Books
When the Grand Ole Opry gave its last regular performance at the Ryman Auditorium on March 15, 1974, Nashville’s music community was still grieving the murders of David “Stringbean” Akeman and his wife Estelle the previous November. Another longtime Opry favorite, Tex Ritter, had died suddenly in January. In a time of such losses, the Opry’s move from the creaky Ryman to a sleek new home east of town seemed sad but hardly tragic. Roy Acuff, who spent decades leading the shows at the church-turned-music hall, reportedly said he didn’t “give a damn about that building.”
One person who did give a damn was photographer Jim McGuire. He spent the weeks before the final show capturing the special magic of the decaying theater and the camaraderie among the performers. More than a hundred of the resulting pictures are collected in a new book, Historic Photos of the Opry: Ryman Auditorium 1974. It includes commentary from Garrison Keillor, Marty Stuart and McGuire himself.
“There was talk about the Ryman being torn down,” McGuire says in an interview, recalling his motivation for the project. “That actually came very close to happening. At the time, I didn’t really know what I was going to do with the images. I just felt they had to be recorded.”
McGuire had moved to Nashville just two years earlier, but he’d been a passionate fan of country music since his boyhood in New Jersey. When he left New York, he thought he was leaving behind a career in commercial photography to produce records here, but the camera wouldn’t let him go, and he soon found himself shooting album covers and portraits of country singers. When he heard the Ryman was being abandoned, he “realized that this was going to be a turning point in the music” and he appealed to Opry general manager Hal Durham, who gave him total access to the building, including the backstage area and notoriously cramped dressing rooms.
With a less-than-inspired photographer behind the camera, Historic Photos of the Opry could easily have been a combination of fan kitsch and slick high school yearbook: look, here’s the dressing room where everybody hung out; here’s Mr. Bell, the security guard; here’s Dolly and her breasts, etc. But as anyone who saw his “Nashville Portraits” show at the Frist last summer can attest, Jim McGuire brings a degree of imagination and skill to his “Nashville stuff,” as he calls it, that takes it to far beyond the level of ordinary celebrity photography.
His unique vision is obvious in the picture that graces the book’s cover. It’s a nighttime shot of the Ryman taken from an oblique angle. Fingers of lightning fill the sky above, while the streetlights create delicate reflections on the wet street below. There’s nothing sentimental or folksy about the image. It’s mythic, ghostly, and it reveals something about McGuire’s understanding of country music. For all its cornpone trappings, the best country music concerns itself with the elemental aspects of life: love, death, betrayal, faith. McGuire clearly appreciates that concern with the eternal; the grand image was no accident.
“When they were talking about tearing that building down,” he says, “I just got that image in my mind of having that lightning behind it, and I used to go down there every time there was a thunderstorm. I didn’t care what time it was. I’d drag myself out of bed in the middle of the night. I probably went down there 20 or 25 times trying to get that picture.”
Not surprisingly, the shot is a favorite among the Ryman’s old denizens. In his elegant introductory remarks for the book, Marty Stuart calls the picture a masterpiece and recalls that Roy Acuff kept a print of it on his wall. Ironically, according to Stuart’s introduction, Acuff was admiring McGuire’s photo when he made the dismissive remark about “that building.”
Unlike the cover image, most of the pictures in Historic Photos of the Opry haven’t been widely seen until now. The big stars are represented, of course: Acuff, Minnie Pearl, the Cashes, Bill Monroe. The performance shots are beautifully composed. There’s an especially haunting picture of a very somber Dolly Parton, and a touching close-up of harmonica virtuoso DeFord Bailey playing at an Old Timer’s Night. But much of the book is devoted to the action backstage, where little-known musicians—carefully given their due in McGuire’s captions—shared the tiny space with big stars, socializing and rehearsing in what was clearly a friendly, egalitarian atmosphere. McGuire shot exclusively with available light, so he was able to wander among the performers without the disruption of a flash. Like the proverbial fly on the wall, he captures impromptu jam sessions, shared jokes and moments of reflection in which the subjects seem unaware they’re being photographed.
Looking through the photos gives a sense of being transported back to what was a very different time, not just for country music but for Nashville as well. The people and the city seem oddly innocent. There are shots of good-natured crowds lining the street before shows or milling around the door waiting for autographs, which stars such as Marty Robbins graciously gave them. The Ryman had no air-conditioning, so in the summer those without tickets could stand out on the sidewalk and listen through the open windows. It’s hard to imagine public space being so unregulated today. As McGuire says, “That was something that was unique about the Ryman. It was so small, and right on the street. There wasn’t any kind of buffer or barrier between the audience and the performers.”
When asked to comment on today’s Nashville music scene, McGuire says, “It’s just different now,” and he’s certainly right. Porter Wagoner is still showing off his rhinestone suits to Opry fans, but many of the performers in these photos are long gone. The Ryman itself has been saved, but it’s also lost some of the quirks and frailties that made it such an endearing space. Fans are more fickle these days, even suspicious: according to McGuire, most people assume his hard-won shot of lightning over the Ryman is photoshopped. These are cynical times. All the more reason to appreciate the talent and foresight of Jim McGuire, and all the hours he spent preserving those last nights at the old mother church of country music.
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