The Academy of Country Music Awards were first held in 1966, honoring the industry's accomplishments during the previous year. It was the first country music awards program held by a major organization. The Academy's signature "hat" trophy was created in 1968. The awards were first televised in 1972 on ABC. In 1979, the Academy joined with Dick Clark Productions to produce the show. Dick Clark and Al Schwartz served as producers while Gene Weed served as director. Under their guidance, the show moved to NBC and finally to CBS, where it remains today.
In 2003, the awards show left Los Angeles and moved to Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Events Center. The show is now held at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. The Academy also adopted a sleeker, modern version of the "hat" trophy that year, which is now made by New York firm Society Awards. In 2004 the organization implemented online awards voting for its professional members, becoming the first televised awards show to do so.
Read more about Academy Of Country Music Awards: Awards, Artists of The Decade, Major Awards, Triple-Crown Award
Famous quotes containing the words academy, country and/or music:
“...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of the highest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then.”
—Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910)
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)