2025 marked the 100th anniversary of Hillsboro Theatre’s opening (it’s now the Belcourt Theatre), which took place just a few months before the Grand Ole Opry radio show began broadcasting country music across the airwaves. The show was later relocated from its downtown studio to Hillsboro Theatre for two years. Eventually, the Opry moved out of its most storied location at the Ryman to the Grand Ole Opry House, next to a theme park called Opryland USA. For those of us who spent our summers soaked on the Grizzly River Rampage, harassing park employees dressed as Hanna-Barbera characters and challenging our cousins to see how many times we could ride the corkscrewing Wabash Cannonball in a single afternoon without puking (which was eight, BTW), it came as a shock when the park closed in 1997 to open an outlet mall. Opryland’s closing is a line of demarcation in our history between the old Music City and “New Nashville.” As part of its Music City Mondays series, the Belcourt will host a work-in-progress screening of Brandon Vestal’s documentary about the beloved park. While few have seen it yet, I hope it answers all my questions. Did anyone actually want Shopryland? Did The Hangman really become the Kong roller-coaster at a Six Flags in California? Did they ever fix Chaos? We need answers.
8 p.m. Dec. 29 at the Belcourt
2102 Belcourt Ave.
