How the Opry Gave Country Music a National Voice

On this episode of Our American Stories, in the early 1920s, WSM filled its schedule with whatever talent it could gather, and one night a fiddler stepped into the studio with a tune that settled easily across the airwaves. The reaction from listeners changed the station’s direction. The music felt local in the best sense of the word, and the signal carried it into homes that had never heard anything like it. Those moments revealed how quickly a simple performance could influence the American music history taking shape around the radio.

The Grand Ole Opry emerged within that momentum, and Nashville followed along with the shift. The influence created a bridge between regional tradition and the broader landscape of country-western music, giving the early threads of country-music origins a steady place to land. Craig Havighurst, author of Musicality for Modern Humans, joins us with a look into how WSM and the Opry reshaped Nashville’s music history and left a mark that continues to guide the way the city sounds today.

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