WMOT isn’t the only Nashville radio station that opened a new studio in 2024. The other one is twice as old and changed American music history. WSM 650 AM, known since the 1930s as the Air Castle of the South, conceived and built the Grand Ole Opry, oversaw a massive, multi-genre live music apparatus, launched the business environment known as Music Row, and even gave Music City its identity and name. And this coming Oct. 5 will be its 100th birthday. So it was due to get some gifts.
“For years, we had discussions on how to incorporate WSM as a larger part of the Opry story,” the station’s General Manager Eric Marcum told WMOT on a visit last month to its new facility in the Roy Acuff House, which faces the plaza in front of the Grand Ole Opry House. They looked into a lot of options, including relocating downtown to the former cafe attached to Ryman Auditorium. That didn’t pan out, but a concept took shape right outside the Opry House doors.
For four decades, WSM had an on-air studio in what’s now known as Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, a kind of “fishbowl” along a hallway. The 2010 flood forced a move for about a year to the WSM tower house in Brentwood, but then they returned to the hallway, far from the Opry action. When major renovations came along for the hotel, and with the 100th anniversary year approaching, Marcum says that pressed the issue like never before. “We were going to be displaced, at least temporarily,” he says. “Will we come back in and build out a new space? Or do you make the move now and create a permanent display for WSM in conjunction with Opry House tours? And that was the green light.”
So not only does a visitor see the WSM call letters prominently displayed over the historic building where Acuff, the patriarch of the Opry, lived during the last decade of his life before passing away in 1992. The broadcast desks and air personalities are visible through plate glass windows. Inside is where it gets really interesting for an Opry/WSM nerd such as myself.
First, we see a sign for the National Life and Accident Insurance Co., the business that launched and owned WSM, that hung on the 5th Ave. side of Ryman Auditorium during the Opry’s golden years. It’s in the shape of a blue shield, lending meaning to the station’s call letters, “We Shield Millions.” Even more remarkable to me, is what Marcum tells me is the last remaining public loudspeaker that hung on the exterior of the National Life/WSM building at 7th and Union, where the station was born. They’d play select live broadcasts to the streets below to make a scene and to reach people who didn’t yet have radios in the early days.
That hall leads to a gallery with a new mini-museum covering WSM’s heritage. A timeline hits the high points - the first broadcast on 10/5/25, the construction of the advanced 50,000 watt radio tower that has been beaming across the South since 1932, the birth of WSMV (Nashville’s first television station launched in 1950), and the construction of today’s Grand Ole Opry House in the early 70s. The Opry’s archivists have placed some choice artifacts on display as well: the fiddle that Sid Harkreader played on the air the night founder George D. Hay named the “Grand Ole Opry” in 1928, a harmonica owned by Deford Bailey, and a red beacon light that used to sit on top of the WSM tower. Most amazing to this student of WSM’s long history of broadcasting innovations is a portable mini transmitter that the station’s news reporters used in the field in the 1930s and 40s.
WSM host and Assistant Program Director Zack Bennett told me that the investment in this polished new facility is part of a revived commitment by the Opry Entertainment Group to elevating the visibility and brand of the radio station that gave the Opry life and reach. “Moving over here to the plaza has been the linchpin and all of that,” he said. “And thankfully that we've got leadership, especially up at the top, that said, WSM, why are they in the hotel? It made sense 40 years ago. It doesn't make sense now. We've got a place for them. And so now, whenever everybody walks out of the Opry house, the first thing they see are the three call letters, WSM.”
Shuttling between the new studio and the Opry House, on-air hosts like Kelly Sutton are living the centenary, integrating the show’s big moment into the sound of the broadcasts going out on WSM’s antique analog tower and its long-running digital presence at WSMonline. “We've been talking about it a lot on the air. In fact, it's been worded into everything that we're saying on the Opry,” Sutton says. “We have a special website that you can go to that has everything that's happening within this year. New merch is rolling out. The programming that we've put together to celebrate the 100th gets mentioned a lot on the air. So, yeah, I think you'd have to be living under a rock to not know it's our 100th anniversary.”
