The photographs in this exhibition were shot by Ed Clark for Life magazine before, during, and after a Grand Ole Opry performance at Nashville, Tennessee’s famed Ryman Auditorium on a Saturday night in July of 1946. 

Ed Clark (1911–2000) started his career at the Nashville Tennessean newspaper as an assistant and later became a staff photographer. His work came to the notice of Life, which made him a stringer in 1936. He joined the staff in 1944, when the magazine allowed him to work from Tennessee. 

Clark traveled the world for Life, covering the Nuremberg trials, Hollywood in its heyday, the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, and Washington during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, creating compelling images wherever he went.

He is perhaps best known for a single photograph. When he learned that Franklin Roosevelt had died, he drove through the night to reach Warm Springs, Georgia, the site of Roosevelt’s Little White House. As the president’s body was being taken to the train station, Clark noticed U.S. Navy bandsman Graham W. Jackson, Sr., playing “Goin’ Home,” one of Roosevelt’s favorite tunes, on his accordion as tears ran down his face. The iconic image appeared full page in the April 23, 1945, issue of Life, perfectly capturing the nation’s grief.

In early summer 1946, he was assigned by Life to create a photo-essay about the Grand Ole Opry. Asked to document a typical performance, Clark instead concentrated on the attendees—slightly starstruck country people arriving in trucks, a young couple who had driven from Idaho to see their idols, and the long lines outside the unair-conditioned Ryman Auditorium waiting to get in.

Now the longest-running radio broadcast in U.S. history, the Grand Ole Opry marks its one hundredth anniversary on November 28, 2025. When these photographs were taken, it had already been on the air for more than twenty years.

In the end, Life never published any of these photographs, perhaps because Clark’s emphasis was on the audience and not the entertainers. It’s impossible to say. But somehow Nashville and the Opry became what they are today without the help of Ed Clark or Life.