Entertainment for Everyone: The Nashville Ryman Auditorium before the Advent of Country Music

Abstract

This article reconsiders the story of Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century to the advent of country music in the early 1950s. Closely scrutinizing the management of Lula C. Naff and her professional network, it argues that the Ryman, thanks to its diversified programming, turned into a music venue for everyone in the course of the first half of the twentieth century, despite ongoing segregation, social cleavages, and cultural parochialism. As such, the Ryman was neither simply the mythical birthplace of a purely local music scene nor a cosmopolitan hotspot of musical special gigs. Rather, the Auditorium developed its distinct aura from the particular mixture of its local religious origin and personal management as well as from its diversified connections into various cultural and social constituencies, on stage as well as in the audience.