American Highway allows KNLS listeners to travel America's back roads, highways, and byways.  You'll find some of this nation's most interesting people, places and events in the transcript below.

The "Mother Church" Of Country Music

Travel into the heart of Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee, and you can visit the "mother church" of country music, the Ryman Auditorium.

Music fans all over the world recognize historic Ryman Auditorium as the traditional home of country music’s Grand Ole Opry radio show, a seventy-seven year old musical institution credited with popularizing the country sound nationwide. Even though the show outgrew the auditorium and moved to a larger facility nearly three decades ago, the Opry still makes a yearly pilgrimage back to the Ryman each winter.

"Rarely do the musical performers get to enjoy performing in a facility that does something more than just hold people. " says Pete Fisher the Grand Ole Opry’s General Manager. "The Ryman Auditorium, as many call it, is the ‘mother church’ of country music; and in fact, it has the presence, many say, of those individuals who really shaped and created the music that they enjoy, not only playing, but making a living from. So it is a very spiritual place to the performers."

Perhaps more spiritual than most artists and fans realize. At the close of the 1800’s a series of Christian missionaries swept through the mid-south. Traveling evangelists of the time found Nashville a rough and ready river town in bad need of the gospel.

Captain Thomas Ryman was a local businessman making a fortune from riverboat gambling and waterfront bars. The traveling missionaries grew so effective that Ryman actually considered them a threat to his business. So much so that he began to hire hecklers to disrupt the meetings. The unscrupulous Captain met his match in the spring of 1885 when a traveling evangelist named Sam Jones arrived in Nashville.

"Well, at this particular evening when Captain Ryman came with his men to heckle, before he could really get started, he started listening to the words, and was so moved that he became a Christian." says The Ryman Auditorium’s Brent Hyams. "And it was a radical, radical change. He went that night, legend has it, and dumped all the beer out of his saloon into the Cumberland. He wanted Nashville to then be a different place. So he started immediately to rally the community and try to get a building where all of these revival preachers could come and speak and not have to be in a tent."

Ryman himself eventually donated most of the funds used to build the Union Gospel Tabernacle, a facility made available to the entire Christian community for gospel meetings and traveling missionaries. Years later evangelist Sam Jones would return to Nashville to preach a memorial service for the late Captain Ryman. During the eulogy Jones suggested that the auditorium be renamed in the Captain’s honor.

Six decades later Ryman Auditorium was still one of the few large performance halls in Nashville. The hugely popular and rapidly expanding Grand Ole Opry moved there in 1943. Each winter the Opry returns to the Ryman for several weeks. Fans travel to Nashville from all over the world to sit in the Ryman’s original church pews and drink in the Opry’s rich history.

Visiting Ryman Auditorium, traditional home of the Grand Ole Opry. Just another stop along the American Highway.

Photos of the Ryman:

• The front entrance to the Ryman Auditorium
• Sculpture in the main lobby dedicated to Opry legends Roy Acuff and Minnie Pearl
• Historic alley outside the Ryman where so many country music stars were "discovered".
• Statue dedicated to Captain Ryman.

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