For the love of Branson: The cathedrals of Branson

In the first year of marriage to my wife, we took a trip to the South of France. While she took an interest in the cuisine and shopping excursions, I went searching for every cathedral I could find. Specifically in the town of Toulouse where her sister went to college, there were a few dozen beautiful cathedrals throughout the entire city. And it made me come to the realization that Branson has cathedrals of its own, they just rise above the Highway 76 strip and house live music shows.

And I’m comfortable as a man of faith referring to Branson’s live music venues and theatres as cathedrals because of the amount of praise and worship that takes place on their stages. In fact, as Branson has gone through many phases of its evolution, a lot of the older theatres now exist as houses of worship. But in their heyday, you’ve never seen something in the Midwestern United States as magnificent as the marquees of Branson’s version of Broadway lit up against the night sky. Depending on how you count them (and trust me, we’ve counted them six ways to Sunday) there have been about 75 individual live music venues in the history of our community and no two of them were ever built exactly the same way.

Each one had its own unique silhouette, often created by the marquee sign jutting out from the front of the building. Perhaps the greatest example being the Jim Stafford Theatre with its iconic 40-foot-tall guitar neck marquee often referred to as the “crown jewel of Branson.” But if a plantation style facade is more your style, look no further than the indelible Ozarks manor built to adorn the Presleys’ Country Jubilee or the antebellum richness of Dolly’s Stampede and Branson’s original Grand Palace. Now some of the venues had grandiose designs that manifested in only part of the glory of their initial design. If you saw the blueprints for the Kirby Van Burch Theatre on 248 for example, the Arabian Nights exterior that they ultimately applied to the building paled in comparison to what they originally dreamed up.

And that isn’t a slight to that particular theatre, the history of Branson is full of starts and stops, but that’s what makes the story so compelling and the resiliency of our live music industry so steadfast. Take a trip to the other side of town and you’ll find what Bransonites know as the Remington Theatre on the end of the 76 strip that was intended to bear the name Cash Country and serve as the home of a permanent Johnny Cash residency. However, that lasted about as long in town as his buddy Willie Nelson’s Ozark Theatre which still sits off the strip behind Olive Garden. Because the truth is, the stars came and went, but the cathedrals remained. Be it the stained glass Yellow Ribbon which gave Tony Orlando’s theatre its name (another relic that now lives at our museum) or the giant banjo jutting out from the Grand Country Music Hall, these houses of song have stood the test of time.

All in all, these venues are dazzling feats of architecture both inside and out, and that includes Shoji Tabuchi’s famous gaudy bathrooms. In fact, they are such marvels of 20th century engineering that some of them have been repurposed into a myriad of renovated complexes from churches to restaurants and even Branson’s new police station in what used to be the White House Theatre.

Because, in reality, these music venues gave our entertainment community an infrastructure advantage that was only rivaled by Broadway. However, it was what took place inside the venues that truly provided all the magic. I essentially grew up inside the Mel Tillis Family Theatre myself as we performed two shows a day, six days a week (only day off being Monday and only month off being January).

For it was this opportunity where I got to spend all that time with my grandpa that was the real secret guarded inside these majestic buildings.

In the past decade or so we have seen the wondrous Sight & Sound Theatre be built and some major renovations to the original Boxcar Willie Theatre now home to the Duttons. But through photographs and family memories, these theatres exist as timeless relics of both the history and future of our town. And through it all, we will never forget the music, the lights and the stages we called home!