At 100, the ‘Grand Ole Opry’ Is America’s Longest-Running Radio Broadcast and a Country Music Sensation

By Greg Cahill | From the November/December 2025 issue of Strings

Playing the Grand Ole Opry—the hallowed Nashville-based music hall and ground zero for America’s longest-running radio show—is a milestone for any country music artist. And it can be especially nerve-wracking for newcomers. Just ask Ketch Secor—singer, songwriter, and fiddler of Old Crow Medicine Show, one of the top acts to emerge from the 21st-century string-band revival. “Marty Stuart was hosting the ‘Jogging in a Jug’-sponsored segment of the Opry at the Ryman Auditorium in January of 2001, on a crystal-clear, ice-cold night in Nashville. Steve Earle was on our portion, too,” says Secor of his Opry debut. “Our banjo player, Critter, threw up in the trash can backstage moments before they waved us on. We played one song, ‘Raise a Ruckus,’ and it brought the house down. The crowd wanted an encore, and we were so nervous that we just did the same song again. I was wearing a train conductor’s hat. It was the biggest night of my life up to that point, and it stayed that way for a few years. Afterwards, I cried my eyes out in the alley behind Jack’s Bar-B-Que because I knew down deep that nothing would ever be the same.”

These days, Secor and his bandmates are among an elite corps of country artists who can lay claim to a coveted membership in the Grand Ole Opry, which this year is celebrating its centennial anniversary. On October 18, Old Crow Medicine Show is, at press time, scheduled to return to the Opry stage for a tribute to the late fiddler and Opry stalwart Roy Acuff—hailed as the King of Country Music—and singer and comedienne Minnie Pearl. “It’s a radio show that people will always love, even if and when they stop listening to radio,” Secor says of the Opry broadcasts, “because country music’s beacon, no matter how the signal is sent, will always reach the heart of Americans. The Opry has history on her side and, as it turns out, country music’s history is one of her most beloved attributes.”

Opry artists today can be pierced, tattooed, and weaned not on Charlie Daniels but on rock ’n’ roll or hip-hop. But throughout its history, the Opry has built its brand around American vernacular music, with high-lonesome harmonies, acoustic guitars, mandolins, banjos, and fiddles. Blazing fiddles, double fiddles, and even triple fiddles. 

Since its founding, the Opry has changed locations several times while hosting such country, honky-tonk, Western swing, bluegrass, gospel, and comedic stars as Acuff, Maybelle Carter and the Carter Sisters (with Chet Atkins), Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, Hank Williams, Dolly Parton, Charlie Daniels, Patsy Cline, Jeannie Seely, Garth Brooks, and Vince Gill, to name a few. To say that the Opry is steeped in downhome tradition is an understatement—its vast hall routinely packs in 4,400 true believers and has the look and feel of a megachurch. 

But despite its current majestic digs, the Opry has humble roots.

In 1925, the founder of National Life and Accident Insurance Company, a radio buff, convinced the company’s executives to launch their own radio station as a marketing tool. The result was WSM, which took its call letters from the company motto, “We Shield Millions.” To accommodate the broadcasts, National Life built a small studio in its downtown Nashville office and went on the air for the first time on October 5, 1925. A month later, National Life hired George D. Hay, a prominent announcer and program director known for his National Barn Dance at WLS in Chicago. Seven weeks later, Hay kicked off the WSM Barn Dance with Uncle Jimmy Thompson, a 77-year-old fiddle player. That modest broadcast struck a chord with country music fans and blazed a trail for major changes in American culture. “I’m no expert in the Grand Ole Opry,” says music historian Ted Gioia, “but I’d speculate that the show’s longevity is due to its success at lifestyle marketing. Even as the US became more urbanized, country music continued to thrive, because it offered a nostalgic connection back to a simpler, friendlier way of life. I believe that the music business invented lifestyle marketing and the genre that has done the best job of this is country. The Grand Ole Opry is emblematic of this success.”

Powered by 50,000 watts of power, the Opry broadcasts drew millions of listeners around the nation and had a profound impact in shaping popular music. At a time when the movie industry was still in its infancy, during a period that predated TV by decades, radio stirred the American melting pot and unified far-flung regions isolated by steep mountain ranges, wide valleys, winding rivers, and poorly constructed roads. Suddenly, country fans weaned on fiddle music from the hills and hollers of Appalachia, or raised on old-timey ballads and church hymns, could tune into singing cowboys and Texas swing artists. So-called “hillbilly” music had entered the cultural mainstream as the airwaves sizzled with the widely diverse sounds of America.

In his eight-part 2019 PBS-TV documentary series Country Music, filmmaker Ken Burns devoted several episodes to the  Grand Ole Opry’s role as a platform for country music artists seeking to reach a national audience, their lives intertwined with the Opry’s own monumental story as it shaped the genre’s identity and became the bedrock of country music. “Much of the film has taken our breath away,” Katie Quine, the Opry’s digital marketing coordinator, wrote on the Opry’s website at the time.

It turns out the Opry broadcasts were just what Depression-era America needed. In his landmark weekly radio addresses, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had proclaimed “the nation must and shall be considered as a whole and not as an aggregation of disjointed groups. May we come to know every part of our great heritage as a nation.”

For historian Bill C. Malone, the impact of radio on impoverished, dustbowl-era Americans was profound: “You could tune in the radio each night and there was no cost at all. You could hear those radio hillbillies. You could hear them early in the morning. You could hear them at noontime, when people came home from work. Or you could hear them on the weekends at jamborees and barn dances. The music just provided encouragement for people,” he told Burns. “It enabled them to cope with hard times. You could lose yourself in the life of a cowboy or the life of a hobo and take assurance from a gospel song that there was a better day beyond this world.”

