A modern-day Nashville commute can be crazy-making on the best of days.
Yet last fall, as Dan Rogers made his way along Briley Parkway toward one of the city’s most enduring venues, he felt a surprising amount of calm.
As the senior vice president and executive producer of the Grand Ole Opry, Rogers was at the center of the planning for the venerated radio broadcast and stage show’s 100th anniversary in 2025, and they were just about to release the first set of plans for what would be an ambitious celebration.
“The day before we publicly announced what the calendar was going to look like, I was driving into work that day and felt this ease that I wasn’t expecting,” Rogers says. “I think the most difficult part was starting with a blank sheet and trying to determine what we wanted to do.
“Because it’s so important to us to get it right, so important to us to honor the people on whose shoulders we stand, and so important to us to get it right because it’s such a monumental opportunity to tell the world, ‘Hey, we’re celebrating 100 years, but more importantly is we are driven for someone to be here to celebrate 200 years.’ We very, very much want the show that we love to not just continue, but to be stronger than ever before.”
Rogers didn’t exactly start the process with an empty slate. “I’ve had a digital folder for years where if somebody said something that caught my interest,” Rogers says. “So many times something was said on the side of the stage that was, ‘Oh, we should do that for the 100th.’
“And I didn’t capture them all, but I did capture many over the past several years of just going in and making a note ‘honor this person,’ ‘do this on this date,’ that sort of thing,” he continues. “But real planning in terms of putting something on a calendar and saying, ‘Everybody meet at this time, we’re going to talk about Opry100,’ started approximately two years ago.
“We celebrated the 5,000th-straight Saturday night broadcast in 2021, so I think that was a good precursor to planning the 100th,” Rogers notes. “People came to those meetings with things they really wanted to do, and so it started with breaking down into small groups, putting ideas together and then sharing with the larger group their favorite plans along the way.”
But it wasn’t just canvassing the talented team that both puts on and promotes the Opry to the world as to what the dream anniversary year would look like. A call went out to the cadre of renowned names that make up the Opry’s membership to add their considerable set of two cents into the content mix.
“We offered opportunities for our members to come have lunch with us and let us walk through what our plans were before we shared with the world,” Rogers says, “so that it wouldn’t be a surprise to them, but also so that we could get their feedback and hear what they liked, what they didn’t like and any additional ideas.
“We had that lunch meeting where, I’m not terribly embarrassed to tell you, I got a little choked up looking out at these great artists of various ages – some who have been an Opry member maybe a couple of years and some who had been Opry members more than 60 years – and truly was just flooded with this gratitude. How lucky are all of us that our lives landed in a place where we get to collectively be a part of celebrating 100 years of the Grand Ole Opry.”
Opry impact ongoing
The Grand Ole Opry didn’t just shape country music – it became its heartbeat. Born in 1925 as a radio broadcast called the “WSM Barn Dance,” the show was given its now-world famous name in 1927 and quickly grew into a weekly event that amplified the voices of rural America and brought the twang of country music to living rooms across the nation.
Through an unbroken stream of performances and the power of the clear channel availability of WSM-AM, the Opry cemented country music as not just a genre (and Nashville its long-term identity as the genre’s center), but created a cultural lifeline, providing comfort, community and a bit of joy during some of the country’s toughest times.
By the 1970s, the Grand Ole Opry had become both a tradition and a phenomenon. The move to the Grand Ole Opry House in 1974 marked a new era, with modern sound systems and larger audiences blending seamlessly with the Opry’s old-school charm.
Yet the spirit remained rooted in its origins: a place where legends could share the stage with emerging stars, creating a chain of musical lineage that continues to this day.
It’s the ongoing infusion of new talent onto the Opry’s stage that’s going to allow for its future impact, says Craig Havighurst, editorial director of Murfreesboro’s WMOT Roots Radio 89.5 and author of the book “Air Castle of the South,” a history of the rise of WSM and the Opry.
“I’m constantly surprised by very interesting artists in the Americana space who are being booked on the Opry,” Havighurst says. “I feel like not that many years ago, they would have needed to have shown a whole lot more in the way of numbers and metrics. I feel like whoever’s booking it right now is using a bit more of their gut and their ears.
“The Opry’s kind of lost a generation of patriarchs and matriarchs that they used to have that gave the Opry its historic cachet for so many of the years that I’ve been here,” he continues. “So the Opry’s relevance going forward really depends on leveraging these younger, hipper acts who are being brought into the fold probably not for many performances. It might be one, it might be three.
“But every time that happens, I see (those artists) posting with great enthusiasm, and I wonder how that gets amplified and put into the minds of fans who don’t give the Opry a second thought on a regular basis,” Havighurst says. “They’re in a challenging place. I think (Opry100) gives them a really great chance to tell their story. In Nashville, everything old is constantly new again. It’s part of what we do so well.”
Celebration starts Friday
The official Opry100 slate begins Friday as part of the show’s annual migration to the Ryman Auditorium downtown, and kicks off in earnest at the Opry House Saturday, Jan. 18, with a birthday celebration for global icon and national treasure Dolly Parton, who’s been an Opry member since 1969.
“We are going to take advantage of the fact that Dolly’s birthday is so early in our 100th year to really look back on her Opry career,” Rogers says. “So if you love seeing Dolly Parton in a jumpsuit circa 1974, Jan. 18 is your night.”
That show will also mark the Opry debut for 2024’s big splash country/hip-hop hybrid Shaboozey, the first of what will be 100 debuts and countless buzz-making moments across the campaign, says Opry associate producer of show development Nicole Judd.
“This team has really put its whole, entire heart and soul into building out these shows and extra programming pieces to really celebrate all of our artists and all of our fans,” Judd says. “It’s a lot about maintaining visibility in what is a very, very crowded landscape, especially in the entertainment landscape. It’s also celebrating the music that’s kept us alive and thriving for almost 100 years.”
Alongside acknowledging the Opry’s history through specialty programming like the Opry Honors series, which will celebrate artists and contributors who have died, and the genre’s global reach with a show at Royal Albert Hall in London this fall, Judd says the team’s continued focus on the weekly products, which will jump to a five-day-a-week show calendar starting in March, will be paramount for making every show special.
“When artists are here or when fans are here, if they’re here on show No. 1 out of this Opry100 campaign or show No. 220, how do we make each and every one of them just as special as the very first one that we did?” Judd asks. “For us, we lean into a lot of new ways to connect with our fans, those loyal fans or those fans that are here to check it out and are thoroughly entertained and talk about it and talk about it to their friends and talk about it on their platforms. That does wonders for us.
“Because for that fan and sometimes for that artist, it might be their very first Opry show that they’re seeing.”
“We’re working really hard to put invitations out there for superstars across genres who have never played the Opry that I just feel would love to play it once they got here, if they hadn’t before,” Rogers says. “So I think you’ll see some names on the lineup in 2025 that you haven’t seen before.”
For something with as many moving parts as presenting the world’s longest running radio show, sometimes it boils down to nurturing the simple relationship between the music and its fans. “Not to oversimplify it, but for me it always comes down to honoring the Opry’s past, looking toward the future and throwing those doors open wide to invite artists and fans from around the world,” Rogers continues. “(We try to) do our very best to ensure we’re presenting the past, present, and future of country music the best way we can every time that we open that curtain.”