Country music is having a very good time in Britain.

Arena tours are getting bigger. New Country nights keep appearing. Cowboy hats are turning up in places where, a few years ago, you might have attracted concerned looks.

Glasgow’s Grand Ole Opry can reasonably reply:

Where have you lot been?

It opened in 1974.

More than half a century later, the bands are still playing.

THIS WAS NEVER A POP-UP

Glasgow’s Opry is not a Nashville-themed bar dreamed up by a hospitality company.

It is a members’ club, largely volunteer-run, built around live Country music and the people who enjoy it.

At its height it had around 2,000 members, with hundreds turning up for bands at weekends. Some of the people who joined in the early years still come through the doors today.

That sort of continuity changes how you look at the current British Country boom.

Country did not suddenly arrive here when the arenas got interested.

Plenty of people were already listening.

They just weren't necessarily making much noise about it outside Govan Road.

NASHVILLE, WITHOUT PRETENDING GLASGOW IS NASHVILLE

Founder Alex Fleming borrowed the Grand Ole Opry name from the famous Nashville institution, but the Glasgow version became very much its own thing.

The building itself had already lived a life before Country moved in. It was once an 1,100-seat cinema, and traces of the old picture house remain.

Then Glasgow filled it with bands, dancing, a saloon bar and Saturday nights that developed their own rituals.

American Country singers including Jean Shepard, Heather Myles and Hal Ketchum have played there.

So have rather less Nashville-shaped visitors including Franz Ferdinand.

A good room is a good room.

THEN WILD ROSE CAME ALONG

If you recognise the place without having visited, there is a decent chance Jessie Buckley is responsible.

Glasgow’s Grand Ole Opry appears in Wild Rose, the film about a Glasgow singer dreaming of Nashville.

That connection runs deeper than somebody scouting a suitably Western-looking location.

Screenwriter Nicole Taylor knew the Opry from her own teenage Saturday nights there.

Which helps explain why the film gets something important right.

You can love Country music in Glasgow without pretending you grew up in Tennessee.

In fact, Glasgow is rather good at being Glasgow.

That is enough.

THE OLD CROWD IS STILL IN THE ROOM

The Opry has inevitably changed.

It has survived changing musical tastes, generations of members and arguments about which old traditions deserve to survive with it. In 2023, members narrowly voted to maintain a ban on the Confederate flag after a difficult dispute around its previous use at the club.

That matters because heritage is not the same thing as refusing to move.

The valuable tradition is the one still happening every weekend: people turning up, bands playing and Country music being treated as something worth building a community around.

And you can still walk in.

Current Friday and Saturday nights remain remarkably accessible, with visiting admission costing less than plenty of places now charge for a cocktail.

The bar is cash only.

Naturally.

After 50 years, Glasgow’s Grand Ole Opry has earned the right not to care what your phone thinks.

The bigger point is simpler.

Britain’s Country world may suddenly look new, fashionable and increasingly enormous.

Some of it has been here all along.

GLASGOW’S GRAND OLE OPRY — USEFUL LINKS

Before you go: Events, admission details and opening arrangements can change. Check the Opry directly before travelling.