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. Its first nine years were played downtown in the WSM offices, in rooms that grew from a booth with a window onto the hall to a purpose built studio holding five hundred, and when even that became unmanageable it went to the Hillsboro Theatre near Vanderbilt, which was too small within two years. The show was free, it was the best entertainment in Middle Tennessee, and nobody at the station had planned for what happens when a radio programme acquires a live audience. The tabernacle is where the Opry first issued advance tickets. They cost nothing, and National Life's agents had been handing them to insurance customers since the early 1930s, which is precisely the use the company had built WSM for. The crowds kept growing. In 1939 the show moved downtown to the War Memorial Auditorium and an admission charge of twenty five cents was introduced, partly to thin the queue, and it did not thin it. Four years later the Opry moved to the Ryman and stayed thirty one years. A congregation burned out of its own church was still meeting on the tabernacle's dirt floor in 1950. The building is gone; an apartment block from 1970 stands on the site.