The Grand Ole Opry and Big Tobacco: Radio Scripts from the Files of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, 1948 to 1959

Click for larger view Figure 1 R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. began sponsoring a thirty minute national broadcast of the Grand Ole Opry in 1938, using the program as a vehicle to promote Prince Albert Smoking Tobacco, and its Cavalier and Camel cigarette brands. Using country music to sell something wasn't new; it reached back to the use of string bands in nineteenth-century patent medicine shows and continued with the advent of radio. Ryman Auditorium, "Grand Ole Opry House," courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.