NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — Chances are, you know this phrase. I want my MTV. The main channel is still around, though much of it is made up of reality and competition shows now. What you may have heard is MTV's music-only channels that were still playing videos have just shut down.
It is the end of an era. That got me thinking about MTV's culture-defining arrival in August 1981 and how that ended up impacting Nashville.
Few can speak to that better than G. Dean Daniels.
"Dad was known in radio as Big Daddy," Daniels remembered. "That became as much his name as Glenn Dean Daniels Sr."
Glenn Dean Daniels Sr. had a long career in radio and moved to television, building a company in middle Tennessee called Video World Productions. They produced the Sing Out America gospel TV series. With the 1981 launch of MTV came a conversation.
"I asked dad, 'have you seen MTV?'" Daniels recounted. "He said, 'how would you like to see something like MTV in country music?' It was a brand new concept to me. I kinda went like, 'wow.'"
With 1983 came the launch of what was then-called CMTV.
"We were all excited," Daniels said. "This is awesome because we were doing and shooting music. [My dad] was the creator, founder, and the first president. I worked with him for two years to put this thing together and developed all the programming."
In fact, CMTV started just two days before the launch of The Nashville Network, TNN.
There was an early change. MTV filed a trademark infringement lawsuit over the CMTV name. A change wasn't a problem.
"My dad immediately said, 'yeah, CMT works for me'," Daniels said.
Glenn Dean Daniels' story with CMT ends in 1984, but the impact of music videos on Nashville was immediate.
This is what CMT operations director Bob Baker said in 1991;
"Can an artist make it without video? Yes. Is it as easy? No."
Nashville suddenly had a lot of production houses making country videos. In 1991, one of those production teams reported making up to eight or nine videos a month.
The music video era also led to the rise of a different kind of country star.
"What I observed was Garth Brooks, coming in with the idea of doing huge concerts and patterning it after KISS," Daniels said.
The end of MTV's music channels is a little bittersweet for Daniels. It's part of his story with his dad, seeing that success of MTV and their music videos and getting to put a spin on that for another audience.
Do you have a positive, good news story? You can email me at forrest.sanders@newschannel5.com.
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