Opryland USA

Opryland was a theme park located in suburban Nashville, Tennessee. It operated from 1971 until 1997. Billed as the "Home of American Music," it featured a large number of musical shows along with the typical rides such as roller coasters, carousels, and the like. It was opened by the former National Life and Accident Insurance Company, a Nashville insurer best-known for operating WSM radio and the Grand Ole Opry. The Opry itself moved to an adjacent site, the New Grand Ole Opry House, in 1975. (However, music at the park was not limited to country music; there were jazz and pop-themed shows as well).

A large, resort-style hotel was also built, and the Opryland Hotel is now the largest non-casino hotel in the United States. After the takeover of National Life by Texas-based insurer American General (now part of the American International Group), management deemed the Opryland to be too peripheral to the operation of the company and sought to sell it, along with the Opry itself and the broadcast operations. These operations were sold to the Gaylord Company of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, whose then-controlling figure, Ed Gaylord, was a huge fan of the Opry. Annual changes were made to the park to continue to attact local Nashvillians as well as out-of-town visitors. Package deals including rooms at the hotel, tickets to Opryland, and admission to the Grand Ole Opry were made. In the early 1990s, "Trickets" (three-day admission tickets for one price) were introduced, large numbers of season passes were sold to residents of the Nashville area, and Opryland became the "official destination of NASCAR" (as in, "I'm going to Opryland!").

However, Opryland was handicapped by the fact that it was built in the Pennington Bend of the Cumberland River. This meant that not only was the site subject to occassional flooding but also that the park, bounded on the other side by a freeway, could not grow, and that for changes to be made something had to be removed for each item added. Also, the Nashville climate made year-round operations almost impossible; seasons were largely limited to weekends in the late fall and early spring and daily in the summer. Seasonal workers became hard to find, and Gaylord found itself with a labor shortage. They began to employ many immigrants from Latin America and elsewhere. Attendance plateaued, and, by 1997, management decided that the property would no longer make a rate of return on investment equal to that desired of its properties and was unlikely ever to return to doing so. Management decided the park should be replaced by a property which made year-round useage of the site. The rides were sold and the park demolished; the site is now occupied by the Opry Mills mall, which has no connection to Gaylord other than the licensed "Opry" name.

Nashville's tourist ecomomy is yet to recover fully from this blow as there has not been a comparable property opened (as of 2004) to in any way replace Opryland; a small, child-oriented park nearby on Music Valley Drive has a few child-scale rides. Several developers have floated plans for a new Nashville-area theme park; to date none have come to fruititon.