My parents took me and my siblings to the “Opryland” amusement park in Nashville, TN around … 1981 or so; I would have been about nine years old. It was part of a family vacation that took us from Long Island, New York through two mountain ranges — I saw the Blue Ridge Mountains for the first time (though certainly not the last), and the Great Smoky Mountains. (That, by itself, seemed like traveling to fantastic new dimension to a young kid.)
But Opryland was a blast. I’m surprised I’ve never heard it mentioned by anyone I knew since I saw it over 40 years ago. (And I’ve been friends with quite a few Southerners.) The shot below is one of the few public domain photos I could find of the park itself (and it dates from the mid-1970’s).
My parents were excited about a stage show called “The Grand Ole Opry;” the theme of the amusement park was … historical country music, or something. That wasn’t of much interest to a kid, but I had a blast with rides like The Log Flume, the Skyride and those Tin Lizzie antique cars on the safety track. (Somewhere there’s a family photo of nine-year-old me happily “driving” one.)
As it turns out, there actually are a lot of people who remember Opryland if you look for them online. There’s an official Facebook page, with tons of photos and links, along with this documentary from Nashville Public Television.
The “Grand Ole Opry” lives on as a live stage performance series and a radio show, but Opryland closed in 1997. It really is missed by a lot of people. Take a look at some of the comments on the Facebook page — this place had a hell of a loyal fanbase.
Photo credit: Chris Faulkner, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 