Overview

Winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award Winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award On November 28, 1925, a white-bearded man sat before one of Nashville radio station WSM's newfangled carbon microphones to play a few old-time fiddle tunes. Uncle Jimmy Thompson played on the air for an hour that night, and throughout the region listeners at their old crystal sets suddenly perked up. Back in Nashville the response at the offices of National Life Insurance Company, which owned radio station WSM (""We Shield Millions""), was dramatic; phone calls and telegrams poured into the station, many of them making special requests. It was not long before station manager George D. Hay was besieged by pickers and fiddlers of every variety, as well as hoedown bands, singers, and comedians--all wanting their shot at the Saturday night airwaves. ""We soon had a good-natured riot on our hands,"" Hay later recalled. And, thus, the Opry was born. Or so the story goes. In truth, the birth of the Opry was a far more complicated event than even Hay, ""the solemn old Judge,"" remembered. The veteran performers of that era are all gone now, but since the 1970s pioneering country music historian Charles K. Wolfe has spent countless hours recording the oral history of the principals and their families and mining archival materials from the Country Music Foundation and elsewhere to understand just what those early days were like. The story that he has reconstructed is fascinating. Both a detailed history and a group biography of the Opry's early years, A Good-Natured Riot provides the first comprehensive and thoroughly researched account of the personalities, the music, and the social and cultural conditions that were such fertile ground for the growth of a radio show that was to become an essential part of American culture. Wolfe traces the unsure beginnings of the Opry through its many incarnations, through cast tours of the South, the Great Depression, commercial sponsorship by companies like Prince Albert Tobacco, and the first national radio linkups. He gives colorful and engaging portraits of the motley assembly of the first Opry casts--amateurs from the hills and valleys surrounding Nashville, like harmonica player Dr. Humphrey Bate (""Dean of the Opry"") and fiddler Sid Harkreader, virtuoso string bands like the Dixieliners, colorful hoedown bands like the Gully Jumpers and the Fruit Jar Drinkers, the important African American performer DeFord Bailey, vaudeville acts and comedians like Lasses and Honey, through more professional groups such as the Vagabonds, the Delmore Brothers, Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, and perennial favorite Roy Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys. With dozens of wonderful photographs and a complete roster of every performer and performance of these early Opry years, A Good-Natured Riot gives a full and authoritative portrayal of the colorful beginnings of WSM's barn dance program up to 1940, by which time the Grand Ole Opry had found its national audience and was poised to become the legendary institution that it remains to this day.

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Reviews

In addition to being a superb researcher and a crackerjack storyteller, Wolfe has a gently persuasive writing style that conveys his immense warmth for the subject. . . . A Good-Natured Riot, like the radio show it celebrates, is vivid theater of the mind.-- Country Music

A highly readable and detailed account of the early years of America's premiere country and western radio show, The Grand Ole Opry. It's hard to imagine that a book about the Opry could appeal to a broad audience, because, frankly, how many people have even heard of early Opry stars Uncle Jimmy Thompson, Uncle Dave Macon, or emcee George Hays? However, what makes Wolfe's book so compelling is that it shows the intersection of the birth of the Opry with so many other important, and often overlooked, cultural moments. First, the Opry comes at the dawn of radio, and Wolfe spells out some of the more interesting features of the pioneering stations. WSM, the Opry's original station, was actually capable of broadcasting nearly coast-to-coast due to the clarity of the airwaves in those days. And its decision to present a program of what was then called old time music was extremely controversial. The city of Nashville, the Opry's home, prided itself on its high-brow aura, making it the soi-disant Paris of the South. Old time music seemed lowbrow, yet its popularity pushed the format forward. It is largely due to the Opry's location there that today Nashville is known as the home of country music. Wolfe also covers, of course, the issue of race, since the Opry was, in its early days, one of the few venues that featured both black and white musicians. That black musicians fell out of country music is an aspect of the transition from old time to country, and one that Wolfe handles sensitively. On the whole, a surprisingly interesting book that covers not only its putative subject, the first great country music radio show, but also the constellation of musical and cultural issues that swirled around the birth of a new music and a new South. (Kirkus Reviews)

The origins of this resilient institution are an important and character-rich story that has never been told as completely or as winningly as in A Good-Natured Riot. . . . The book is the product of three decades of interviews with early Opry cast members and promises an entertaining read even for those not caught up in the country sound. Indeed, it's probably a more gratifying and insightful work on mass media, public relations and image-making than most of the flashy business titles flooding the bookstalls today.<br>Wall Street Journal

Author Information

Charles K. Wolfe (1943-2006) was one of the leading experts on the history and development of country music. He wrote or edited around twenty books, including The Devil's Box: Masters of Southern Fiddling (Vanderbilt University Press/Country Music Foundation Press). Until his retirement in 2005, he was an English professor at Middle Tennessee State University. His work helped popular music scholarship gain academic acceptance.

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