In 1885, riverboat and saloon tycoon Thomas Ryman stormed a tent revival to heckle preacher Samuel Porter Jones and walked out a convert. He spent seven years and about $100,000 building the Union Gospel Tabernacle, refused to put his name on it, and only after his 1904 funeral did mourners vote to rename it the Ryman Auditorium. This episode treats the building as a character with a biography, from its balcony funded by Confederate veterans to its near demolition and modern rebirth.

The story turns on Lula C. Naff, a widowed stenographer who signed her letters L.C. Naff so agents assumed she was a man, booked Houdini, Chaplin, Caruso and Helen Keller, quietly seated integrated audiences in the Jim Crow South, and beat the Nashville Board of Censors in court in 1939. The Grand Ole Opry arrived in 1943 because rowdy fans could not destroy wo ...