Local Stories in Davidson County
Tennessee·13 places
Music History
Acuff-Rose
Before 1942 a country songwriter in the South often sold a song outright for a flat fee and never saw another penny from it. Floyd Tillman let It Makes No Difference Now go for three hundred dollars in 1938. Acuff-Rose was incorporated in Nashville on 13 October 1942 to change that.
Music History
Club Baron
Doctor Jackson H. Brown built on Jefferson Street in 1951 for his pharmacy, and in 1955 spent seventy five thousand dollars turning the place into a skating rink, a dance hall and a club. The rink floor was the dance floor, and it was the only rink in the city open to Black skaters.
Music History
Ernest Tubb Record Shop
Ernest Tubb was already an Opry star when he opened a record shop on Commerce Street on 3 May 1947 and, the same night, began broadcasting a live show from inside it. The Midnite Jamboree went out on WSM immediately after the Opry finished, which meant a listener in Ohio or Alabama who had stayed up for the Opry simply kept listening.
Music History
Hank Williams' Last Opry
Hank Williams was fired from the Grand Ole Opry on 11 August 1952, at twenty eight, as the biggest star in country music. The Opry's manager, Jim Denny, had run out of patience after Williams failed to appear for a scheduled spot two days earlier. It was not the first missed show.
Industry & Science
Hatch Show Print
Two brothers, Charles and Herbert Hatch, opened a print shop in Nashville in April 1879. Their father was a printer who had brought the family from Wisconsin four years earlier. The first job off the press was a handbill six inches by nine advertising a lecture by the preacher Henry Ward Beecher, and it already had the things a Hatch poster would always have: big wood type, a letterpress bite you…
Music History
Music City U.S.A.
Fisk University was five years old and nearly bankrupt when its treasurer, George L. White, took nine students out of Nashville on 6 October 1871 to sing for money. Most of them had been born into slavery.
Music History
Nashville Number System
Nashville session players write chord charts in numbers rather than letters, and the reason is the working day. In the late 1950s Neal Matthews Junior, who arranged the vocals for the Jordanaires, was singing on several sessions a day and could not memorise everything.
Music History
The Circle Of Ryman Oak
The Grand Ole Opry played the Ryman Auditorium for the last time in its thirty one year residency on 15 March 1974, and opened this house the following night. President Richard Nixon came, five months before he resigned, played piano and took a yo-yo lesson on air from Roy Acuff.
Music History
The Dixie Tabernacle
From June 1936 until July 1939 the Grand Ole Opry was broadcast from a revival tabernacle on Fatherland Street in East Nashville. It was a rough building: plank benches, a dirt floor, canvas that rolled down for walls, no dressing rooms and room for around three thousand five hundred people. The Opry had been moved there because it had outgrown everything else.
Music History
The Nashville Sound
By the late 1950s rock and roll had taken country music's audience and its radio slots, and the men who ran the Nashville studios made a commercial decision that still divides people. Chet Atkins at RCA and Owen Bradley at Decca began stripping the fiddle and the pedal steel out of records and putting in string sections, smooth background vocals from the Jordanaires and the Anita Kerr Quartet,…
Music History
The Quonset Hut
In 1954 the bandleader and producer Owen Bradley and his brother Harold, a guitarist, paid 7,500 dollars for a two storey house at 804 16th Avenue South and built a recording studio in the basement. The street was residential and there was no music business on it.
Music History
We Shield Millions
WSM went on the air on 5 October 1925 from the fifth floor of the National Life and Accident Insurance Company building at Seventh Avenue and Union Street. The call letters were not chosen for their sound. They stood for the company motto, We Shield Millions. A National Life executive named Edwin Craig is generally credited with the idea.
History
Where I-40 Cut Jefferson
Jefferson Street was the commercial spine of Black Nashville. Fisk University, Meharry Medical College and Tennessee State sat along or near it, and the mile and a half between them held groceries, barbershops, tailors, churches, restaurants and the nightclub circuit that made the street a stop on the chitlin circuit. In the 1960s the state of Tennessee routed Interstate 40 straight down it.
Elsewhere in Tennessee
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
