George D. Hay
American radio personality (1895–1968)
George Dewey Hay (November 9, 1895 – May 8, 1968) was an American radio announcer and journalist. He was the founder of the original radio series Grand Ole Opry on WSM-AM in Nashville, Tennessee, from which the country music stage show of the same name developed.
Early newspaper and radio career
Hay was born in Attica, Indiana, United States. In Memphis, Tennessee, after World War I, he was a reporter for the newspaper The Commercial Appeal. While performing a reporting assignment in Mammoth Spring, Arkansas in 1919, Hay was invited to a hoedown in a local cabin. There, a fiddle player, a guitar player, and a banjo player performed until dawn. Hay was impressed, and that may have inspired his later efforts. When the newspaper initiated its own radio station, WMC, in January 1923, he became a late-night announcer for the station. His popularity increased and in May 1924 he quit for WLS in Chicago, where he served as the announcer for a program that became National Barn Dance.
Beginning The Grand Ole Opry
On November 9, 1925, Hay's 30th birthday, he relocated to Nashville and began work for station WSM. Getting a strong listener reaction to 78-year-old fiddler Uncle Jimmy Thompson that November, Hay announced the next month that WSM would feature "an hour or two" of old-time music every Saturday night.
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This entry incorporates text from “George D. Hay” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.