Wikipedia Deep Dive

Ryman Auditorium

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The Saloon Keeper's Redemption

Thomas Ryman went to a tent revival in 1885 planning to heckle the preacher. He left pledging to build him a church.

Ryman was a Nashville businessman who made his fortune in ways that didn't exactly align with evangelical Christianity. He owned a fleet of riverboats and several saloons—establishments that the traveling revivalist Samuel Porter Jones would have condemned from his makeshift pulpit. The story goes that Ryman showed up to one of Jones's outdoor meetings intending to disrupt the proceedings, perhaps to defend his livelihood against the preacher's attacks on demon rum and those who profited from it.

Something happened that night. Whatever Jones said, however he said it, Ryman walked away a changed man. Not just spiritually converted, but physically committed to a grand gesture of repentance. He would build an indoor tabernacle so the people of Nashville could attend revivals regardless of weather—a permanent home for the kind of religious awakening that had transformed him.

It took seven years and one hundred thousand dollars. In today's money, that's roughly three and a half million. Jones was so eager to use the space that he held his first revival there in May of 1890, when the building was nothing but a foundation and walls six feet high. The congregation sat under open sky, surrounded by the bones of what would become one of America's most legendary performance venues.

A Building Born in Debt

The Union Gospel Tabernacle—as it was originally called—opened twenty thousand dollars over budget. From its very first day, it needed money.

Architect Hugh Cathcart Thompson had designed the structure with a balcony, but there wasn't enough funding to build it. The tabernacle operated for five years with just its main floor before the balcony finally materialized in 1897, funded by an unlikely source: the United Confederate Veterans. The former soldiers were holding a gathering in Nashville and needed more seating. They put up the money, and for years afterward the upper level was known as the Confederate Gallery. (That plaque was quietly removed in 2017 and replaced with one simply reading "1892 Ryman Auditorium.")

With the balcony complete, capacity jumped to six thousand. A stage added in 1901 brought it back down to just over three thousand, which remains close to its current seating of 2,362.

Jones wanted to name the building after Ryman immediately. Ryman refused. He was a businessman, not a monument-seeker. This went on for years—Jones proposing, Ryman declining.

When Ryman died in 1904, his memorial service was held in the tabernacle he had built. Jones officiated. During the service, with the coffin before him and the congregation filling the pews, Jones proposed one final time that the building be renamed Ryman Auditorium. This time there was no one to refuse. The attendees approved overwhelmingly.

Jones himself died less than two years later. Neither man would live to see what their collaboration would become.

The Woman Who Saved It

The building that Thomas Ryman built for religious revivals spent most of its early decades hosting anything that would pay the bills. Boxing matches. Lectures. Concerts. Plays. The debt that hung over it from opening day never quite went away, and the only solution was to rent the space to whoever could fill it.

In 1904—the same year Ryman died—a widow named Lula C. Naff started booking events at the auditorium in her spare time. She was working as a stenographer, and promoting shows was just a side hustle to supplement her income as a single mother. When her day job disappeared in 1914, she made the Ryman her full-time occupation. By 1920, she was its official manager.

She went by L.C. Naff professionally. In an era when women weren't supposed to run anything, she found it easier to let people assume she was a man until they'd already agreed to do business with her.

Naff was a fighter. Nashville had a Board of Censors that regularly threatened to shut down performances deemed too provocative for the city's moral standards. In 1939, they planned to arrest the lead actor in a play called Tobacco Road—a controversial drama about poverty in the rural South that had scandalized audiences since its 1933 Broadway debut. Naff took them to court and won. The judge declared the entire law creating the censorship board to be invalid.

Under her management, the Ryman became what newspapers called "The Carnegie Hall of the South." Harry Houdini performed there in 1924. W.C. Fields and Will Rogers came in 1925. Charlie Chaplin graced the stage. Bob Hope brought Doris Day in 1949. John Philip Sousa conducted his band there. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft gave lectures in 1907 and 1911. The Italian opera legend Enrico Caruso sang there in 1919.

The first event to completely sell out the Ryman was a lecture by Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy in 1913.

Segregation and Its Contradictions

Tennessee's Jim Crow laws required audiences to be separated by race. Official policy meant some shows were designated "White Audiences Only" while others were marked "Colored Audiences Only."

But photographs from the period tell a more complicated story. In practice, Ryman audiences were often integrated—not officially, not legally, but actually.

Naff regularly booked the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the renowned choir from Fisk University, a historically Black college just across town. Their performances at the Ryman beginning in 1913 represented something unusual for the era: a Black musical institution performing in one of the South's most prominent venues, managed by a woman who seemed less interested in enforcing social hierarchies than in putting on good shows.

Naff retired in 1955 after more than four decades of keeping the Ryman alive and relevant. She died in 1960, just as the building was about to enter its most famous chapter.

