In Memoriam: Ralph Emery

Ralph Emery, a nationally renowned radio and television broadcaster and best-selling author who became one of Country Music’s most recognizable boosters in a career that spanned half a century passed away January 18, 2022. Born on March 10, 1933, he was 88 years old.  

Walter Ralph Emery, born in nearby McEwen, TN, fell in love with the art of broadcasting at an early age and grew to become one of radio and television’s most well-known figures and a 2007 inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He has been called “the Dick Clark of Country Music” and the dean of Country Music broadcasters.  

Emery tried to leave Nashville a few times over the years, but always returned to the market that gave him access to Country Music and the endlessly fascinating people who populated Music Row. His early jobs were part-time and had him considering another line of work. But his love for talking to stars about Country Music was immediate, originating with interviews of personalities like Webb Pierce and Marty Robbins while working at WAGG in nearby Franklin in the early 1950s. 

“I suddenly felt that being in radio was unequivocally the right thing for me after all,” Emery once recalled. 

Emery continued to climb to stations with larger and larger reach, joining the staff of 5,000-watt WSIX where he would notably land his first television job in 1954 at sister station WSIX-TV as a studio announcer for live wrestling matches.  

The 24-year-old disc jockey finally hit the jackpot in 1957 when he took over WSM’s night shift, carving out his first place in Country Music’s bedrock during a 15-year stint at Nashville’s 50,000-watt flagship station. His was a rollicking, all-night freeform show that included an open-door policy, future stars like Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard walking through that door at all hours to perform and reminisce and few restrictions on his musical taste. 

He started to double dip into television in the 1960s at the behest of producer Elmer Alley, who launched Emery’s first show on WSM-TV, “Opry Almanac,” in 1963. He moved from mornings to afternoons with “Sixteenth Avenue” from 1966-1969, then helmed other local and national shows over the decades, including the early morning “Ralph Emery Show” from 1972-1991. 

He was hired to host TNN’s flagship show, “Nashville Now,” in 1983. This job brought Emery before the largest audiences of his career and viewers loved his long-practiced laid-back approach and conversational ease. That voice carried over to the written page in a series of four memoirs, beginning with 1991’s “Memories: The Autobiography of Ralph Emery,” which spent 24 weeks on The New York Times best-sellers list. He was inducted into the Country Music Disc Jockey Hall of Fame in 1989.  

“I’ve always tried to bring respect to Country Music,” Emery once said. “I’ll be very content if people can look on me and say, ‘He brought dignity to his craft,’ or, ‘He brought class to the business.’”