smooth production, converting country music from a regional form with a working-class audience into something more broadly commercial. Whether that was a compromise or an evolution is a question that Nashville musicians have been arguing about ever since. The city skyline you are driving toward has a replica of the Parthenon in it.

Nashville was called the Athens of the South in the nineteenth century because of its concentration of universities and churches. The full-scale Parthenon in Centennial Park was built in eighteen ninety-seven for a state fair and was not demolished afterward, which is how Nashville ended up with a Greek temple in a public park. The inside has a forty-two-foot statue of Athena.