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. The company sold industrial policies at a nickel a week, collected door to door, and the station was built to advertise the firm and to back up the agents who walked those rounds. Less than two months later, on 28 November 1925, WSM put a fiddler on the air for an hour and the programme that became the Grand Ole Opry began, under the name WSM Barn Dance. Uncle Jimmy Thompson was seventy seven and claimed to know a thousand fiddle tunes, and the telegrams and telephone calls that came in afterwards decided that it would be weekly. It got its permanent name by accident on 10 December 1927. The barn dance followed an NBC concert hour conducted by Walter Damrosch, who that night had closed with an unnamed young composer's piece written to suggest the onrush of a locomotive. The WSM announcer George D. Hay then brought on DeFord Bailey, the harmonica player who was the show's first Black star, to play Pan American Blues, a harmonica piece named for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad's Pan-American passenger train. Hay told listeners that for the past hour they had been hearing music largely from grand opera, and that from now on they would present the Grand Ole Opry. The studio audience outgrew the room by 1934, and the show began a run of moves through three buildings before it settled at the Ryman.