When the Grand Ole Opry put together its Sunday, November 8 show celebrating 60 years of the CMA Awards, John Anderson was meant to be part of it. According to the Opry’s announcement of the show, Anderson had confirmed he would perform just one day before his death on October 21, 2026. He was 71.
So the night became a tribute instead. Jamey Johnson took the stage and sang “Swingin’,” the song that won Anderson CMA Single of the Year in 1983, and he sang it in a building John Anderson had worked on with his own hands long before anyone in Nashville knew his name.
The kid on the roof
John Anderson left Central Florida at 17 and headed for Nashville. In the summer of 1972, he took a job as a construction laborer on a new building going up for the Grand Ole Opry. The Opry’s own biography of him says he was eventually moved up to the roof, where he could look down into a deep hole with steel rebar sticking out of it.
That hole became the stage. And as the Opry puts it, that stage was exactly where the young laborer wanted to be. Radio stations and fan sites have repeated the story for years, usually in a single line: before the hits, John Anderson helped roof the Grand Ole Opry House.
The new Opry House opened in 1974, and from that year until 2004 it was also home to the CMA Awards. That is how the next part of the story happened.
Ten years later, on that very stage
Anderson co-wrote “Swingin'” with his friend Lionel Delmore, son of Alton Delmore of the Delmore Brothers. The Opry’s biography says the record company did not originally want it released as a single. It came out anyway, reached No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart in March 1983, and became his first million-selling single.
That fall, about a decade after he had worked on the building, John Anderson stood on the Opry House stage as the winner of the CMA Horizon Award and Single of the Year for “Swingin’.” The man who had once looked down into that hole from the roof was now standing in the middle of it.
The night the Opry remembered him
The November 8 show, hosted by Vince Gill, featured Ricky Skaggs, Crystal Gayle, Lorrie Morgan, Deana Carter, Mark Wills, Ketch Secor, Molly Tuttle and Jamey Johnson. Much of the evening, though, centered on Anderson.
Anderson was never an official Opry member, but he played the show many times. His longtime friend John Conlee spoke about him from the stage, calling him a “very kind and generous man.” Conlee recalled the time his own tour bus broke down and Anderson lent him one of his, then refused any payment when it came back.
Ketch Secor and Molly Tuttle performed “Seminole Wind,” the 1992 hit about Anderson’s home state of Florida. Jamey Johnson, a two-time CMA Song of the Year winner and an Opry member since 2022, sang “Swingin’.” Vince Gill also performed “Go Rest High on That Mountain,” which Country Rebel reported he sang in tribute to Anderson.
A song that outlived the moment
Anderson’s death came only days after he attended the latest Country Music Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Nashville, according to the Associated Press. He had joined the Hall of Fame himself in 2024. His family announced his passing on his official social media pages and did not share a cause of death.
More than four decades after “Swingin'” topped the chart, it was sung one more time on November 8, in the room a 17-year-old John Anderson once helped put a roof over.
Do you remember where you were the first time you heard “Swingin'” on the radio?