NASHVILLE, Tenn. – There are a number of venues that could rightfully earn the title of “cathedral of music,” from Carnegie Hall to the Hollywood Bowl, from the 100 Club to the Royal Albert Hall, from La Scala to the Opera Garnier and beyond.

But only one of them actually began life as a church and that’s the Ryman Auditorium at 116 5th Ave. N, in Nashville.

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Considering how hallowed it is now and how much it has been revered for most of its lifetime, it’s almost impossible to fathom that there was a chance the Ryman would be torn down, but that was the case in both the 1960s and the 1970s.

These days the venue – begun in 1888 and opened in 1892 as the Union Gospel Tabernacle – is a vibrant concert hall, hosting country, rock, comedy and other shows and it is also a tourist attraction that offers a variety of tours from self-guided experiences to full-on VIP tours that include backstage visits.

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How did the Ryman avoid the fate of many Nashville sites that once housed vintage buildings but are now occupied by glassy 21st century towers?

Well, the story begins with a 19th century scenario that sounds a bit like Music City today.

After the Civil War, Nashville was a booming town and growing rapidly. It was also a good-time, anything-goes river city on the banks of the Cumberland River. Along with that growth came a lot of boozing and carousing (presumably without the bar bikes).

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No one loved a party more than wealthy Thomas Green Ryman, who not only captained a riverboat but owned the riverboat company, as well as a riverfront saloon.

Ryman was born in Nashville and in 1864, while still a teenager, following in his father’s footsteps, got into riverboats by buying his first steamer. Within 20 years he’d launched three riverboat businesses that merged into the Ryman Line, which at one point could boast ownership of nearly three dozen vessels.

No one, on the other and, seemed to hate the partying more than Rev. Samuel Porter Jones, a Methodist Episcopal revivalist pastor from Georgia, whose drinking problems had quashed a career as a lawyer and led him to menial jobs.

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After the death of his father, he had a religious experience and became an evangelist.

Jones arrived in Nashville in May 1885 to preach the Gospel at a three-week series of open-air revivals that drew huge crowds and national attention to what is now 8th Avenue and Broadway.

Ryman attended that meeting with the intention of haranguing the goody two shoes preacher but ended up converted, or so the story goes, shutting down the bars on his vessels, transforming his saloon into a sanctuary and, more importantly for our story, vowing to build a permanent home in Nashville for Jones to hold his revivals.

In addition to making a substantial donation, Ryman raised the rest of the roughly $100,000 required to start construction of the new temple – called the Union Gospel Tabernacle – designed by architect Hugh Cathcart Thompson.

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Thompson was born in Monroe County, Tennessee in 1829 and by the time of his death in 1919 had become one of the state’s most prominent architects, working on residential commissions as well as other projects, including Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Franklin and First United Methodist Church in McMinnville, after opening his own practice in 1875.

He also drew one of my favorite Nashville buildings, the lovely 1891 Romanesque Revival-style Utopia Hotel on 4th Avenue North (now part of the Dream Nashville Hotel).

All this despite the fact that Thompson appears to have been more of a carpenter and contractor than an experienced architect.

What he designed for Ryman and Jones was a two-and-a-half-story Victorian Gothic gem on 5th Avenue, just north of Broadway, with a rusticated rock-faced limestone foundation, brick walls punctuated by slender Gothic windows and limestone and metal detailing, capped by a gabled roof.

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Inside, the auditorium is oriented length-wise, with an exceptionally wide stage along the south wall, facing the seating, which is arranged in a concentric arc, with a semicircular balcony above.

Initially, the theater had seating for about 3,000 but that number doubled in 1897 with the construction of the balcony, the underside of which resembles the innards of an old baseball stadium, such as Wrigley Field, with its sloping iron girders.

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The capacity dropped to 3,500 in 1901 when the stage was added, replacing an earlier configuration that focused attention on a pulpit.

In 1904 and ‘06 the venue was further adapted more for performances than religious ceremonies with the addition of backstage dressing rooms and storage areas.

The earliest part of this work coincided with the passing of the tabernacle’s namesake and the subsequent renaming of the building, at Jones’ urging, in honor of its late patron. Jones would pass away just two years later.

