Some old school Country, with more than a few hints of what was to come. Dolly Parton at around 7:00 piled up the hair and sang it straight. She’d wander onto the pop charts, bigtime, a little later, with the crossover sound that fell out of the old country music tree.

Rock music had already worked its magic on country music. Up until the late fifties, pop music was very wide-ranging and catholic. Elvis and his cohort had one foot still in country, for instance, but they started the deluge of rock or nothing that found everyone shifting over from whatever genre they inhabited before. When Bobby Darin starts trying to sing rock music, things have truly shifted for good. Eventually, in 1964, the Beatles wiped the charts clean and scrawled their name all over it. Country music had an identity crisis.

This video is a museum exhibit of the end of the original Grand Ol Opry movement. Shortly after this, the Opry moved to a new venue. It didn’t look down-home anymore, and the acts moved into New Country, and various forms of crossover styles. In some ways, it isn’t a long trip from this video to stuff like the Eagles, or Eddie Rabbitt, or BJ Thomas, or Charlie Rich, or Kenny Rogers, or Dolly Parton’s transformation, or the Bellamy Brothers, but there’s an oceanic gulf between the styles. It’s nice that someone pointed a camera at the dotted line that divided the eras.