To keep pace with the Opry’s growing live audience, WSM moved its broadcast studio a couple of times, settling in 1943 into the Ryman Auditorium, a disused tabernacle that had been constructed by a river-boat tycoon. It would remain there until 1974 (it’s now at the Grand Ole Opry House near the Cumberland River), though the Opry still presents country music concerts at the historic Ryman and that auditorium’s legacy is an essential part of every Opry broadcast to this day. According to the Opry website: “On January 9, 1974, an eight-foot square of wood was cut from a portion of the Ryman stage before it was lovingly carved into a perfect six-foot circle that would remain intact over 40 years later. Overseeing the circle’s installation himself, beloved Opry patriarch Roy Acuff instructed workers where exactly the circle should lie on the new stage. ‘Move it just a hair to the right,’ he told them as they positioned the piece, comprising a blend of heavy white oak and sturdy maple. After the wood was secure, he strode to its center, becoming the first person to step inside, christening the most sacred space in country music.”

The magic of that circle is not lost on fiddlers respectful of the Opry’s history. “I remember very clearly the first time I played the opening Square Dance on my first Saturday night in January 2016,” says Eamon McLoughlin, the Opry’s London-raised house-band fiddler (see sidebar). “I had played ‘Cherokee Shuffle’ about 7,000 times that day, and I was completely focused on delivering. As I stood behind the curtain, listening to the build up, listening to the historical references, I couldn’t help but feel like I was part of this great historical lineage. I felt enormous pride and exhilaration! When the big red curtain rose up, the spotlight shined on me—at least that’s how it felt—and I kicked off the customary 16 ‘taters,’ playing ‘Cherokee Shuffle’ as the square dancers strode out arm-in-arm. For a brief second it felt as if the light of the world was shining down upon me, as I experienced the privilege of being the Opry fiddler!”

SteelDrivers fiddler Tammy Rogers, has played the Opry “close to a hundred times now, but if you’re a true fan of the music, you never get past the weight of the history there,” she says. “Now they have that circle of floorboards from the old Opry and I always make it a point to stand in that spot and soak it in for a few seconds. I see those boards, and it’s just magical.”

Fiddler, violinist, composer, and educator Mark O’Connor first played the Opry as a 12-year-old in 1974 at a show hosted by Acuff himself. He also has felt the magic: “If you’ve played any country music at all, or fiddled an American tune,” he says, “you really understand how meaningful it is when you’re there and about to step into that circle of the Mother Church of Country Music. Each time you play it, you feel that it’s a career highlight.” 

Secor, who has played the Opry “hundreds of times” since his first stomach-churning debut, adds that playing the Opry is a religious experience. “There were rumors going around that the ghost of Hank Williams would come to the Opry and sit a few rows back. I never saw him, but I’ve certainly felt a divine presence onstage and off,” he says. “Sometimes I listen to Uncle Jimmy Thompson’s handful of [recorded] sides, so I can imagine what it was like back then in 1925 when a backwoods rube could ride a mule into town, stand in front of a mic—which must have seemed like the most foreign object Jimmy ever encountered—and scratch out a 200-year-old tune while his daughter banged chords on an out-of-tune piano. The Opry came from very humble origins, and you can hear them in the record. But the richness of the tradition is there, too, the power of kinship, the sense of the right time and place for lightning to strike: Nashville 1925.”

The Grand Ole Opry weekly broadcasts can be heard over the air on WSM Radio in Nashville (650 AM), on Fridays and Saturdays, from 7–9:15 pm CST, or through their website or app. The Opry also airs on SiriusXM’s Willie’s Roadhouse (channel 56) on Saturday nights at 9 pm ET, with rebroadcasts on Sundays. 

My Life as the Opry’s House Fiddler 

I grew up in London to Irish parents—we played country music in our family band. I was obsessed with bluegrass and country music, even though it was very hard to get my hands on it back then. I fell in love with fiddlers like Bobby Hicks, Stuart Duncan, Mark O’Connor, Brantley Kearns, Johnny Gimble, and I was primarily focused on how they played in a band situation, playing behind a great singer. That remains my passion to this day, and playing in the Opry band has sharpened every instinct I have and even cultivated some new ones.

I joined the house band in 2016. My friend Matt had the gig before me, and by pure chance, I ran into him the night he gave his notice. I asked him to put my name in, and a few days later I had a phone call from Steve Gibson, musical director at the time. I had played the Opry in various guises before this job. As a member of the Greencards, I would play the Opry a couple times every year from 2006 to 2009. When I left that band, I took a job with Josh Turner, and we would play the Opry very often. It’s a very different experience as a visiting sideman—you are there for about an hour before your time slot, you wait and wait . . . and then all of a sudden you’re playing music onstage. It goes by in the blink of an eye.

As a member of the house band, your day starts that morning when you open the music files, assemble your charts, look at your assignments, and begin to learn the songs. Honestly, that process can take anywhere from 45 minutes to four hours—you just never know until the day of the show. Of course, there can be late changes to the lineup, so you may find you learned three songs for nothing, and suddenly there are two more songs in the pile! We use number charts, written by the amazing Larry Paxton, who creates what is considered by many to be the best charts in town. They are available on our iPad, and then I overlay notations for my parts. Our musical director, Kerry Marx, assigns our roles and tasks on each song. We text each other to clarify any discrepancies or ask questions. 

After nine years in this role, one does get used to the pressure and the magnitude of the position, but every so often something will happen that brings me back to those early feelings of wonderment. Occasionally, I get to play some solo fiddle at the front of the stage, and I can hear how good the fiddle sounds in the house PA, and it gives me an inner glow deep in my being.

—Eamon McLoughlin