When the building opened in 1892, Jones is reported to have declared, “I believe for every dollar spent in this Tabernacle, there’ll be $10 less spent in the future on court trials. This tabernacle is the best investment the city of Nashville ever made.”

By then, Jones had already preached at the new tabernacle. In fact, his first revival was held there on May 25, 1890, when all that stood were the foundation and six-foot high walls.

Interestingly, it seems that despite the name, the building was always intended to host more than just religious revivals. In fact, in May 1892, the Theodore Thomas Orchestra performed, kicking off well over a century of concerts, dramas, educational talks, boxing matches and other non-religious events.

That same year, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who continue to perform in the theater today, made their Ryman debut.

By 1920, Lula Naff was the star of the show at the Ryman, having become the theater manager, booking – since as early as 1904 – the likes of Harry Houdini, Charlie Chaplin, Katharine Hepburn, Will Rogers, Enrico Caruso, Bob Hope, John Philip Sousa, W.C. Fields, Doris Day, Helen Keller, Presidents William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt, and many others before inking a deal with radio station WSM to bring their Grand Ole Opry radio show to the Ryman.

(Naff retired in 1955 and died five years later.)

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WSM – owned by National Life and Accident Insurance Company – hit the airwaves in 1925 and quickly hired popular Chicago radio personality George Hay to bring his barn dance show to the station, where it was known as the WSM Barn Dance until 1927 when it was renamed The Grand Ole Opry.

The show started out at the station’s downtown Nashville studios but quickly outgrew that, so National Life built a 500-capacity theater and quickly packed that. In 1934, the show moved to what is now The Belcourt Theatre and after topping out that place, shifted two years later to the 3,500-seat Dixie Tabernacle and in 1939 to the War Memorial Auditorium.

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Once it landed at the Ryman in 1943, it remained for 31 years, though a half-century after the weekly Opry left the Ryman, many folks still think of the Ryman as the Opry and vice versa.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Opry, which made stars out of countless country and western performers and was the setting for the “invention” of bluegrass music when Earl Scruggs and Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys played in December 1945.

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Elvis Presley performed on the Opry stage, as did Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline. It seems almost pointless to name them all, since every country performer of any note appeared on the Grand Ole Opry, from George Jones to Dolly Parton to Loretta Lynn to Charley Pride and on and on.

In 1963, National Life bought the Ryman and changed the name to the Grand Ole Opry House and three years later, the company installed the colored glass windows that we see today and made some upgrades.

In 1969, Cash would insist that his television show be filmed at the Ryman, and so it was.

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However, by then, the future of the auditorium was already in question.

In 1969, when the Opry announced that it would leave for a new home out in the ‘burbs, the fate of the Ryman was reason for concern.

Still, having dodged a bullet in 1962 when the new Municipal Auditorium was constructed a few blocks north rather than on the Ryman site, as had been proposed, things did not look good.

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One newspaper report said that when the Opry moved to its new suburban home, the Ryman – added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 – would be dismantled and moved, too.

Country music legend Roy Acuff supported another idea, that of tearing down the Ryman and using the bricks to build a “Little Church of Opryland.”

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Ironically, the WSM proposal for this idea that would destroy the Ryman included this kicker: “The Ole Opry House is invested with too much history and too much sentiment to not be preserved in some way.”

In May 1973, no less than venerable architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote about the issue in The New York Times.

“Although it was neither an opera house nor a legitimate theater, the Ryman has one of the most star-studded histories of the performing arts in the United States,” she wrote. “As architecture, it is a vernacular version of the Ruskinian Gothic – a style with a high casualty rate because its fashionableness in the 19th century is matched only by its unfashionableness now, except with the experts.

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“Taste turns, usually, after an entire era has been destroyed. The building is a unique combination of popular architectural and cultural history.”

After lamenting the “inevitable ... commercial corruption” of country music and noting the plan to build the new Opryland complex 10 miles out of downtown – “in one of those glorious cultural confusions of past and present in which only the phony is real” – Huxtable continued, “National Life is politely, but adamantly against saving the old Grand Ole Opry House. In fairness, this is probably a mixture of architectural ignorance and astute business venality. Opryland puts it all together in one tremendously profitable commercial package.”

