Nashville did not invent country music. That distinction belongs to Bristol, Tennessee, a small town on the Virginia state line where Victor Records producer Ralph Peer recorded the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in August 1927. The U.S. Congress formally recognized Bristol as the “Birthplace of Country Music” in 1998. Before that, through most of the 1920s, Atlanta was where the major labels actually recorded the genre, with one music historian calling it “the Nashville of its day.” Nashville’s own status as the center of country music came later, through a specific chain of events that happened after World War II.
The Opry as the Starting Engine
The foundation was laid on November 28, 1925, when WSM radio in Nashville launched what announcer George D. Hay eventually named the Grand Ole Opry. The show was not a recording enterprise at first. It was a live Saturday night radio program broadcast from the fifth floor of an insurance company building. What it did was pull musicians. WSM’s 50,000-watt transmitter, upgraded in 1932, reached across nearly 30 states. Every country musician in the South knew the Opry existed and knew that getting on it meant national exposure.
The show moved to the Ryman Auditorium in 1943 and went national on NBC radio in 1939. By the mid-1940s, the Opry was the dominant barn dance program in the country, having outlasted its Chicago competitor, WLS’s National Barn Dance, after WSM gained access to NBC’s network. The Opry’s dominance was not artistically inevitable. It survived because WSM invested in its infrastructure while other shows faded.
The Recording Industry Arrived Postwar
Nashville’s recording industry did not start with the Opry. Victor Records sent a field crew to Nashville in September 1928, recorded several Opry acts, and never came back. For the next two decades, major labels recorded country music in field sessions across the South or in New York.
The shift came after 1946. Major labels including Mercury, Capitol, RCA Victor, Columbia, and Decca opened Nashville offices to access the talent pool the Opry had assembled. In 1942, Roy Acuff and songwriter Fred Rose had already founded Acuff-Rose Publications, Nashville’s first country music publishing firm. Fred Rose signed Hank Williams to MGM Records in 1947. Williams’s success in the late 1940s, including “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” helped cement Nashville’s emerging status. When Williams died in 1953, he was already the biggest name in country music, and nearly all of it had been recorded and managed from Nashville.
Music Row Crystallized the Industry in the 1950s
In 1954, Owen and Harold Bradley opened the first recording studio on what would become Music Row: a converted house at 804 16th Avenue South with a Quonset hut added behind it. RCA followed in 1957 with Studio B at 1611 Roy Acuff Place. By the early 1960s, RCA Victor, Decca, and Columbia were completing the majority of their country recording sessions in this four-block stretch. Music Row was not planned by anyone. It accumulated because the Bradleys and RCA started things there and everything else followed the studios.
The Country Music Association was founded in 1958 specifically to compete with rock and roll for radio airplay. In 1960, Time magazine reported that Nashville had “nosed out Hollywood as the nation’s second biggest (after New York) record-producing center.” The Country Music Hall of Fame opened in a building on Music Row in 1967. By then, the city’s identity was locked in. WSM disc jockey David Cobb had already been calling Nashville “Music City, U.S.A.” on air through the 1950s, and the nickname had stuck.
The Nashville Sound Kept Country Alive Through Rock and Roll
The timing that matters most is 1956 to 1960. Rock and roll devastated country music sales. Producers Chet Atkins at RCA and Owen Bradley at Decca responded by stripping out fiddles and steel guitars and replacing them with string sections, vocal choruses, and smooth arrangements that could compete on pop radio. The first songs identified as part of this Nashville Sound appeared around 1957. Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” (1961) is the canonical example: a country song produced with a lushness that crossed over to mainstream pop audiences. Jim Reeves and Eddy Arnold had similar success.
If Atkins and Bradley had not pivoted the sound, the labels might have relocated country operations somewhere else or shut them down entirely. The Nashville Sound was a survival response that kept the industry in Nashville through its most dangerous competitive moment. The term first appeared in print in a 1958 Music Reporter article and again in a 1960 Time piece. Chet Atkins defined it memorably when he put his hand in his pocket, rattled his loose change, and said: “That’s what it is. It’s the sound of money.”
The Timeline in Practice
Country music as a genre started in Appalachian folk traditions in the 18th and 19th centuries. Its commercial recording history started in Atlanta and Bristol in the 1920s. Its national radio home started in Nashville in 1925. Its recording industry concentration in Nashville started in the mid-1940s and solidified by 1960. The Music Row infrastructure that still defines the city today took shape from 1954 through the late 1960s.
Nashville did not start country music. Nashville absorbed it, institutionalized it, and then held it so tightly for so long that separation became unimaginable.
Sources
- Nashville Recording Industry, Tennessee Encyclopedia: https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/nashville-recording-industry/
- Grand Ole Opry official history: https://www.opry.com/about/history
- Country music, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countrymusic
- Nashville Sound, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashvillesound
- Music Row, Tennessee Encyclopedia: https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/music-row-nashville/
- Historic Music Row: https://historicmusicrow.com/
- Britannica, Country music: https://www.britannica.com/art/country-music
- Atlanta Studies, “The Nashville of Its Day”: https://atlantastudies.org/2017/08/09/steve-goodson-the-nashville-of-its-day-recalling-the-origins-of-recorded-country-music-in-1920s-atlanta/
- Country Music Hall of Fame, Tennessee History: https://tnhalloffame.org/grandoleopry.html