On 5 October 1932, seven years to the day after WSM first signed on, the station switched on a new transmitter in what was then open farmland in Williamson County. The antenna was a Blaw-Knox diamond cantilever: a steel lozenge 878 feet tall balanced on a single insulated point at its base, so that the whole tower is the radiator rather than a mast carrying a wire. At the time it was the tallest radio tower in the United States. It let WSM run 50,000 watts at 650 kilohertz, a clear channel the station had held since 1928, meaning that after dark nothing else in North America was allowed to compete with it there, and on a winter night, when the signal bounces off the ionosphere instead of running along the ground, the Grand Ole Opry could be picked up across some thirty states. That reach is the reason country music has a capital city at all, and the reason it is Nashville. Chicago's WLS had been running its National Barn Dance since 1924, and Fort Worth's WBAP had put the first barn dance of all on the air in 1923, and neither had a signal like this one. Musicians moved to the town whose radio station could be heard in the places records were sold. Engineers cut seventy feet off the tower in 1939, leaving 808, after the signal was found to be cancelling itself out at middle distances. It is the tallest Blaw-Knox diamond in North America, and it still carries the station.
Getting there
35.9981, -86.7909
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