How Country Music Found Its Church

The Grand Ole Opry started in 1925 as something humble: a radio program called the WSM Barn Dance, broadcast from a Nashville studio. WSM was a clear-channel AM station, meaning its signal could travel enormous distances without interference. On a good night, you could hear it across thirty states.

The show wasn't designed to have a live audience. It was radio. But people started showing up anyway, driving from across the region to watch the musicians perform in the studio. The crowds grew until there was no room left.

In 1934, WSM moved the broadcast to the Hillsboro Theatre (now called the Belcourt Theatre). Two years later, it relocated to the Dixie Tabernacle in East Nashville. By 1939, it had landed at War Memorial Auditorium, an elegant civic building near the state capitol.

War Memorial was not built for the Opry's audience. The crowd was enthusiastic. The crowd was rowdy. The crowd damaged the upholstery.

After four years, the Opry was asked to leave.

The Ryman made perfect sense. Its pews were wooden—no upholstery to destroy. Its location was central. And Lula Naff knew how to handle a crowd. On June 5, 1943, the Grand Ole Opry broadcast from Ryman Auditorium for the first time. It would originate there every week for nearly thirty-one years.

Every show sold out. Hundreds of fans were turned away at the door.

The Mother Church

The nickname emerged organically, a perfect collision of the building's origins and its new purpose. The Union Gospel Tabernacle had been built for religious revivals. Now it hosted weekly gatherings where the faithful came to witness their heroes perform the music that defined their culture. "The Mother Church of Country Music" captured something true about what happened inside those walls.

During its three decades as home to the Opry, the Ryman's stage saw virtually every major country artist of the mid-twentieth century. Hank Williams in 1949. Johnny Cash in 1956. Patsy Cline in 1960. Elvis Presley—before he was Elvis, when he was still just a young Memphis singer—performed there in 1954. Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys in 1945. The Carter Sisters with Mother Maybelle Carter in 1950.

The building also continued its tradition of hosting artists from other genres. Marian Anderson, the groundbreaking contralto who would later sing at the Lincoln Memorial after being barred from Constitution Hall, performed there in 1932. Louis Armstrong brought his trumpet in 1957.

But the Ryman had never been designed as a performance venue. It was a church. It showed.

The Chaos Behind the Stage

There was no backstage. Not really. The building had one dressing room for men and relegated women to an inadequate restroom. Performers waiting to go on had nowhere to wait except the wings, narrow hallways, or the alley behind the south wall.

Across that alley stood Tootsie's Orchid Lounge.

With no proper green room, musicians wandered over to Tootsie's and the other honky-tonk bars lining Lower Broadway. They drank alongside the regular patrons. Sometimes they performed impromptu sets. The lack of space at the Ryman accidentally created an entire ecosystem of music venues, transforming a few blocks of downtown Nashville into something like holy ground for country music fans.

The performers who made the Opry famous often had complicated feelings about the Ryman itself. Roy Acuff, one of the show's biggest stars and a major stakeholder in its business operations, later said: "Most of my memories of the Ryman Auditorium are of misery, sweating out here on this stage, the audience suffering too... We've been shackled all of my career."

There was no air conditioning. In summer, the wooden pews held the heat. The stage was hotter. Acuff hated the dressing room situation so much that he bought a building nearby just to have a decent place to prepare for performances.

The New Opry House

WSM purchased the Ryman in 1963 for just over two hundred thousand dollars and renamed it the Grand Ole Opry House. Many people kept calling it the Ryman anyway—after six decades, habits are hard to break.

The company made minor upgrades in 1966, but they were already thinking bigger. The building was deteriorating. The neighborhood around it was declining. The crowds kept getting larger, and there simply wasn't room for everyone who wanted to attend. In 1969, WSM announced plans for a brand-new, purpose-built auditorium on a large tract of land in what was then rural territory a few miles from downtown.

The development became Opryland USA. It would eventually include a theme park and a massive hotel. The new Grand Ole Opry House—confusingly sharing its name with what WSM had rechristened the Ryman—opened on March 16, 1974.

The final Opry broadcast from the Ryman happened the night before, on March 15. It was emotional in ways that surprised people. Sarah Cannon, the comedienne who performed as the character Minnie Pearl, broke character and wept on stage.

In a gesture meant to connect the old home to the new one, a large circle was cut from the Ryman's stage floor and inlaid into the center of the new Opry stage. Performers at the new venue would still stand on the same wood that had held Hank Williams and Patsy Cline.

The Fight to Tear It Down

WSM's president, Irving Waugh, had plans for the abandoned Ryman. He wanted to demolish it and use the salvaged materials to build something called "The Little Church of Opryland" at the new theme park. A quaint chapel made from historic lumber. A gift shop, probably.

