Following Joy to the Grand Ole Opry
I grew up watching Hee Haw and like country music, so Nashville has always been a fun place for me. It’s hard not to be happy in a city where live music starts before lunch and no one seems particularly concerned about that.
There’s an artist I follow named Joy Oladokun. I cannot pronounce her last name with enough confidence to say it out loud, so in my world she is simply Joy O. I saw that she was going to perform at the Grand Ole Opry and immediately bought tickets.
Now, I have technically been to the Grand Ole Opry, but it was more than 25 years ago and I had never actually seen a show there. I did remember that it wasn’t downtown Nashville. It’s out in the suburbs, surrounded by Opryland and everything that has sprung up around it.
So Chad and I decided to fly to Nashville for one night and fully embrace the Opryland experience. No downtown. No Broadway. No pedal taverns filled with women named Brittany celebrating their third engagement. We were going all in on Opryland.
We stayed at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, which feels a little like arriving at a Las Vegas resort if Las Vegas had removed the casino and replaced it with several acres of indoor horticulture.
It is enormous, incredibly clean and completely indoors, with a contrived sense of adventure. There are lush gardens, waterfalls, rivers, bridges and pathways winding through the atriums. Everything is beautiful, but almost too beautiful. At some point you start wondering if the plants are real or if you’re actually inside a very elaborate plastic terrarium.
There is water running everywhere, creating this white noise that makes the whole place strangely peaceful despite the fact that thousands of people are wandering around trying to remember which atrium contains their hotel room.
The room itself was exactly what I expected: nice, comfortable and perfectly adequate. You don’t really stay at the Gaylord for the room. You stay there because apparently someone decided a hotel needed its own ecosystem.
We also learned that summer is actually the off-season, which surprised me until we discovered that one of the big summer attractions is the indoor water park. Chad and I were not participating in this activity, but we did investigate it for future reference. At this stage of life, I’m no longer willing to commit to swimming with strangers’ children while pretending we all don’t know someone has peed in the pool.
We had an early dinner at Old Hickory Steakhouse.
It was exactly what you want from a good steakhouse: plenty of meat, vegetables cooked with enough butter that they no longer qualify as vegetables, and a waiter who laughs at your jokes and makes you feel like you’re the most important person in the room.
We started with a tomato salad that was absolutely delicious. Then I made a mistake.
For some reason, I got it into my head that I should have a cocktail. The menu featured a honey-and-lavender espresso martini, and apparently those words arranged together sounded appealing to me at 5:00 in the afternoon. They should not have.
I’m not sure drinking coffee at five o’clock that smells vaguely like your grandmother is the best way to kick off an evening. I took a few sips and surrendered.
Our waiter came back over and I said, “Can I just have a glass of red wine?”
He looked at the cocktail.
“You don’t like it?”
“I know I ordered it. I’ll pay for it. I’m just not going to drink it.”
He very kindly took it off the bill, which really just meant his tip went up by approximately the cost of one lavender-scented caffeinated mistake.
The rest of dinner was very good, although everything leaned a little sweet for me. I ordered a filet, ate about half of it and then ran the other half upstairs to put in our room refrigerator. Not because I needed a midnight snack. Because I had two dogs at home who would absolutely expect me to return from Nashville bearing steak.
After dinner, we walked over to the Grand Ole Opry.
The Opry moved from the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville to its “new” home in 1974. I put new in quotation marks because anything built in 1974 is now only considered new if you’re discussing European cathedrals.
What I hadn’t fully appreciated is that the Grand Ole Opry is a radio show. They’ve been broadcasting it for 100 years, and the evening isn’t structured like a regular concert. It’s a variety show, with multiple performers coming on and off the stage throughout the night.
The auditorium itself was much bigger than I expected, but somehow it still felt intimate. The wooden pew-style seating gives the whole place a church-like quality. Which seems appropriate. Country music is basically church with more cheating and whiskey (well, maybe not that much more).
I honestly didn’t know anyone on the program other than Joy O, which turned out to be one of the best parts of the evening. Instead of waiting impatiently for the person I’d come to see, I kept discovering ridiculously talented people I’d never heard of.
Maggie Rose performed a new song called Gentle Man, which had just been released that day. She wrote it for her son. And I cried. Of course I did.
I had never heard of Maggie Rose, only to discover that she has performed at the Opry more than 100 times. Apparently, I am not nearly as plugged into the music industry as Spotify has led me to believe.
Then there was Josh Weathers, who was making his Grand Ole Opry debut. His wife and four of their six children were sitting directly behind me, and I believe his brother was sitting in front of me. Suddenly we weren’t just watching some musician make his Opry debut. We were sitting inside his family while they watched something they had probably dreamed about with him for years. You could just feel the love and pride surrounding them.
He was fantastic. And you could tell immediately that he was one of those classic 15-year overnight successes.
But I was there for Joy.
And I’ll admit, I was a little worried. Looking around the room, I wasn’t entirely sure this was going to be her crowd. Then she started singing. Talent has a wonderful way of making demographics irrelevant. People sat up. They listened. And she was fantastic.
I was ridiculously happy that I had groupied my way to Nashville for one night just to see her perform at the Grand Ole Opry. Sometimes you just have to follow your Joy. — Literally.
The Grand Ole Opry clearly knows its audience, and I can illustrate this with two pieces of evidence.
- During intermission, you could purchase: Pizza, Whiskey, and Werther’s Originals.
- At the end of the show when they brought out The Oak Ridge Boys.
Now, I want to be clear. These are not currently all of the original “Boys.” Half of the lineup has been replaced.
Chad leaned over and whispered, “Do you think the other two are dead?”
“YES.”
Because looking at the two originals who were still standing onstage, one was shaking badly with tremors and the other appeared to be actively negotiating with the Grim Reaper to be his replacement.
And yet…The music started. The crowd came alive. And when the new bass-voice Boy dropped that famous “Giddy up, oom poppa, oom poppa, mow mow,” in the song Elvira the place absolutely erupted.
And suddenly it didn’t matter who was original, who was new, who needed a Werther’s Original or who might have the Grim Reaper waiting in the wings. For a few minutes, everybody in that room was young again.
And that might be the real magic of the Grand Ole Opry.
