In 1885, riverboat and saloon tycoon Thomas Ryman stormed a tent revival to heckle preacher Samuel Porter Jones and walked out a convert. He spent seven years and about $100,000 building the Union Gospel Tabernacle, refused to put his name on it, and only after his 1904 funeral did mourners vote to rename it the Ryman Auditorium. This episode treats the building as a character with a biography, from its balcony funded by Confederate veterans to its near demolition and modern rebirth.

The story turns on Lula C. Naff, a widowed stenographer who signed her letters L.C. Naff so agents assumed she was a man, booked Houdini, Chaplin, Caruso and Helen Keller, quietly seated integrated audiences in the Jim Crow South, and beat the Nashville Board of Censors in court in 1939. The Grand Ole Opry arrived in 1943 because rowdy fans could not destroy wooden pews, the cramped backstage pushed stars across the alley into Tootsie’s, and after the Opry left in 1974 the building rotted for nearly two decades until Emmylou Harris recorded At the Ryman in 1991 and forced a 1993 renovation.

• How Hugh Cathcart Thompson’s design for an unamplified preacher created legendary acoustics
• Why Roy Acuff wanted the Ryman torn down and bought a neighboring building for a dressing room
• The 1979 car bomb disarmed 20 minutes before it would have leveled three blocks
• The circle of oak carried to the new Opry House and the 18-inch lip of old stage kept in 2012
• Wu-Tang Clan, John Mulaney and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame landmark status in the Mother Church