Grand Ole Opry

I didn’t grow up listening to the show, but I did listen to enough AM country growing up traveling around the country and out and about with my father to have a deep appreciation for what it meant to those who did. Visiting the Opry is still on my bucket list.

It appears the Opry house in its current incarnation turns 40 this month, and Garden & Gun’s article Lordy, Lordy, the Opry’s 40! has a few quotes from artists who’ve performed there over the years. My favorite is from Ricky Skaggs.

“I used to go to sleep on my grandfather’s lap, listening to the Grand Ole Opry in his Ford pickup truck out by the barn. The sound would come and go up in those Kentucky mountains, but when it would come back in, it was the greatest sound in the world."

Perhaps the reference to sleeping on his grandfather’s lap as the music came and went is what struck me, as I my earliest memories of music were with my head asleep on dad’s lap as we drove across country.