Before it was a stage, the Grand Ole Opry was a sound. The National Life and Accident Insurance Company of Nashville, Tennessee, launched a new radio station, WSM-AM, to advertise themselves, and just needed to figure out what to play on that station. What they came up with was a country music tradition that for decades brought the listeners an eclectic mix of rising stars and living legends, an institution as important to Country as Carnegie Hall is to Classical.

On this day, October 18, in 1925, WSM featured “Dr. Humphrey Bate and his string quartet of old-time musicians,” a single act eventually expanding into multiple country and bluegrass songs that collectively came to be called the Grand Ole Opry.

George D. “Judge” Hay, who created the “National Barn Dance” program for a Chicago station, was brought on board just days after the Humphrey Bate concert. Nashville was deemed a much better place for barn-dance music, and Hay turned out to have an ear for talent. His singers and musicians followed an hour of opera and classical musical, and Hay once remarked upon the contrast “For the past hour, we have been listening to music taken largely from Grand Opera. From now on we will present the Grand Ole Opry.”