The First Lady

In November 1940, Sarah Ophelia Colley, would-be Broadway actress, made her debut on the Grand Ole Opry. She wasn’t allowed onstage until 11:05 p.m. Her performance had been pushed back to that late hour because the Opry brass were uncertain how her comic creation, Minnie Pearl, would go over with the Opry’s devoted country audience. At that time, the Opry’s biggest stars were performers like Roy Acuff and Bill Monroe, performers whose authenticity as hillbilly musicians was beyond question. Minnie Pearl, on the other hand, was the cornball invention of a young woman who, in real life, had attended Nashville’s prestigious Ward-Belmont finishing school. The Opry management feared that, despite Minnie’s country dialect, listeners would catch hints of Sarah Colley’s breeding. They might think that a cultured lady was condescending to them.

The Opry management’s uncertainty was short-lived. Their fears were calmed when 300 pieces of fan mail addressed to “Minnie Pearl” poured into the WSM studio.

Many have noted that Minnie Pearl made a unique contribution to Nashville’s life by bridging the gap between the worlds of Music Row and Belle Meade. Her contributions to and work for the Nashville Humane Society, the Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital and, especially after her double mastectomy in 1985, the American Cancer Society, were generous and tireless. Her address on Curtiswood Lane, next door to the Executive Residence, was right for her. But so were her gingham dress and her $1.98 hat. As early as 1947, with her Opry career already in full swing, her engagement to Henry Cannon—an exceptional man in his own right—was announced on The Tennessean’s society page.

Perhaps because she was up-front about never having longed for a life on the Opry, it has sometimes been assumed, too quickly, that Minnie was more comfortable in high society than in the Ryman crowd. Her ability to connect with a country audience was, it seemed, less a result of her upbringing than of her overwhelming personal warmth.

She was not a Tennessee farm girl but the daughter of a prosperous Centerville sawmill owner. Her mother, “the epitome of a Southern lady,” as Minnie described her, was from an old Franklin family. In her 1980 autobiography (coauthored by Joan Dew), Minnie tried to envision her mother making the move from Franklin to the street-brawling country town of Centerville. “There must have been times when my mother wondered if she’d left all semblance of civilization behind her in Franklin, Tenn., where her life had been so vastly different,” Minnie suggested.

But Minnie herself had little experience of that “vastly different” life. The youngest in her family, she was born in Centerville on Oct. 25, 1912. Because Centerville was so small, there was no reason for Minnie to be confined to a drawing room. She roamed where she pleased, played with whomever she pleased, and lived the idyllic childhood of a gregarious girl for whom societal boundaries were incomprehensible. Before she could walk, her father took her along on his rounds of the lumber camps, where the “rugged outdoorsmen” who worked for him accepted her into their midst.

“I was never touched by gentler hands than when they’d reach up to lift me down from Daddy’s horse,” Minnie wrote.

A born performer, Minnie started playing the piano when she was 4, and by the time she was an adolescent she was already dreaming of a life on the stage. At age 10, she played piano at the local movie house—backing the silent pictures in exchange for free admission—until her mother got wind of the arrangement and put a stop to it. Her mother didn’t mind, though, when Minnie signed up for lessons in “expression” (society’s euphemism for “acting”), nor was she upset when Minnie was elected to the cheerleading squad of Hickman County High School.

Hickman County High’s funniest cheerleader graduated in 1930, during the first year of the Depression. The crash hit her father’s business hard. Minnie’s dreams of enrollment at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts were wrecked. Instead, she was given the choice of spending either four years at UT or two years at Ward-Belmont. She had been told that Ward-Belmont had a pretty fair drama department. It was for that reason—and not because she aspired to ladyhood—that she chose the Nashville finishing school. Her two years at Ward-Belmont have, ever since, been cited as evidence of Minnie’s society-girl background. But she maintained that she never felt more miserably out of place than during her first few weeks among the sophisticated city girls. “By comparison, I was a country bumpkin,” Minnie explained.

Characteristically, it was Minnie the performer who would eventually make the break into the in-crowd. One day a trio of big-girls-on-campus overheard her singing alone at the piano. Impressed, they took Minnie under their collective wing. Thereafter, she was comfortable among the Ward-Belmont debutantes, sharing in their mirthful camaraderie as they weathered such lectures as “The Conduct of Young Ladies While Traveling on Public Conveyances.”