From Loretta to Garth, Les Leverett recalls career as country music's resident photographer

“Get your damn picture and get out of the way.” 

Those words, hissed by an anonymous voice in the front row of the Ryman Auditorium one Saturday night, marked the inauspicious beginning of photographer Les Leverett's Grand Ole Opry career. 

He spent the next 32 years as an Opry staff photographer, capturing country music greats from Kitty Wells to Vince Gill on and off one of the genre’s most revered stages. He also shot 200 album covers for artists like Dolly Parton, Porter Wagoner, Tom T. Hall, Jim and Jesse McReynolds, and Waylon Jennings, and worked on "The Johnny Cash Show."

"There's Les Leverett, and then there's everybody else," said Opry member and photographer Marty Stuart. "He was to country music what Mathew Brady was to Abraham Lincoln and the War Between the States." 

Leverett's work, including some never-before-seen photos, will be showcased in the new exhibit "Family Reunion: The Opry Photo Album 1960-1992," which opens Monday and is scheduled to run through Oct. 31. It will be staged at the Acuff House, a home built on Opry grounds for country music legend Roy Acuff; he lived there from 1983 until his death in 1992. This is the first time the home's doors have been opened for public tours, and videos and artifacts from Acuff's six-decade career will be on display. 

More:Grand Ole Opry to open Roy Acuff House for Les Leverett photo exhibit

It's a fitting location for the exhibit, as Leverett, who recently turned 91, is only slightly exaggerating when he says that he took "a million shots" of Acuff over the years. “I loved Roy. Roy loved me," he said in his Goodlettsville living room one recent afternoon. Then he leaned forward conspiratorially. "Acuff, bless his sweet soul, he had more lines in his face than I’ve got. He was hard to retouch because he had so many. You had to clean him up a little bit. If you printed him without retouching it was just terrible."

Born in Alabama in 1927, Leverett started dabbling in photography while serving as a surgical technician in the Army Medical Corps in 1945, but he didn’t become a devoted country music fan until he attended the Texas College of Photographic Art in San Antonio after leaving the service. Everyone in the boarding house loved country music, especially the Western Swing outfit Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, and Leverett fell for it, too. He also fell for Nashville native Dorothy Vandiver. They married in 1949 and, not long after, moved to Tennessee, where Leverett began working for Associated Photographers.

In 1960, he was hired by the National Life and Accident Insurance Co., which at the time owned the Opry and WSM, to spearhead its photo department. "I did not really want the job until (National Life executive Powell Stamper) made the statement that whoever takes this job is going to replace four photographers: National Life, WSM radio, WSM television and the Grand Ole Opry," Leverett said. "When I heard that, the fireworks went off."

Soon, Leverett was spending every Saturday night at the Ryman. "I felt a kinship with those people (on the Opry)," he said. "To me every one of them was a nice person to know and that kind of shocked me, because I had a feeling in the back of my mind that there had to be a lot of ego going around. I doubted if they’d even speak to me. But they weren’t that way. They were friendly people."

It didn't take long for Leverett to earn the musicians' trust, and he never betrayed it. An omnipresent but unobtrusive figure at the Opry, he captured some of country music's defining moments. 

When Opry manager Ott Devine called Loretta Lynn to his office and invited her to become an Opry member, Leverett snapped the Coal Miner's Daughter as she leaped into the air and threw her arms out, an open-mouthed grin stretching from ear to ear. 

The night James Brown performed on the Opry in 1979 at the invitation of Porter Wagoner (a move that drew criticism from several Opry members), Leverett was there to photograph the soul singer.

Name a country performer and he knows the best way to photograph him or her: "Barbara Mandrell moved so fast, you had to open your lens way up and shoot at a high speed. ... Garth Brooks seemed like he always had a microphone (blocking his face). ... I always said, 'Don’t make a picture of a microphone with ears.' Wait until they get that microphone away from the front of their face. That's not easy to do sometimes."

Leverett retired in 1992, then briefly came out of retirement in 2009 to serve as a photographer of "The Marty Stuart Show." The Opry acquired the Les Leverett collection, which includes thousands of slides, prints and negatives accompanied by meticulous notes, in February 2017. Said Leverett, the Opry archives are "where they belong."

Leverett was in Stuart's Opry dressing room several weeks ago as he and his band the Fabulous Superlatives worked up the gospel song "Just a Little Talk with Jesus." Said Stuart, "Les ended up singing the bass part. We got a big kick out of it and it was really good." After decades of watching performances through his lens, Leverett will make his Opry Country Classics debut May 10 alongside Stuart and the Superlatives.

Over the years, Leverett's work has been featured in several exhibits, including a 2014 showcase at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, but in Goodlettsville, his cameras are gathering rust. His right eye, the one he used to peer through his viewfinder, is affected by macular degeneration, leaving a black spot in the middle of his field of vision. His decades of work, including the Grammy he won for the cover of Porter Wagoner's record "Confessions of a Broken Man," are mostly confined to his home office. 

He looks around the small room, filled with album covers he shot, and smiles. "Honest to goodness, I had more fun than anybody."

Reach Juli Thanki at jthanki@tennessean.com or on Twitter @JuliThanki.

If you go

"Family Reunion: The Opry Photo Album" opens April 30 and is scheduled to run through October. Tours of the Acuff House and the "Family Reunion" exhibit can be booked through Opry.com or by calling 1-800-SEE-OPRY.