He brought in Jo Mielziner, a noted theatrical producer who had staged a production at the Ryman back in 1935, to assess the building. Mielziner's verdict was damning: "Full of bad workmanship and contains nothing of value as a theater worth restoring." He recommended tearing it down and building something modern in its place.

The response was immediate and fierce.

Ada Louise Huxtable, the architecture critic for The New York Times and a Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote a scathing column: "First prize for the pious misuse of a landmark, and a total misunderstanding of the principles of preservation. Gentlemen, for shame."

Musicians who had performed there spoke out. Preservation groups organized. They argued that WSM was exaggerating the building's poor condition because they worried nostalgia for the old venue would hurt business at the new one.

Roy Acuff led the charge in favor of demolition. "I never want another note of music played in that building," he reportedly said. His miserable memories of sweating on that stage had hardened into something like hatred.

But the preservationists had history on their side—literally. They emphasized the building's importance to regional religious history, its role as a gathering place for more than eight decades, its status as the birthplace of country music as a national phenomenon. The Ryman had been approved for the National Register of Historic Places in 1971, while the Opry was still performing there. In 1974, U.S. Senators Howard Baker and Bill Brock, along with officials from the Department of the Interior, pleaded with WSM to save it.

The company tabled its demolition plans. The Ryman was saved—but just barely, and with no commitment to restore it.

Twenty Years of Silence

From 1974 to the early 1990s, the Ryman sat mostly empty. No regular performances. No repairs. The neighborhood around it continued to decline. Lower Broadway, once vibrant with honky-tonks serving Opry crowds, became seedy and neglected.

The building was never officially closed. Tourists still came to see where the Opry had lived, walking through a piece of history that was slowly crumbling. Film crews occasionally used it as a location—the old auditorium appeared in movies about Elvis, Loretta Lynn, and Patsy Cline, its decay lending authenticity to period pieces about long-gone eras of country music.

In August 1979, the Nashville bomb squad responded to a tip about a car parked near the Ryman. They found a massive explosive device, large enough to damage a three-block area. The target turned out to be a nearby strip club, not the auditorium itself. They disarmed it with less than twenty minutes to spare.

The building survived. It kept surviving, through neglect and abandonment, its historical designation protecting it from demolition while doing nothing to restore its former glory.

The Resurrection

In 1983, all of WSM's Opryland properties—including the forgotten Ryman—were sold to Gaylord Broadcasting Company for a quarter billion dollars. The Ryman was almost an afterthought, a piece of real estate attached to the properties that actually mattered.

But Ed Gaylord, the company's chief executive, cared about country music history. He'd gotten to know many Opry stars through his involvement with Hee Haw, the long-running country comedy television show. He was particularly close to Sarah Cannon—Minnie Pearl herself—who had wept on the Ryman stage the night the Opry left. Gaylord's appreciation for what the building represented helped ensure its preservation.

Slowly, the Ryman came back to life. A 1986 CBS special celebrating the Opry's sixtieth anniversary brought legendary performers back to the old stage for the first time in over a decade. Restoration work began in earnest in the early 1990s. The auditorium reopened as a full-time performance venue in 1994, twenty years after the Opry's departure.

The neighborhood revived alongside it. Lower Broadway transformed from urban blight back into the entertainment district it had been in the Opry's heyday—though now with more bachelorette parties and fewer cowboys.

A Stage That Endures

Today the Ryman Auditorium seats 2,362 people for concerts, comedy shows, and special events. The Grand Ole Opry returns periodically for performances in its original home, though its primary residence remains the larger, more comfortable venue at what's now called the Grand Ole Opry House (the old Opryland USA site, minus the theme park, which closed in 1997).

The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2001, recognizing its pivotal role in popularizing country music. In 2022, it was named a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Landmark—an acknowledgment that the stage which hosted Hank Williams and Patsy Cline also helped launch rock and roll through Elvis's early appearances and countless other genre-crossing performances.

Life-sized statues of Roy Acuff and Sarah Cannon as Minnie Pearl stand in the lobby. Acuff, who wanted the building demolished, is now frozen in bronze in its entrance, an eternal greeter for the venue he tried to destroy. There's something perfectly Nashville about that irony.

The wooden pews remain. They're original to the building—the same pews that couldn't be damaged by rowdy Opry crowds, the same pews that held congregants at Samuel Porter Jones's revivals, the same pews where Helen Keller's audience sat in 1913. No cushions, same as always. The acoustics that made the building work as a tabernacle still make it one of the finest listening rooms in American music.

Thomas Ryman built a church for a preacher who converted him. His building outlasted both men, outlasted the religious movement that inspired it, outlasted the radio show that made it famous, outlasted the attempts to tear it down. It remains what it always was: a gathering place, a house of worship for whatever people choose to worship there.

The stage is rarely empty now.