NPT AIRS “NASHVILLE: THE 20th CENTURY IN PHOTOGRAPHS” SERIES

From Smokey Joe to Music Row, Nashville Public Television sifts through history of Nashville ‘In Photographs’ from the 30s to the 50s..

Second installment in ‘Nashville: The 20th Century in Photographs’ series traces city from after the depression, through World War II, the rise of suburbs and the beginning of Music Row –

Twenty years before Nashville became known in the nation as “Music City, U.S.A.,” it was derided by its locals as Smokey Joe.

“Walking down Broadway in the 30s, you would see a lot of coal soot,” says James Hoobler, Senior Curator, Art & Architecture, Tennessee State Museum. “Nashville was still burning anthracite and the soot was everywhere.” Together with the soot spewing out of the engines of trains at Union Station, according to Hoobler, Nashville had a pall over it. So much soot covered Nashville, adds Sally Ellner Brunson Scott and Tom P. Henderson III, that “they called Nashville Smokey Joe because you couldn’t see the city.”

Though the city continued to struggle with its air quality for a number of years, by the mid-1950s, Nashville was a completely different city.

Hoobler, Scott and Henderson are just a few of the Nashvillians interviewed, and photos of the transformation of Broadway are just a snapshot of the hundreds culled through and gathered, for the second installment of Nashville Public Television’s documentary series “Nashville: The 20th Century in Photographs,” premiering on Thursday, June 3, and encoring on Sunday, June 6, both at 7:00 p.m. on NPT-Channel 8.

Volume Two of the series picks up where Volume One left off, with Nashville crawling out from under the Great Depression and celebrating the completion of the permanent Parthenon in Centennial Park. The end of the 30s would see citywide progress as a result of The New Deal and the Works Progress Administration, the development of the airport at Berry Field, and a thriving rail business at Union Station. Photographs from the archives of The Tennessean, the Tennessee State Library and Archives, the Library of Congress and more tell the story.

“In the entire history (of Tennessee) there hasn’t been a period of change and growth like that seen between the mid 1930s and the mid 1950s,” writes producer Justin Harvey — warmly narrated by Bill Turner — in the documentary. “We went from the Depression to the Music City; from streetcars to buses. The suburbs exploded. Everything moved from downtown out into the neighborhoods. It was an amazing time. A time of triumph and despair; of innocence and innocence lost; of joy and suffering. It was a remarkable era in our history.”

Through photographs taken in the 1940s, we see citizens walking across the frozen Cumberland River during what was the coldest winter on record in Nashville. Radio, especially broadcast out of WSM, became a cultural export. Pearl Harbor pulls Nashville and the rest of the nation in to World War II. The Nashville chapter of the American Red Cross takes a leadership role, and women join the workforce to aid in the effort.

“The War years weren’t only known for conflict,” writes Harvey. “The city itself made some great strides as well, that left a lasting impact.”

In 1943, the Grand Ole Opry moved to the Ryman Auditorium, and the seeds of a music industry were planted. With an influx of musicians in town to play the Opry, and the ease of using Union Station to come and go, Castle Studios opened in the Tulane Hotel, offering acts the chance to not only play Nashville, but to record here as well. There was no need anymore, legendary session musician Harold Bradley says in the program, to pay for the travel expenses to take artists up to Cincinnati or New York to record.

“Because of the Opry, we had the singers, the songwriters, the musicians, the engineers and the know-how to make records,” Bradley says. “So it all just came together.”

In addition to the beginning of the music industry, the 40s saw the growth of then-suburban areas in Green Hills, Inglewood and South Nashville, and the rise of a middle class. Everyone got a car and took advantage of drive-in soda shops and movie theatres. Neighbors gathered at drugstore counters and began shopping at retail establishments beyond downtown. The wealthy took further advantage of Berry Field airfield to hop a flight to other cities in the country. Margaret Ann Robinson shares a nostalgic anecdote about “ladies getting on those airplanes with fur coats and hats and beautiful suitcases.”

“Oh my, goodness, the best of the best were getting on those airplanes,” she says in the documentary.

In the 1950s, Nashville officially became Music City, U.S.A. Harold Bradley and his brother Owen  purchased a home on 16th Avenue South and turned it into the first studio on what would become known as Music Row. With the arrival of Chet Atkins and RCA in the mid 50s, Nashville’s music industry reputation was solidified. With the building of the Quonset Hut behind the 16th Avenue Studio, the “Nashville Sound” was born.

Not bad for a city that just 20 years earlier was covered in soot.

NASHVILLE: THE 20TH CENTURY IN PHOTOGRAPHS (VOLUME 2) airs on NPT as part of its June membership drive. The program is made possible through the generous support of the Ford Motor Company.

About Nashville Public Television
Nashville Public Television is available free and over the air to nearly 2.2 million people throughout the Middle Tennessee and Southern Kentucky viewing area, and is watched by more than 600,000 households every week. NPT provides, through the power of traditional television and interactive telecommunications, high quality educational, cultural and civic experiences that address issues and concerns of the people of the Nashville region, and which thereby help improve the lives of those we serve.