Tennessee Ernie Ford

In the late 1940s and 1950s, this building's WROL studios stood at the center of a new movement in country music, bluegrass, as Flatt and Scruggs used WROL as their home base for radio performances and touring and the Osborne Brothers, Cope Brothers, and other bluegrass pioneers performed there regularly. On December 7, 1941, Ernest Jennings Ford, a disc jockey from Bristol, Tennessee, working at WROL, was among the first to bring news of the Pearl Harbor bombing to East Tennessee, and he later became one of the most successful country and pop music stars of all time under the name “Tennessee” Ernie Ford.

Knoxville, Tennessee · United States