She then quoted National Life’s William C. Weaver, who said, “When these good people come to Opryland and later a National Life agent calls, they'll have something to talk about. We'll have ways and means of getting people's names and addresses at Opryland. I think it will be a right interesting tie-in.”

Astute business venality indeed. Plus the desertion of a downtown.

“Destroying the Ryman is more than demolishing a touchstone of Nashville's past,” Huxtable wrote. “Pulling out means abandonment of a neighborhood that needs help, and speeding the death of downtown.

“That's fine for the kind of redevelopers who wait like vultures to produce sterile new urban pap. But good urban design practice would have suggested long ago that the area should have been renewed in terms of historic rehabilitation and that a most important key was the Ryman and its related economic uses. There is more than one way to kill a neighborhood.”

As for the idea of “The Little Church of Opryland”?

“That probably takes first prize for the pious misuse of a landmark and the total misunderstanding of the principles of preservation,” Huxtable chided. “This travesty has convinced a lot of people, that demolition is an O.K. thing. Among them are Billy Graham and Tennessee Ernie Ford, who is reputed to be waiting to sing the first hymn.

“Well, as we said, in today's world only the phony is real. Gentlemen, for shame. You at least should be on the side of the angels.”

The last Grand Ole Opry broadcast at the Ryman took place Friday, March 15, 1974. Even Acuff admitted he was a little sad.

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Minnie Pearl cried.

George Morgan closed the show with a performance of "Candy Kisses" and then Johnny and June Carter Cash sent everyone home with a singalong of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” on the "Grand Ole Gospel Time" show.

At that point, the lights went out and the doors were locked.

But gosh darn it if the Ryman wasn’t still standing nine years later when after a 1982 hostile takeover of National Life, the new owners American General sold the Grand Old Opry to Gaylord Entertainment, along with Opryland and other related properties, including the Ryman, the following year.

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In 1988, Dolly Parton filmed her television show at the Ryman and the following year, Gaylord began work to renovate the old Mother Church, spending $1 million to clean and tuckpoint the exterior and restore the old pediment window that had fallen out and been boarded up about three decades earlier.

They also replaced the roof, repaired damaged woodwork and broken windows and rebuilt the chimneys.

In 1991, Emmylou Harris and The Nash Ramblers recorded an album on the stage, and three years later, the Ryman reopened as a concert hall and a museum.

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By that time, a new brick structure connected to the auditorium by a glass walkway had been constructed at the back of the Ryman and included a large gift shop, a box office, restrooms, exhibition space and a new main entrance into the venue.

In 2001, the Ryman was named a National Historic Landmark. It is currently owned by Opry Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of Ryman Hospitality Properties.

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To step inside today is to feel the reverberations of American musical history, as well as Nashville history.

When I visited two woman sat near the front, each with one ear to an iPhone held between them, and they gently and quietly sang along with a song that I couldn’t hear, but that clearly echoed with meaning to them in this special place.

Their reverence is not unique.

There are signs of modernity all around, including television screens and modern safety features, as well as up-to-date sound and lighting equipment, dressing the Ryman for its role in the 21st century.

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There are also modern display cases befitting a museum, with costumes and guitars and historical documents and photos and explanatory panels, but the real history isn’t behind glass.

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I sat on some of the weathered pews and imagined the countless people who prayed here, testified here, sang and played their hearts out here. Close your eyes and you can almost hear Hank (maybe two or three Hanks) on the stage.

The history is in the woodwork, the masonry, even in those colored glass panels that have become a key part of the Ryman’s fabric.

It’s in the advertising signs that are on display in one of the entry areas and in the incredible iron stairs and balusters fabricated by the National Foundry and Machine Company of Louisville, Kentucky, and those handrails that have guided so many into and out of the Mother Church of Country Music.

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Best of all is that after some tough times, downtown Nashville came back – even without the Grand Old Opry being there – and in a big, big way.

And while the Opry remains out in the ‘burbs, the Ryman remains Nashville's beating heart, right in the thick of it all.