Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City »

Craig Havighurst is a Nashville-based writer, editor, and producer whose company String Theory Media specializes in music documentaries. His short "WSM Snapshot" for Nashville Public Television won a regional Emmy Award in 2001. A former staff music writer for The Tennessean in Nashville, he is also an independent journalist whose music correspondence has appeared on NPR and in Billboard, The Wall Street Journal, Country Music Magazine, and Entertainment Weekly.

How WSM put Nashville on the map of American entertainment

Henry L. Carrigan Jr. - Library Journal

The mother of all Nashville landmarks, WSM, or 650 AM, introduced country music to the world when it launched The Grand Ole Opryover its airwaves in 1927. Nashville-based writer and filmmaker Havighurst's fast-paced chronicle of the rise of the station and its contributions to Nashville's economic base and cultural identity recounts the challenges, the personalities, and the music. In 1925, the National Life and Accident Company started the station with radio guru Jack DeWitt at the technical helm and Edwin Craig as the first broadcaster. By 1930, WSM (which stands for "We Shield Millions," a slogan for National Life and Accident) was so popular that it was one of five stations that the Federal Radio Commission permitted to grow to 50,000 watts, thereby increasing its audience from Nashville to as far north as the Arctic Circle. Havighurst includes snapshots of early Opryperformers such as Uncle Dave Macon, DeFord Bailey-the only African American on the show-and Minnie Pearl, as well as performers such as Dinah Shore and Pee Wee King, who got their starts on WSM. Havighurst's superb book belongs in every library's country music collection.

Acknowledgments     xi
Introduction     xiii
On the Very Air We Breathe     1
The Ears Are Eyes     18
A Pleasing Spectacle     41
Air Castle of the South     61
We Must Serve These People Tonight     88
Guts and Brass     104
One of Our Boys Shoots the Moon     121
It Helped Everybody in the Long Run     138
The Balance of Power Has Shifted     159
Jack, We Got a Real Problem     178
A Code and a Concern     205
The Whole Complex Is a Studio     224
Epilogue: Signal Fade     244
Notes     251
Bibliography     261
Index     265