Country Music Birthplace
Ironically, at the very time that Tennessee’s rural culture was under attack by sophisticated, urban critics, its music found a national audience.
In 1925, WSM, a powerful Nashville radio station, began broadcasting a weekly program of live music which soon was dubbed the "Grand Ole Opry." Such music came in diverse forms: banjo-and-fiddle string bands of Appalachia, family gospel singing groups, and country vaudeville acts like that of Murfreesboro native Uncle Dave Macon.
Still the longest-running radio program in American history, the Opry used the new technology of radio to tap into a huge market for "old time" or "hillbilly" music.
Two years after the Opry’s opening, in a series of landmark sessions at Bristol, Tennessee, field scout Ralph Peer of the Victor Company recorded Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family to produce the first nationally popular rural records.
Tennessee thus emerged as the heartland of traditional country music — home to many of the performers as well as the place from which it was broadcast to the nation.
Read more about this topic: History Of Tennessee
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