This morning was another one for the books: I visited the Opry archives and interviewed my friends Tim Davis and Cameron Knowler for my upcoming podcast. The Opry archives are unique, they represent a great deal of incredibly important country music artifacts, a lot of them going back to Roy Acuff’s museum in Nashville down on lower Broadway in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, which later became the Grand Ole Opry museum, on the Opryland grounds, which operated from the 1980s until 2010, when the Cumberland River flooded the area and the museum was closed.
These days, Tim and Cameron manage the archives for a much broader tent, displaying items in and loaning items to various museums and institutions, and maintaining a digital archive of the massive collection.
It quickly becomes complete sensory overload, as you might guess. We talked about a great number of topics, including the history of their archive, various mind-blowing and important instruments in the archive, and the future of preservation and what these artifacts mean to people.
In the first photo, they let me hold Jimmie Rodgers’s original 1929 Gibson HG-22 guitar, an interesting guitar not only because it was one of only a few instruments owned by Jimmie Rodgers (the Singing Brakeman) during his lifetime, but also because the HG-22 was an impossibly rare model made with both F-holes and a round hole (with separate resonating chambers inside the body), and ornate neck inlays and an over-the-top presentation banjo-style headstock. Wow!
We could’ve talked about this single guitar for the entire interview, but we covered lots of other things, and took a look at some other really incredible historic instruments.
Thanks to the Opry archives for allowing me access, and a huge thank you to Tim and Cameron for their time! I think you’ll be really entertained by this episode of the podcast. Still working on launching the thing, but I’ve got some really great stuff in the vault. Stay tuned!
