Grand Ole Opry Finds New Purpose Amid Pandemic, Playing to Empty Houses and a New TV Audience

has its ghosts, but March 21 felt downright eerie. There was no anticipatory murmur of excitement from fans filing into the Grand Ole Opry House that night. No curtain going up. No applause marking the moment the show began. Instead, Paisley and fellow Opry members Vince Gill and Marty Stuart sat on stools six feet apart and looked out at nearly 4,400 dark seats, a few cameras and fewer than 30 crew members, only a handful visible at any given time.

For the past three and a half months, radio’s longest-running show has aired without a live audience for the first time since the 1920s. At the same time, the Opry has increased the number of people who watch or listen to the show, averaging a weekly audience of more than 2 million across multiple media platforms.

The Opry completely overhauled its Saturday, March 14 show in about 36 hours after pausing live audiences the day before. Opry executives reformatted the show but kept that night’s previously announced performers: Opry members Connie Smith, Bill Anderson and Jeannie Seely, plus Mandy Barnett, Sam Williams, and Michael Cleveland & Flamekeeper.

For Paisley, the most surreal aspect of that show was the silence between songs. “The silence added to the gravity of the situation,” he says. “You felt the gravity of the fear, since none of us knew where this thing was headed. You sensed that in the room: It was like having a crowd that was too scared to applaud.”

“If we were going to put this together, we wanted make sure we kept the safety of the artists and our employees top of mind,” Opry Entertainment Group president Scott Bailey says. “The protocols also include how the artists come into the venue,” Bailey says, “what doors they can come in, who is there to greet them — and what was supplied in and around the bathrooms, as well as all the wipedowns we need to do to make sure everything is clean and safe and that the artists feel comfortable.” Opry staff even made sure that each artist was provided their own Sharpie marker with which to sign commemorative posters.

The precautions appear to have worked. Rogers says he is not aware of anyone that has worked one of the shows being subsequently diagnosed with COVID-19. The Opry’s streak had been threatened two other times since then. A 1975 flood forced the show to move downtown to Municipal Auditorium for one weekend. And ten years ago, a thousand-year flood submerged the Opry House stage beneath two feet of water; for the following five months, six substitute venues provided temporary homes for the Opry.

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