Tennessee Ernie Ford - WROL Studios
Cradle of Country Music Tour
While hosting the WROL studios in the late 1940s and 1950s, this building served as the center of a new movement in country music - bluegrass. The legendary duo Flatt and Scruggs used WROL as their home base for radio performances and touring. The Osborne Brothers, Cope Brothers, and other bluegrass pioneers performed regularly at WROL.
On December 7, 1941, a disc jockey from Bristol, Tennessee, working here at the studios of WROL, was among the first to bring the news of the Pearl Harbor bombing to East Tennessee. The disk jockey, Ernest Jennings Ford, would become one of the most successful country and pop music stars of all time while performing under the name “Tennessee” Ernie Ford.