“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their Opry.”---Charles E. Weller
On Saturday, May 18, Gainesville’s Hogtown Opry lights up the night with its second show at the ancient and storied University Auditorium. An exotic collection of performers from Dave Brubeck (1987) to Tom Petty & Mudcrutch (1971) have performed there, and the place looks and sounds pretty much the same now as it did then. The Auditorium was built between 1922-24, then restored and expanded in 1977 and placed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 20, 1989. The seats are soft, the acoustics are great, the temperature is perfect and it almost never rains inside. And in a rare gesture of respect to the old girl, the dreaded Florida mosquitoes always stay outside.
UA contains the famous Andrew Anderson Memorial Organ, built and installed in 1925. A musical landmark of its day, the organ was designed and voiced at the zenith of orchestral-imitative or “symphonic” organ design in this country and is frequently played by appointment by students of the UF Music Department across the street. One of these days, we’re going to crank that baby up and let Brad Bangstad play the early comers down the aisle.
Playing for our second incarnation are the Hogtown Opry Band, Wil Maring & Robert Bowlin, and the Music City Ramblers bluegrass band. The Opry Band is the secret identity of Cathy DeWitt’s expanded Patchwork contingent which led off last year’s show with great energy and musicianship, not to mention a lot of fun. Wil & Robert brought down a surprised house last year with their enchanting songs and great musical talents. When their set is finished, they’ll join Forrest O’Connor and Shad Cobb to form the Music City Ramblers for a fast-paced bluegrass extravaganza. Forrest and Shad are long-time Nashville players who have cavorted with Maring and Bowlin in the past. O’Connor earned national recognition with the O’Connor Band, a group he co-founded with his wife and his father, seven-time CMA Award-winning violinist/fiddler Mark O’Connor. Forrest wrote the title track for the O’Connor Band’s debut album “Coming Home,” which debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Bluegrass Albums chart. He also won a Grammy Award in 2017. O’Connor has performed or recorded with Paul Simon, Zac Brown, Steve Martin, Kenny Loggins, Clint Black, Emmylou Harris, Suzy Bogguss and Bela Fleck. He also performed on the hit TV show Nashville.
Shad Cobb is a Wisconsin-born musician who began playing the fiddle at age 13 with his family’s band. In 1995, he moved to Nashville and began recording with many of the city’s major artists, including the Osborne Brothers, Mike Snider, Marty Rabon and Shenandoah, Willie Nelson and Steve Earle. Shad is currently one of the most in-demand session players in Nashville. Verberate.com calls Cobb “an incredible musician who has had a huge influence on the country and bluegrass musical scenes and made a name for himself with his flawless skill and unwavering love of music.”
The citizens of Gainesville are used to cheap tickets for musical events. The Opry tickets are not cheap, with a floor of $40. Here’s why. The acts we want to bring in after May 18 charge $15,000 and up. The auditorium expenses, sound & lights company, advertising and printing, etc., run another $10,000. If your nut is $25,000 or more and you charge twenty bucks for tickets, you lose $8000 even if you sell out the 843-seat house. You just about break even with a $30 ticket and make $8000 net at $40---and that’s only on the unlikely occasion you sell out.
Okay so find another building. We tried for months before we got started. There aren’t any. Ask the guys at High Dive, who just lost their lease and are trawling block by block for an alternative venue. The closest thing we found is the 500-seat auditorium at Santa Fe College, which is only slightly cheaper to rent and offers 343 less seats. We’d like to keep our 800+ seats because you never know when there’ll be a Flatt & Scruggs revival tour.
Final option; hire cheaper talent. Nobody needs us for that. There’s a ton of good music bubbling in Gainesville every day of the week, especially at Heartwood, which brings in musicians of every stripe, now even country bangers like the Steel Drivers. Our vision is to bring to Gainesville bigger-name entertainers the city doesn’t usually see. If that proves not to be viable we’ll quietly go away.
The public is the final arbiter of what’s worth their money. We attempt to provide a complete musical show in a perfect setting with comfortable amenities like indoor plumbing and noone blocking your view, but the talent we bring in will tell the final tale. Our first Summer show will be revelatory. We’ll find out after the August 3 extravaganza if the Hogtown Opry is a contender or a pipe (organ) dream. Stay tuned.
Rhonda Vincent’s career began at age five singing gospel songs with her family’s band, the Sally Mountain Show. Her father bought her a snare drum for her sixth birthday. At age eight, she was playing mandolin and added the fiddle by the time she was twelve. In an interview with Ingrams magazine, she said “Dad used to pick me up after school and Grandpa would come over and we played until after dinner almost every night. There wasn’t a lot going on in Greentop, Missouri but it was always hopping at the Vincent house.”
Rhonda recorded her first single, a version of Mule Skinner Blues, in 1970. The family traveled and performed extensively across the Midwest in the seventies and early eighties. Rhonda came to the attention of Grand Ole Opry star Jim Ed Brown and spent what she calls her musical college years recording for Giant Records, releasing her first album New Dreams and Sunshine in 1988. After branching out to mainstream country music in the 1990s, Vincent returned to bluegrass in 2000 with her album Back Home Again. The International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) gave her its Female Vocalist of the Year award for the years 2000-2006, plus IBMA Entertainer of the Year in 2001. The Society for Preservation of Bluegrass Music in America designated her its entertainer of the Year in 2002-2006 inclusive.
In September of 2010, Rhonda released Taken, her debut album on her own label, Upper Management Music. Featuring special guests like long-time friend Dolly Parton, Richard Marx and Little Roy Lewis, the album entered the Top Bluegrass Albums chart at Number 1. It was her pivotal album Back Home Again, however, which transformed Vincent into the All-American Bluegrass Girl. She was crowned the New Queen of Bluegrass in 2000 by the Wall Street Journal, of all people. She is a multi-award winner with a 2017 Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, an Entertainer of the Year in 2001, and had the Song of the Year in 2004. Rhonda was invited to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry on February 28, 2020.
Barring an unlikely Act of God (she’s friends with him), Rhonda Vincent will sell out University Auditorium for Hogtown Opry III on August 3. Attendees at the May 18 Opry can assure themselves seats by filling out the back of the current show’s program and returning it to the swag table or mailing it back to PO Box 970, Fairfield, Florida 32634. Rhonda is one of two performers the Opry has been trying to recruit for the last 18 months. Synchronicity arrived when her 2024 tour scheduled a stop in Talladega on August 2 and she became available for August 3. Sometimes you just get lucky. The big bluegrass bus is coming this way and local Rhonda fans are all adither.
“Well, you get down the fiddle and get down the bow….kick off your shoes and you throw ‘em on the floor! Dance in the kitchen ‘til the mornin’ light. Hogtown Opry Saturday night!”
Y’all come, hear?
bill.killeen094@gmail.com
