BIG COUNTRY : NASHVILLE’S MUSIC AND ITS 8-YEAR-OLD CABLE NETWORK STRIKE A CHORD

If a deluge started and didn’t let up, and you owned the only store in town that specialized in umbrellas and galoshes, you’d be in roughly the same position The Nashville Network has been enjoying amid the current boom in country music.

And you would really have something in common with the cable network if your business had also been out there seeding the rain clouds for eight years.

In a year that country sensation Garth Brooks ruled the pop music charts, TNN experienced a 20% growth in viewership--the biggest gain of any of the basic cable providers--during 1991.

Although only the 10th-largest basic cable network in terms of the number of households where it’s available, TNN is currently ranked No. 5 in actual viewership, according to ratings from the A.C. Nielsen Co.

Eight-year-old TNN airs a steady diet of country videos and live performances mixed with celebrity talk shows, a country music-themed game show and an array of “country lifestyle” programming that ranges from cooking and home-repair shows to monster truck rallies.

There was a time after its March 7, 1983, debut that TNN had trouble finding enough country performers willing to come on the air and fill its shows. Today artists drop in on programs even when they aren’t on the bill, and many give TNN a good deal of the credit for country’s present mass popularity.

“There’s a lot of good music being made these days,” said country queen Emmylou Harris, “but then Merle Haggard’s been making good music for 25 years.” The difference now, many feel, is that country music is available 18 hours a day in 54 million cable homes.

“TNN played the videos to Garth’s first two singles before anybody really knew him, and that’s one of the things that really established him,” said Brooks’ manager, Pam Lewis.

It helped nearly as much, she said, when TNN refused to air the video to Brooks’ “The Thunder Rolls,” because the network was afraid viewers would be upset by its child-abuse theme. The resulting controversy helped push the single up the charts.

Travis Tritt, another of country’s breakthrough sensations last year, said he has no doubts about TNN’s role in establishing his career.

“TNN began showing the video to my first single, ‘Country Club,’ two weeks prior to the single itself being released,” Tritt said. “We were going around on a promotional tour introducing ourselves to radio stations in the Southeast and as a result of the video being on TNN people were already calling in like crazy and requesting the song before radio stations even got their copies. It’s been like that with every release since.”

Such tales are becoming the rule in country music, said David Hall, TNN vice president and general manager David Hall.

“Anybody in the country music industry will tell you that a breaking act used to take five to six years of trouping around on a bus to get seen and develop a fan base,” he said. “Today the artists can work the TNN shows and instantly be out there in 54 million households. Fans get to know them in situations from performing to interviews to casual experiences with them, and the acts instantly get recognition. Now, because of TNN, the record companies can tell in six months to a year whether an artist is going to be a major success or not.”

TNN is a product of Opryland U.S.A., which also operates the Grand Ole Opry, country’s 65-year-old institution. Opryland U.S.A. in turn is owned by Gaylord Entertainment. TNN is distributed and marketed by the Westinghouse giant Group W Satellite Communications.

Hall may be one of the most hands-on general managers in television. Instead of the usual business school credentials, he has a degree in electrical engineering. He worked his way up through Opryland’s ranks; his first job there was installing sound and lighting systems in its theme park.

“My background certainly gives me the ability to know everything there is to know about what we should be doing,” he said. “I like to think the team I’ve got is a very realistic one: We try to spend our money putting talent on the screen and not putting glitz there and gold in other peoples’ pockets.”

One example of the power of TNN is that “Memories,” the autobiography of its decidedly nonglitzy “Nashville Now” host Ralph Emery, recently rocketed to the No. 2 slot on The New York Times bestseller list. For decades Emery had been the voice of Nashville via radio station WSM, but it was his nightly 90 minutes as TNN’s answer to Johnny Carson that made him a national name. Even Emery had no idea so many readers would be interested in him. “I was just hoping I could stay off the $2 book table,” he said.

With four decades of country media experience behind him, Emery said he feels that “TNN has made a great contribution to the acceptance of today’s country music. It certainly has given a face and a picture to what was formerly to many people just a sound, and to a lot of people a very disagreeable sound.

“It bothers me that a lot of people say, ‘Well, I can’t stand country music,’ when they’ve never really listened to it. There are stereotypical misconceptions that it is peopled by singers who only sing with a twang and through their nose, that it’s the music of the redneck and the uneducated.

“I find that another form of prejudice, and some of it will be with us forever. But I think it’s improved a lot, with the influx of all the new singers and fresh faces in country music. One thing that many of us think is that with these younger faces TNN has developed a new audience among people who have been disenfranchised by today’s rock.”

The long-haired and typically leather-clad Tritt supports that notion. “Our videos have a hipper look to them: Here is a guy doing country music, but he’s dressed in a black tank-top with black leather jeans on and a funky, rock ‘n’ roll-looking belt, not the old notion of country with the rhinestone Nudie suit. I’ve had people tell me, ‘We watch MTV, but we were flipping by and saw you on TNN.’ It caught their eye, then it made them pay attention to the music. Some of them told me they listen to country all the time now after seeing us on TV.”

TNN viewership was once based largely in the Southern and Central states. While New England and the Pacific Northwest remain weak spots, the network has caught on in most other areas, including Southern California. But the average viewer of TNN is still the 40-year-old female who has always been country’s staple audience, said Lloyd Werner, Group W senior vice president, sales and marketing.

“The people who watch the Nashville Network dont drink Perrier and don’t drive BMWs,” he said. “We’ll probably never do business with Smith-Barney and the investment bankers. On the other hand, we sell a lot of soap and cooking oil.”

The network’s demographics are beginning to shift, however, with younger viewers attracted to TNN’s video programs, and more male viewers being brought into the fold by the network’s weekend sports programming, Werner said. A year ago Gaylord and Group W purchased Country Music Television, a country all-video network available in 16 million homes that also is attracting a younger, more citified audience.

Neither Werner nor Hall is the least bit perturbed by NBC’s recent incursions into the country field, notably with NBC’s “Hot Country Nights” series and its highly rated Garth Brooks special.

“They may momentarily take away from our viewership, but in the long term we have a real opportunity there. They’ve got a much larger reach than we do. And when NBC does a big special and gets a new audience hooked on country music, then we’re their only continual source once they’re hooked,” Hall said.

One person who is reflective of the new breed of country listener is TNN’s own Lorianne Crook, co-host with Charlie Chase of “Crook and Chase” TNN’s folksy answer to “Entertainment Tonight.” A magna cum laude graduate of Vanderbilt University with majors in Chinese and Russian, Crook never listened to country music until she went to work for TNN in 1983.

“To be honest, I was kind of like this headbanger rock ‘n’ roller,” Crook said, “Led Zepplin is still and will always be my favorite group of all time, but I’ve really come to love country music.

“I guess what I like about it is that it’s never boring. There are so many facets to it. It could sound pop, rock, really country, or it could sound hillbilly. You’ve got a real diverse lineup of stars: Think about Garth Brooks smashing guitars on stage, and then Bill Monroe just standing there singing without hardly moving.”

Emery said he thinks that once viewers tune in, the music will keep them there.

“Our country songwriters create very powerful songs with stories that address so many issues that plague the public today: dysfunctional families, alcohol and other things.

“Mike Reid, the songwriter who used to play for Cincinnati Bengals summed it up. He said to me, ‘I think country music is popular because it makes everyone feel like their problems are important.’ ”